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The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

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Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#431

Post by jeffreyq »

SideQuark wrote: post #387
usrbinbash wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimme a good argument why good conditions should diminish, or deteriorate, despite the fact that workforce productivity, as well as corporate margins, have been growing steadily ever since.

Good conditions didn't diminish. People now buy vastly bigger and more things. Want to live on one salary like a 1950 person, with 1950 level goods, you can. Also more classes of people now have much better things: women, minorities. Labor is not the only input to productivity, so there is zero reason labor rewards should match productivity. As capital expenses increased to obtain modern productivity gains, the rewar…

Can you elaborate on what "labor rewards" means in the context of ``` Labor is not the only input to productivity, so there is zero reason labor rewards should match productivity. ```

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#432

Post by njdvndsjkvn »

wizofaus wrote: post #390
Nifty3929 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A roof, food and leisure time are historically luxurious. Poverty is the natural default. Anything more than that requires a lot of hard work as a society, and has only been realized in the tiny sliver of humanity that is recent (last ~200 years) western society. Everywhere else and at all other times has been starvation, strife and constant work to subsist. And you die by 40 on average.

Studies of how remaining hunter/gatherer tribes around the world have/had been living suggests that's not really true - shelter, food and leisure time were almost always readily available. What wasn't was modern medical technology, which has been almost solely responsible for massively reducing deaths in childbirth and early infancy and giving us the average lifespans we enjoy today. Even among civilizations that fou…

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Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#433

Post by ndriscoll »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #430
ndriscoll wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current median home sale price in the US is $416100[0], so with 3% down for a first time homebuyer ($12500), and assuming a Starbucks coffee costs $3.50 including tax, it'd take ~3570 coffees, or a little under 10 years of a daily habit. That ignores any interest on the savings. So yeah it seems like "small" regular spending in your 20s (e.g. $100/mo total) can add up to an entire down payment in your early 30s.…

Now, could you add on the housing price inflation over the last 10 years? Your calculation assumes housing prices stay flat for the next 10 years, which is a tall order. Also, what would happen to people with not so well off parents?

The avocado toast meme is six years old now, and people said the same thing at the time (hence it becoming a meme). It's fair to say "actually I don't have any subscriptions and don't buy daily coffee or go to restaurants/bars (including fast food or pickup) or drink alcohol or smoke or use any other drugs" but complaining that $3/day doesn't add up to a down payment was wrong then and it's still wrong now even after the housing balloon of the last few years. Simple math demonstrates this.

If someone's parents were able to provide a place to live until 18, why is 19 suddenly impossible? You don't need to be well off to let your kids stay with you a little bit past legal adulthood. Surely there's room for a couch or a bean bag or something to give them a huge leg up right out of the gate, assuming you were in a marginal position where you otherwise needed to immediately kick them out and downsize.

Some people are going to have rough situations and can't rely on a family at all. Some will need to emancipate before reaching 18. How common is that? If it is common, that seems like the real problem to address.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#434

Post by Turskarama »

SideQuark wrote: post #427
Turskarama wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Want to live on one salary like a 1950 person, with 1950 level goods, you can. No, you can't. People lived in smaller houses, but the vast majority of the increase of property values is _land_. If you want a house that's anywhere near as cheap as the average was 50 years ago, you get to live somewhere with no jobs. That is not equivalent. As for everything else, the majority of the modern day luxuries we enjoy amoun…

The vast majority is not land. Here's [1] inflation adjusted land cost per acre over the last 50 years. Pick a piece of land at median 1950 sizes and the increase is around $500 in today's dollars. Now please cite why you claim the vast majority of the increase is land. Want to read what did increase? Houses got bigger as I stated [2]. [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/55910/farmrealestate... [2] https://ww…

And where can you buy a small house?

EDIT: worth noting as well that the source you cited was specifically for farm real estate, not residential.

Here is a source for land price: https://www.aei.org/housing/land-price-indicators/

On the last chart, change the indicator to Change in Land price (standardised). Note that this is only for 2012 to 2021, not even 10 years, and the _smallest_ increase is 44%, while the highest is 807%!

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#435

Post by 8bitsrule »

"I wanna be rich, rich, rich. WHY won't anyone give me half of their waking life to help?"

Found this quotation on Wiki earlier today, attributed to Jonathan Sudholt:

"In the Jacksonian era of antebellum America, class inequality was a major concern as fiscal downturns and the economy's transition from guild-based artisanship to private business sharpened socioeconomic disparity."

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#436

Post by bayindirh »

usrbinbash wrote: post #353
Aurornis wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How well people are off is a function of how many resources there are to go around. Since the end of WWII, these resources only ever increased. This is a very US-centric view. Demand for resources across the world has increased dramatically as everyone’s living standard increased. The situation isn’t going to make sense if you continue to ignore the rest of the world and try to understand the United States as if we…

> Demand for resources across the world has increased dramatically as everyone’s living standard increased. As has productivity.

Increasing productivity brought is more complex goods, and they take longer to build. Hence, the throughput didn’t increase as much.

Also some industries can barely keep up. We have seen this during the pandemic. “Chip crisis” is a great example.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#437

Post by jeffreyq »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #430
ndriscoll wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current median home sale price in the US is $416100[0], so with 3% down for a first time homebuyer ($12500), and assuming a Starbucks coffee costs $3.50 including tax, it'd take ~3570 coffees, or a little under 10 years of a daily habit. That ignores any interest on the savings. So yeah it seems like "small" regular spending in your 20s (e.g. $100/mo total) can add up to an entire down payment in your early 30s.…

Now, could you add on the housing price inflation over the last 10 years? Your calculation assumes housing prices stay flat for the next 10 years, which is a tall order. Also, what would happen to people with not so well off parents?

Well, as the parent poster mentioned, interest on the savings are not taken into account. Furthermore, the inflation in the price of the Starbucks coffee is also not taken into account. So, seems like the logic/reasoning still stands.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#438

Post by jeffreyq »

stevezsa8 wrote: post #253
mensetmanusman wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultra wealthy hired the best to win a game of financial manipulation that the rest of us didn’t even know was being played. The median salary would be six figure if the share of productivity gains was distributed like it was in 1970.

I think focussing on salary alone isn't a great strategy. If you doubled everyone's salary, the gain would almost certainly be absorbed by real estate or some other necessity. Regulations on maximum working hours, access to fair housing, education, healthcare etc might work better.

Can you further elaborate on why more government intervention would work better?

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#439

Post by lifeisstillgood »

bluGill wrote: post #281
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation can be combatted by taxing it out of the economy - the issue is who do we tax. One should always tax the rich first - like robbing banks that's where the money is

The money is in the middle class though. Sure the rich have a bunch, but the middle class has far more. In real terms taxing the rich won't bring in enough money to count unless you redefine rich to cover most middle class.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

So if i am reading the very first graph right, the top 10% wealthy in USA in 2023 held about 96Trn out of 140 Trn.

The top 10 % is not usually middle class

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#440

Post by soligern »

coldtea wrote: post #375
optimalsolver wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that pine for the 50s are def suspicious.

[flagged]

In the United States, if you’re not a white male it probably is. It was also probably pretty good for white women that didn’t want a job and wanted to be a homemaker.
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