221–230 of 288 posts
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I think it illustrates very little about society, but quite a bit about human nature.
What does it say about human nature?
"What if people find out my husband only made 85 million last year." Note: That conversation actually happened and the person was worried about how they were going to cut back their lifestyle. With the clear implication that 85 million was just not enough.
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The U.S. economy is geographically spread out and enormous . However, due to various historic reasons, the population is mostly focused at the coasts, and for other historic reasons, the north-west and north-eastern coastal areas are the wealthiest and densest. More people and more money means more demand and higher prices. In the rest of the country, which is fairly sparse, you can find high standards of living, min…
>extras usually in the form of various culture and activities Note that the average local more or less intentionally can't afford the time or money to visit the tourist traps. If you are not rich and want to visit the museums and galleries of Chicago, or attend a Bears game at the stadium, or a music concert, you can't live in Chicago because then you'd be too poor, you have to live elsewhere and visit. What dense, e…
Ah, but that's an American perspective. In Britain museums and art galleries are generally free, for exactly this reason.
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I feel you. My brother is a restaurant manager in the middle of Kansas making 30k a year. And he is a smart guy who was a MATH MAJOR at a state school! He could come out here and get a job at a startup and make 80k easily. But he won't leave his inlaws family, so he's stuck in Kansas. There is some strain and resentment in our relationship over our income differential, sure... especially when I want to complain that…
Yea, cost of living is a big deal. I live just outside of Greenville, SC in a little town called Easley. When graduated from college I had an 1100 square foot, 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment with a washer and dryer for $500 / month that was 10 minutes from downtown Greenville (beautiful, booming area - http://www.visitgreenvillesc.com/ ). Also have some of the cleanest water in the country, which I never really appr…
No regrets. Thanks for sharing your space.
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Poor people don't consider 1MM$ mortgages.
Do you remember 2004-2008? Maybe you didn't get to see it first hand, but in the US, it happened.
Please stop the ridiculousness of blaming "poor" people for the recent housing collapse.
> For generations, factories provided good jobs to people who never went to college, allowing families [...] to be upwardly mobile [...] unions at their prime helped create a “moral economy” in which wages rose both in firms with unions and those without them, and in which the average worker had a notable voice [...] lobbying on their behalf in Washington This might be overstating the case somewhat. The very term "ma…
For the white middle class, life in 1950 was pretty good (unless you were sent to Korea). Life in 1960 was fabulous. At that time, a man could work as a clerk in a hardware store or an assistant in a butcher shop and support a stay-at-home wife and four children in his own middle class home with one car, one television, one phone, etc.
It was the American dream, based partially on generous union contracts for some, and general prosperity for others. Writers were in great demand; musicians could play 365 nights a year. Housing was cheap, jobs were plentiful, and salaries and wages rose every year.
Life in 1970 was different; the Japanese had beaten the Americans at steel, the Vietnam wartime economy was winding down even as Americans perceived we had lost the war, 50,000+ young Americans killed and hundreds of thousands of others traumatized and damaged. The Sixties had taken a massive toll on church, marriage, and society's general cohesiveness and morale, and suddenly things seemed awfully uncertain.
Around that time, Europe and Japan had rebuilt and were starting to compete vigorously, taking away the easy monopoly that American companies enjoyed for the previous 30 years.
It's no surprise that this same socioeconomic group is going through tough times today. The technology economy has no room for people with a high school diploma and good manual labor skills. Some car mechanics in the old days were barely literate, but fixing cars today requires knowledge of digital circuitry and software.
There are some silver linings, though. Shale energy has created a boom for drivers, roughnecks, welders, waitresses, etc. in places like North Dakota. Now that oil is legal to export, and assuming oil goes north of $40/BBL again, the U.S. will probably emerge in another decade or two as the world's largest energy exporter. Cheap domestic natural gas from shale formations has been a boon to the chemical and plastics industries. New technologies such as 3-D printing, as well as rising wages in the 3rd world, notably in China, are bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.
We probably won't see a golden age such as we experienced from 1945-1970, and unions have lost much of their clout since that time, but perhaps there will be more opportunities in coming years for blue collar and middle class workers than since the 1980s. Someone in this thread points out that technology workers may some day find themselves on the other side of the prosperity wall, as well. Nothing lasts forever.
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Just because you have a >1,000,000 mortgage debt that sucks up a lot of your salary doesn't make you a millionaire. Its if you have > 1 mill in liquid assets that you are a millionaire.
Poor people don't consider 1MM$ mortgages.
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Isn't inequality just a polite word for jealousy? We're all peasants compared to some possible future generations 100 years in the future with all their cancer cures and Mars holidays.
And you think possible future generations are going to want to lord things over us ? Don't play dumb. They're going to break down crying when they're told what our planet went through right now. It will be like when today's children are made to really look at photos of Auschwitz, or the Syrian Civil War, or guinea-worm cases in Africa, or child labor in coal mines. Oh wait, some of those things are still present-day…
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What does it say about human nature?
We get used to excess really easily. "What if people find out my husband only made 85 million last year." Note: That conversation actually happened and the person was worried about how they were going to cut back their lifestyle. With the clear implication that 85 million was just not enough.
>Primitive commodity money, like the magical words of non-literate society, can be a storehouse of power, and has often become the occasion of feverish economic activity. The natives of the South Seas, when they are so engaged, seek no economic advantage. Furious application to production may be followed by deliberate destruction of the products in order to achieve moral prestige...Potlatch is very widespread, especially where there is ease of food-gathering or food-production. For example, among the Northwest coast fishermen, or rice-planters of Borneo, huge surpluses are produced that have to be destroyed or class differences would arise that would destroy the traditional social order. In Borneo the traveler may see tons of rice exposed to rains in rituals, and great art constructions, involving tremendous efforts, smashed. At the same time, in these primitive societies, while money may release frantic energies in order to charge a bit of copper with magical prestige, it can buy very little. Rich and poor necessarily live in much the same manner. Today, in the electronic age, the richest man is reduced to having much the same entertainment, and even the same food and vehicles as the ordinary man.[1]
[1]Understanding Media, Ch. 14 Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card, Marshall McLuhan
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The U.S. economy is geographically spread out and enormous . However, due to various historic reasons, the population is mostly focused at the coasts, and for other historic reasons, the north-west and north-eastern coastal areas are the wealthiest and densest. More people and more money means more demand and higher prices. In the rest of the country, which is fairly sparse, you can find high standards of living, min…
Roommates can make a huge difference in this math. Which is how someone actually making 30k / year can live in the same area where people 'struggle' making 100k/year. The classic tech approach of not actually cooking is also a huge money sink. PS: You can actually just flat out save 1 million by mid 30's working for big co.
Yep, if you're serious about saving, this is entirely doable. I'm not at all on track for this because I'm not dedicated enough. But when I lived and worked in the bay, I knew a couple of guys who saved >50% of their take-home every year. They maxed out their 401Ks in the first few months and then redirected the money to other savings. Someone earning $100K before taxes can absolutely save a million in cash by saving aggressively for a decade and a half.
Hell, my roommate in grad school earned $30K/year and managed to save $10K one year, despite buying a (used) car. This was the result of cheap cost of living and generally just being really frugal.
Am I the only one that finds it odd after reading an article about someone making $11/hr in factory losing their job, the top-voted comment (and a good number of the replies) is one lamenting their $150k salary?