Yes, historians notoriously focus all of their analysis of the rise and fall of an entire country on the ratio of worker pay to productivity.

The health care cost one is so dumb I won't even bother with it.

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ceejayoz 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Scroll bar doesn't work, huh?

There's… substantially more than one chart on that page.

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senordevnyc 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair, I did not see that :)

I would assume that you can take virtually any society that goes through rapid change over the course of a few decades and make all manner of cherry-picked charts like this. Just ignore all the charts with shapes that don't fit your hypothesis (like they show divergence way outside 1971, or gasp, they show positive changes!).

Honestly, I find the attitude that the best times in America were 50-60 years ago to be baffling.

So let me ask it this way: you can be born at a random place as a random person in America. You can't control your gender, your race, your sexual orientation, your intelligence, your socioeconomic standing, your family, your health, nothing. The only thing you can pick is the year.

What year are you going to choose?

I'd love a serious answer too. I never seem to get one that supports the idea that America's best days are behind us, but maybe you'll provide some reasoning.

	▲	bryanlarsen 17 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I didn't say the best times in the US were 50-60 years ago. I said that historians would consider the start of the decline was 1969 or 1973 or similar. Declines start in the second derivative -- progress is positive, but the rate of progress increases is decreasing. It takes a long time with a negative second derivative to make the first derivative negative, but the decline started when the second derivative turned negative. And the second derivative made an obvious turn around 1970. And it's also measured relatively. It 1969 it was obviously way better to be an American than a European or a Korean or Japanese. Even than a Russian, although it wasn't as obvious at the time. In 2026 I'd rather be born in Europe than the US if I don't get to choose to be born to rich white parents.
	▲	ceejayoz 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> So let me ask it this way: you can be born at a random place as a random person in America. You can't control your gender, your race, your sexual orientation, your intelligence, your socioeconomic standing, your family, your health, nothing. The only thing you can pick is the year. 2012, as long as I can bring some news articles with me, to convince people that https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/10/473709316... was, if anything, understating things.