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The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org

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Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#491

Post by digitaltrees »

zer00eyz wrote: post #317
digitaltrees wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be both. Look at the stress hormones people live with. Look at other stats like rising infant mortality, dropping IQ etc.

> Look at the stress hormones people live with. https://research.senedd.wales/research-articles/poverty-and-... Does being poor cause mental health issues, or are mental heath issues a cause of poverty... The answer here clearly better access (read free) to mental heath care, and it wont have the impact one would think (see the UK data). > Look at other stats like rising infant mortality You mean the attributions tie…

You seem to be arguing that people are poor because they have mental health issues or are otherwise to blame.

The first article you site contradicts that position.

I would also argue that regardless of the cause, society should provide mechanisms to take care of people. Just like we don’t blame people for crop failures, hurricanes, fires or other catastrophic health issues, and instead have insurance, fire departments, etc. poverty is a consequence of social policies. We should strive to create social policies that have less inequality because they are more stable, safe and consistent with what everyone would want if they didn’t know what role they would occupy.

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#492

Post by digitaltrees »

cityofdelusion wrote: post #275
digitaltrees wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re only complaint is the word “abject”, I encourage you to try to live on anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour, in a part-time job that doesn’t guarantee week to week how many hours you’ll get. That is a very common reality.

My room mates all lived on slightly above minimum wage with part time hours. They were not in abject poverty. They were just plain poor. They still had cars, phones, video games, food, water, shelter. They each had an ACA plan heavily subsidized and probably were eligible for other welfare but didn’t use it as far as I am aware.

Do that for your entire life with no advancement. Do that with kids. Do that with elderly parents. Do that until you can’t physically work.

The range of human experience is longer and broader than being a 20 something single young person

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#493

Post by jjk166 »

stymaar wrote: post #456
boelboel wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New factories use very few people, part of the reason why it's difficult for many countries to industrialize like South Korea or China did (climbing manufacturing ladder).

> New factories use very few people That's both true and false. Yes they need very few people to operate , but building and maintaining still need a lot of people.

They need fewer people to build and to maintain than older ones did. Further the jobs from building the factory are temporary.

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#494

Post by digitaltrees »

gruez wrote: post #293
digitaltrees wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that makes the argument you think it does. Wealth concentration is even more extreme.

The point is that his original claim is either incorrect, or is not supported by the source he cited.

That doesn’t logically follow. If the claim is 1% control 80%.

And the counter argument is wealth is different than income the implication is that wealth inequality is 1) lower than income inequality and 2) more important for some unspecified reason.

But if wealth inequality is more extreme then that means 1% control GREATER than 80% of wealth. So point 1 is false. And point 2 is most likely irrelevant because greater concentration likely means whatever harm from one category would track the other category

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#495

Post by sapphicsnail »

palmotea wrote: post #167
GlickWick wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The origin of the word is a bit darker than its meaning, unfortunately. It comes from the Greek word for Uterus. You can kinda fill in the blanks from there as to how it came to its modern meaning.

> The origin of the word is a bit darker than its meaning, unfortunately. We should all just stop speaking. The origin of too many words is problematic. Just think of how many were coined by racists and misogynists!

Are you aware of the irony of complaining about people being hypersensitive while you're overreacting to someone explaining why some people might find a word offensive?

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#496

Post by bluefirebrand »

WarmWash wrote: post #453
bluefirebrand wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I've seen a lot is claims about individuals being self made, climbing the ladder from grit and ingenuity and such. Look at Bezos, he's an example of climbing the ladder! Or Zuckerberg! And when you dig a bit more, you kinda find out this isn't really true? I mean look at this AI summary of asking "Was Jeff Bezos born into wealth" > Jeff Bezos was not born into wealth; his mother was a 17-year-old student an…

The question is how many people get $250k from their family and lose it all. Everyone's life is a mix of skill and luck, so to discredit skill, you would need to quantify the luck. An easy example is a lottery winner, a hard example is a Bezos. Any investor with the foresight to see what Bezos could do with grans money, would jump past her in line and give him triple.

> The question is how many people get $250k from their family and lose it all

I don't think that really matters? The fact that they even had that shot at all is such an incredible opportunity above people whose family simply cannot afford to even try

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#497

Post by taiwan_num1 »

colechristensen wrote: post #256
honeycrispy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's wild to me how we can't seem to figure out how to bring the cost for this down. Building affordable houses should be our no. 1 priority.

Just tax corporate owned vacancy. In a slump there will be apartment buildings that are mostly empty because they refuse to lower the rent as lowering rent triggers property re-valuation. Office buildings sit mostly empty for the same reason. Tax the owners to punish the bad bets and eternal growth expectations of banks to force them to use the space to the benefit of the community or be forced to sell when they run…

We already don't have enough housing and you want to increase the cost of entry to build? This would just reduce competition and new builds even further. Hard to see this kind of policy coming out ahead if any increased utilization of existing buildings is cancelled out by the lack of new ones.

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#499

Post by PaulHoule »

mmooss wrote: post #472
PaulHoule wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get to the Baumol effect, the movie actor can perform once and be seen by millions whereas the theater actor has to perform at least once a night in front of one roomful of people. So the former can get paid more, a lot more. Probably the highest paid athletes in the world are european soccer players and the thing there is that these salaries can be justified in terms of the value top players bring in a game where…

In European football, relegation is a zero sum outcome for society: One team is relegated and another promoted. On average, equal numbers of fans are happy or sad. Acting is about art, which brings up different issues and value. But looking at broadcast sports, the marginal value of doing that work is still zero: If that person didn't play football, someone else would and the entertainment benefit would be the same (…

Well in American football we have the problem of teams that lumber on playing terribly for years and years. Like we have three teams in New York state and the Buffalo Bills (upstate) are good and the two in the city (the Giants and the Jets) are awful year after year.

If there was some accountability those teams would be better or would be playing at a different level or not at all. So I'd argue pro/rel is a net plus because it leads to better play. Personally I watching the New York Red Bulls (Major League Soccer) play in person but overall soccer is the US is not up to international standards.

What blows my mind about soccer in the UK is that interest is so great that they can support two leagues below the Premier League and I know there are leagues below those. When I went to the Cornell/Syracuse game which is a legendary matchup that attracts a lot of youth players in the audience I was just thinking of the depth and width of the pyramid of soccer play from Kindergarten all the way to the world cup which is what makes the soccer universe so compelling. (Kinda wish more of us enjoyed college soccer!)

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#500

Post by digitaltrees »

legitster wrote: post #279
digitaltrees wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The homeless number under estimates people with unstable housing that aren’t on the streets. I assure you that when your basic housing and nutrition are uncertain and missing even a few days of income will result in cascading effects of hunger and homelessness, the underlying stress is overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t let bullies steal all the toys on the playground and destroy the very ecosyste…

I agree with all those things, but if we start making up numbers and definitions we're at risk of undoing actual progress. Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little u…

That’s a reasonable perspective. I would ask though, whether the fear of muddying the discussion is weaponized to create the impression of complexity, a broad range of intractable causes that lead to the conclusion that any solution is futile. The forces that benefit from the status quo deploy this quite effectively
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