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American life is improving for the lowest paid

economist.com

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Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#101

Post by luckylion »

NE2z2T9qi wrote: post #71
luckylion wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the reality is that over 3/4 of Americans have access to knowledge that people in any other century would have sold their souls for Some people. Your average medieval serf didn't care for all that in his pocket: he couldn't read and he'd get the whip if he stood around doing nothing, so he would very much not have sold his soul for something that had no value for him. It's similar today. For you, it's a great a…

> Also, I have my doubts about the importance of carrying it around with you. It's the knowledge and the access that counts (if you're into knowledge), not the "and I can do it while standing outside anywhere in the city". I would have to disagree strongly with that. There's a fundamental difference between the knowledge being extraordinarily democratized vs. available only through gatekeepers. Imagine having to go t…

You're certainly right that few people would pay as much for the device if "all" it could to is serve as a gateway to human knowledge. I don't believe that the knowledge part is an active ingredient in the equation, but I don't disagree that it's a nice bonus.

> Imagine having to go to a library to get directions for a short daytrip or book an Uber a day in advance. The frustration that would cause and time it would waste is enormous.

I grew up in a time when that was quite normal (well ... day trips to somewhere unknown? that's rare!), and it wasn't so bad, and certainly didn't feel frustrating. It's hard to believe, but we managed to traverse the city (and even the country) without navigation assistants too ;)

> How many people in a poor neighborhood would shell out for a knowledge-only device or spend hours after a hard day shlepping down to a library?

Workers in Germany used to organize voluntarily in educational organizations some 150 years ago to advance their knowledge and social situation. Since it was forbidden to do so before the revolution of 1848 by the ruling elite, they got together under the guise of singing or sports to share knowledge (and socialism). They'd happily spend hours at the library had they been allowed to.

I'm not arguing against your point, but I do believe that it's class-dependent. If you're educated, you're likely to use your phone for information and entertainment. The lower the class, the larger the entertainment part grows. The idea of social liberation through knowledge is a noble one, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I don't believe that the availability alone will help for large parts of the population, and we shouldn't rely on that to advance their circumstances.

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#102

Post by hollandheese »

FabHK wrote: post #100
jjeaff wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that because their record of presidential endorsements have a (D) after their name, we can thus infer they are critical thinkers?

No, that was a second point: The Economist is often portrayed as a right-wing or libertarian magazine, and I think that's an unfair and inaccurate portrayal. The list of endorsements supports that (unstated) point. (EDIT: typos)

They are a right-wing magazine (i.e. ardently pro-capitalist). Their endorsements support that idea. All of those candidates that they supported were also ardent supporters of capital.

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#103

Post by FabHK »

njepa wrote: post #97
dj_gitmo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like some things about the Economist and I subscribed for years. I feel like people would be better informed about the world if they read it. That said, it's absolutely dripping with ideology and you need to know how to read it. It's a cheerleader for Capitalism, kinda like the Financial Times. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/how-the-economist-thi...

Unfortunately I think the Economist is one of those publications where it seems authoritative until they write about something you really know about and realize it is mostly just written in an assertive style.

Granted. Yet, I think about it this way: They're smart kids that have studied their PPE in Oxford and can write well, but know nothing about issue XYZ, say whether to use tabs or spaces.

But now, the issue comes up, and then they send someone out to visit a conference and speak to people and ask around who the experts in the field are, and (because they're The Economist) get an interview with, dunno, Guido van Rossum and Bill Gates and Woz and Don Knuth and Joel Spolsky and Linus and rms, and hear them out. Maybe throw in a few unnamed senior government officials and ambassadors and so on.

Then they take all their notes and condense it in one page for the magazine, providing some background, explanations, "colour" and the consensus (or factions) in the field.

Sure, if you know the subject in great depth, you'll recognise that it's not written by an expert in the field, and some details may be wrong, and maybe you don't agree with some characterisation. Yet, if you didn't know anything about the subject before, you now know vastly more than before.

I think that's valuable.

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#104

Post by FabHK »

Cannibusted wrote: post #29

The Android and iPhone made a few lives happier. Back in my day, not everyone had a powerful pocket computer that could do Facetime!

FWIW, economists try to capture that with quality adjustments or hedonic indices.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_index

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_regression

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#105

Post by skybrian »

hollandheese wrote: post #102
FabHK wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that was a second point: The Economist is often portrayed as a right-wing or libertarian magazine, and I think that's an unfair and inaccurate portrayal. The list of endorsements supports that (unstated) point. (EDIT: typos)

They are a right-wing magazine (i.e. ardently pro-capitalist). Their endorsements support that idea. All of those candidates that they supported were also ardent supporters of capital.

This is kind of a weird critique though. It's like, it's not enough for a movie critic to think some movies are bad and they should have been made better. They have to hate the whole concept of movies.

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#106

Post by FabHK »

hollandheese wrote: post #102
FabHK wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that was a second point: The Economist is often portrayed as a right-wing or libertarian magazine, and I think that's an unfair and inaccurate portrayal. The list of endorsements supports that (unstated) point. (EDIT: typos)

They are a right-wing magazine (i.e. ardently pro-capitalist). Their endorsements support that idea. All of those candidates that they supported were also ardent supporters of capital.

If you want to call the candidates from the left party in the US right-wing, sure (when you look at it on a global scale, you might have a point there).

But as I said, while The Economist supports free trade and free markets, they are not laissez-faire, but support sensible regulation, anti-trust, action on climate, etc.

> "The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability." [1]

> Is The Economist left- or right-wing? Neither. We consider ourselves to be in the "radical centre" [2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231949/http://www.econom...

[2] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/02/...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190329063026/https://www.econo...

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#107

Post by scarface74 »

hollandheese wrote: post #102
FabHK wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that was a second point: The Economist is often portrayed as a right-wing or libertarian magazine, and I think that's an unfair and inaccurate portrayal. The list of endorsements supports that (unstated) point. (EDIT: typos)

They are a right-wing magazine (i.e. ardently pro-capitalist). Their endorsements support that idea. All of those candidates that they supported were also ardent supporters of capital.

What exactly does an anti-capitalist look like that would be considered something that most Americans would recognize?

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#108

Post by scarface74 »

bjourne wrote: post #78
peisistratos wrote: post #65

The article text does not really support the headline > By last year, the poorest 10% were still earning only a miserly 4.1% more per hour than they did (in real wages) 40 years ago. Median hourly pay for America’s workers was up a little more, by 14%. With exactly 40 years ago being in the midst of a wage downturn. Go back a little more and real hourly wages have fallen for both groups, despite GDP etc. booming for…

How come so few Americans realize how insanely unfair that is? The USSR collapsed 30 years ago, so there is no Communism to scare people with anymore.

So how do you propose to make things more fair? Why do I have the feeling that knowing the population of HN, who are heavily employed in the tech industry, don’t consider themselves the privileged beneficiaries of capitalism?

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#109

Post by 0x262d »

bjourne wrote: post #78
peisistratos wrote: post #65

The article text does not really support the headline > By last year, the poorest 10% were still earning only a miserly 4.1% more per hour than they did (in real wages) 40 years ago. Median hourly pay for America’s workers was up a little more, by 14%. With exactly 40 years ago being in the midst of a wage downturn. Go back a little more and real hourly wages have fallen for both groups, despite GDP etc. booming for…

How come so few Americans realize how insanely unfair that is? The USSR collapsed 30 years ago, so there is no Communism to scare people with anymore.

well Trump was elected president in 2016 and there might be a socialist elected president in 2020. so people realize.

Re: American life is improving for the lowest paid

#110

Post by scarface74 »

ghaff wrote: post #81
henrikschroder wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for high-paid white-collar jobs, you normally don't get a lot of paid time off in the US. Two weeks, typically. Three weeks is seen as generous. These days off are then typically used piecemeal, a day here, a long weekend there, some days around christmas, a family trip here. A whole week off is seen as weird. I worked at a company where that was the standard, but every five years (!) you could apply for a whole…

A whole week off is not seen as weird in most of the US. I’ve had 3-4 weeks of vacation for decades and I’ve always taken pretty much every day. Among many of the people I’ve known that was by no means unusual.

11 days for salaried employees is the average.

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-much-vacation-time-and...

Anecdotally, I’ve had one job in the past 20 years that didn’t have at least 15 days PTO. Because of corporate policy, they wouldn’t budge. I asked for extra pay to compensate.

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