I’ve been noticing a recurring sentiment among Americans - frustration and disillusionment with the economy. Despite having gone to school, earned a solid education, and worked hard, many feel they can’t get ahead or even come close to the standard of living their parents enjoyed.
I’m curious - is this experience unique to the United States, or do people in other countries share similar frustrations?
Do people in Europe, Australia, Canada, or elsewhere feel like they’re stuck in a rut, unable to achieve financial stability or mobility despite their best efforts?
Are there any countries or regions that seem to be doing things differently, where education and hard work can still lead to a comfortable life?
Let’s hear from our international community - what’s your experience with economic mobility (or lack thereof) in your country?"
The rich don’t stay rich by letting other people join their club
I’m curious about the same things - which you won’t find in this thread. Apart from a couple people who actually tried to answer OP’s question it’s just typical blah-blah.
We are reaching the limits of an “infinite growth” mindset. You can’t make money infinitely, which is why we are witness unprecedented amounts of shrinkflation, price gouging, and of course, enshitification. And housing prices.
An old unattributed saying, “Anyone who believes exponential growth on can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” Often attributed to Kenneth Boulding but there’s no real sources for that.
The only infinite growth I could think of is just bitcoin and shit. Just dilute gambling.
Take some of it with caution. Powerful forces are amplifying unhappiness.
Some things suck. No area is thriving. Dictators are taking power and there are several distressing wars.
Things have been worse and improved, but it us not a straight line.
Yeah the more I learn history the I feel we are in an imperfect but exceptionally opportune time.
Not being coy: can you help me understand the word choice of “opportune”?
I’ve recently become fascinated by history and the underpinned stories that really get to the answers to the WHY questions.
Well put. It’s important to learn from history
When the USSR broke up you had Russian cab drivers in NYC with PhDs. I worked with a woman programmer who had a PhD in condensed matter physics from Moscow State U.
American PhD here.
I’ve m only half-joking when I say I’m considering driving a cab somewhere in South America.
Yeah I did the smart thing and walked away from research.
Total dead end, Industry don’t care at all.
Depends on the subject
the 22 people with 12 digits in their net worth don’t want you to have a spot at the table. they’d sooner kill you than risk letting you have upward mobility
They don’t think about you at all. They just want that net worth and thus power to go up.
At a very big picture scale, we’ve hit the point where the macro level benefit of extracting resources to drive economic and human population growth is less than the cost of such extraction and its associated pollution and other externalized costs, and the cost of providing the now very large population its standard of living.
It is now too costly to even maintain the real economy and real living standards as they are, thus everything becomes more expensive, more and more people fall into poverty, famines occur from food shortages/price hikes, more and more are killed or uprooted or financially devastated from more frequent and severe natural disasters.
Thats the latest update to the World 3 model, from ‘The Limits to Growth’, originally done by MIT back in the 1960s.
Recalibration23 is the latest revision.
Main difference is the old ‘pollution’ metric was just replaced with co2 level, which is much easier to measure accurately.
…
This is why everything is obscenely financialized.
Overwhelming financialization is a very good historical indicator that a civilization level collapse is about to occur, and it also coincides with an absurd wealth disparity, as financialization necessarily cannibalizes the remaining real economy, concentrates wealth, and makes the investment done by the smaller and smaller oligarch class less and less profitable and rational, chasing insane schemes and blowing up bubbles.
…
Here’s standard of living:
In 2050, average human standard of living will be roughly where it was in the Great Depression / WW2.
And about a billion people will have died, largely from famine/overbearing food costs, and natural disasters, intensified by global warming.
[noticing that almost all the projections fall off a cliff right about now]
Oh.
Oh no.
Okay, so, question: how much of this could be alleviated by changing how we do things? I.E. building dense apartments and walkable neighborhood commercial with good bike lanes and public transit instead of sprawled out single family home hellscapes?
Short answer (imo, beyond the scope of anything I cited in other posts):
Not much, not enough to meaningfully change any of the lines, no.
If we’d (as in the entire world) started doing that 20 years ago such that those massive and transformative processes would be complete now, it may have smoothed out those curves a bit.
Now? Starting now? Sorry, too expensive.
Why do you think the billionaires bought up all the farmland starting 5+ years ago?
They saw this coming.
Why do you think we are only building new houses in climate disaster zones now?
Because construction labor, material and land prices are too high anywhere that is remotely climate safe, and you can only make a profit if you make luxury housing.
… What we would need right now is a complete and total overthrow of worldwide capitalism.
Instead, we’re all turning fascist as dumb stupid idiots tend to when confused and scared.
Thanks, I hate it
The labor market is a free market - this means that prices are regulated by supply and demand.
If people have fewer children, there will be fewer workers, and therefore lower supply in working hours. This will mean wages would go up - and quite significantly. This is why i think it would make sense to implement policies to encourage people to have fewer children, or at least not standing in the way of DINKs (double income no kids). Because i want to keep the quality of life up.
So i guess, yes, it does make sense if the population number drops (peacefully). High unemployment rates typically precede social unrests, and i foresee high unemployment rates around 2040. Because economic growth is slowing down, and it is unlikely that it can be brought back to the rapid pace it had in the 1960s.
But it is economic growth that causes the most demand for workers. Simply maintaining things does not require such a high work input.
You forsee high unemployment around 2040?
Who are you?
What model are you using?
… Here’s the actual paper I am showing images from, I’m willing to bet its just a little bit more advanced and comprehensive than the IS LM graph from your first macro econ class in college.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.13442
We are not talking about natural declines in human population growth being the single change, where we hold everything else ceterus paribus and then go from there.
We are talking about a systems dynamics model with multiple factors that all affect each other simultaneously, actually based on historical empirical data, taking into account the externalities and caveats and complications that are so often glossed over by pop econ, the stuff you don’t get to until you get a masters or phd.
We are talking about a complex systems collapse that indicates mass die off from famines, food prices hitting the stratosphere, increasing climate disruption.
Maintaining a system in a steady, no growth state actually does become more expensive and labor intensive after less and less farmers can afford fertilizer, the farmland keeps burning down or flooding, less and less logistics can afford gas prices, unmaintained basic infrastructure falls apart, that kinda stuff.
Have you seen this?
Somewhere around 25% less world GDP than now in 2070 from climate change destroying everything.
Not 25% less world GDP growth, 25% lower absolute world GDP.
This is coming from the UK’s most credible association of actuaries, the folks that actually do all the complicated, summated math from the micro level up, that most economists just hand wave attempt to explain from the macro level down.
EDIT: Take a look at that first graph I posted and note how one of the axes labels is Non Renewable Natural Resources
The entire infinite growth paradigm of most mainstream economics is untethered to reality, often handwaved away with ‘oh technology will just make everything better, everything more efficient’.
Everything crashes when its not cost effective to extract the resources the system requires to function, then parts of the system just start shutting down.
You’re describing a very scary future… What would you say we can do to prepare for it?
Fuck if I know, play Fallout games with the difficulty turned up on a self imposed ironman mode.
Or figure out how to signal to the Vulcans that we need help.
That’s very helpful, thanks lol
I genuinely wish I had better advice, but if climate experts explaining, for 20+ years, how fucked we will be if we do not drastically change has achieved negligibly effective results, I am not going to be able to come up with anything that will actually fix the problem.
I am disabled. I live off of SSDI. Fixed income.
If Trump cancels that, I’m dead.
If not, my plan is to try to move to Minnesota.
Low fire risk, relatively low flooding risk, lots of access to water, at least for now its a blue state, and it is the least expensive blue state to live in (that isn’t the desert of New Mexico).
Also has a decent range of assistance for poors like me, a rental rebate program… but who knows what’ll happen if Trump just cancels all the federal funding for all that.
Has a lower required common income to rent ratio, 2.5x compared to 3x in most of the rest of the non climate disaster zone parts of the US.
If I can give any useful individual advice it would be to form a mutual aid network with your friends and family, and go check out some predicted climate danger maps, move somewhere that’s low on that but also affordable, learn how to cook from raw ingredients, learn how to mend and maintain things like appliances, vehicles, clothes, etc.
All my friends and family were QAnon MAGAtards, or hysterical, irresponsible, backstabbing hypocrites, or both, so I’m SoL on the ‘have a support network’ front, but I can at least move somewhere better for me.
I don’t think there’s a lot you can do … a lot of problems are big and complex, like food getting expensive, a staggering economy, … but what you can do is to talk with your friends and build social connections. If it doesn’t change reality, at least it makes you feel better :) and i mean it, lots of mental health problems (that are so widespread today) can be at least alleviated by social contact. And maybe gives society a little bit of extra stability … if people are connected in meaningful ways.
Apart from that, i can only pray that people take the world and the future seriously, and think twice before they put children into this world.
Do you have a matrix chat account? I would like to talk to you in more detail.
I have collected these thoughts discussing with a small group of friends.
To really understand long-term development, it isn’t enough to just consider “pop econ”, as you rightly put it. I have considered some thoughts into it that are right on the border between reality and mysticism, for lack of a better word. The reason people do things is because deep inside, they are moved by the meaningfulness of it all. That is why it makes sense to consider the world’s fate on a story-telling scale.
People believed during the 1960s that economic growth was the right thing to do. As we all know (The Limits to Growth) it can’t go on that way forever, in fact it has to come to a halt. That is why the economy is in turmoil, and people must have fewer children or we face a large unemployment crisis in the future.
When that exactly will be is a subject to debate, and i put 2040 because there’s Renewable Energy that has to be set up, including everything that has to do with it (green steel, …). So that takes a few (maybe 20) years to install. After that … what comes after?
In my eyes, the unemployment crisis is bigger than the food crisis. Acres lose fertility, yes, but they retain 40% fertility in the long-term, even with all the insects dying and the mycorrhiza dissolving. Since people only use 30% of (technically) possible food-sources today, this should work out.
Somewhere around 25% less world GDP than now in 2070 from climate change destroying everything.
I don’t think we’ll have (and i hope we won’t still have) “GDP” in 2070, honestly.
Unfortunately I do not have a matrix account, I only have a shitty smartphone.
I am still recovering from spending a year homless after being assaulted and held hostage in my apartment for a week… my wrist (and many other body parts) are still massively fucked up, I can only type in bursts before immense pain sets in.
ooh shit, how did that happen? was it a crazy ex? i hope you get better soon. i know how demanding these post-stress syndromes can be. (i’m struggling with something similar, but not as severe)
Had some recently met friends of friends, and friends I’d known longer, over for a small get together.
One of the friends of friends decided not to leave.
Fucked up me and my apartment real bad, injured me so bad I lost my job, lost my phone, lost my computer, got evicted, lost all my other belongings, pent a year homeless, got my wallet stolen many times, further beat up by fentanyl addicts on the streets.
I am recovering slowly, but I have to do all my own PT, as I can barely walk, don’t have a car, couldn’t afford the proper PT anyway as half my disposable income is going toward paying off debt from my stolen credit cards that the credit bureaus refuse to remove from my record.
PTSD is something I now have but is the least of my concerns, Im more worried with re learning how to walk, as my torn muscles attempt to heal around my broken bones.
Except automation is a thing.
As soon as they become economically viable, robots will be mass produced.
At some point our species is going to have to move beyond this rapacious zero-sum logic of “unsticking” economies and “getting ahead” and instead learn how to distribute all that wealth better.
Yeah its sorta funny to because I don’t necessarily want to get ahead of my parents, excepting maybe in technology, but I what I really want is sorta the same but with security to have it. Healthcare and citizens income. Im fine if my neighbors have nicer tvs or shit.
Completely agree. It bothers me that so many people can’t see the obvious problem that it’s going to be impossible for 9 billion people to “get ahead” on this small planet that we all have to share and which is already stressed to the limit. Either people just aren’t thinking very deeply or, worse, they’re tacitly assuming that they’ll be the winners and to hell with everyone else.
To personalize this a bit (but not too much!), I can say that I now earn less than I did just after I graduated 20 or so years ago. Far from being a disaster, this was planned and I’m more than happy with the situation. A rising salary should not be destiny. Apart from anything else, time is money and if you have a lot of one then you tend to have not enough of the other.
But yes, every civilized society should guarantee a basic income and healthcare.
That’s the issue I have with a lot of talk about equity or equality even from people on the left. They will practically make it their entire identity, but then when faced with a scenario where they could improve the situation overall for the group at the cost of sacrificing or giving up some amount of privilege or prosperity they pull the latter up. Everyone is about equity and equality when they stand to gain, but they won’t go much out of their way to help things
Note: I am very liberal in a lot of my social beliefs and have a very strong sense of or drive to achieving equity, fairness, and justice. Which often results in making a lot of the people I mentioned above seem kinda phony to me.
My personal experience with this is that I am mildly on the spectrum. Most wouldn’t notice or guess it though due in part to the fact that I somehow managed to balloon animal a lot of the social interaction and language abilities to the problem solving analytical part of my skill set. What this means is that I am always having to “translate” what I’m thinking into normal people talk and normal people talk into how I think with every conversation and interaction.
I don’t even have much of an issue with that aspect perse. I know I’m the odd one out, and while not fair it’s understandable. What is frustrating is how little effort others seem to be willing to put forth. This obviously manifests in relationships the most acutely. I’m not usually even looking for 50/50. I’m more than willing to do the bulk of the work. All I want is for them to meet me somewhere on that bridge. Give me 80/20, 90/10, fuck I’ll take three or four steps onto the bridge, but no. Anything that requires they actively engage in thinking rather than doing everything off of vibes and they nope out so fast. I have had so many conversations where I essentially point out blatant inconsistencies between what they say they believe in (like equity or DEI) and what they actually want said either explicitly or through their actions and they inevitably end up saying something like “it’s just my preference”.
Having a preference doesn’t just absolve a person of hypocrisy, bigotry, racism, or any other belief that disenfranchises or puts down the marginalized and outcast.
Yes, it does seem to be a problem with progressives in recent years, at least in the anglo countries - preferring to talk about abstract ideas of justice and “equity” and group power dynamics etc, rather than engage with what actual poor people are concerned about.
Policing people’s speech is cheaper than agitating for tax rises and healthcare. Just saying.
It’s not just recent. MLK wrote about it in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1963, and he referenced some considerably older sources as well:
Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
And in another section:
Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
Humans are really good at normalizing things. It takes a lot to push someone from theoretical opposition to direct action. It’s harder to get to that point for those not directly suffering the worst oppressions. Dr. King talks about that too.
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
All fine words no doubt (no irony intended). But for the sake of argument I would argue that we need to give a hearing to everything that poorer people claim to care about, and not just the bits that fit with our priors about what they should want.
I’ll put it In brutal terms. IMO we need to get the Trump-adjacent masses to vote for higher taxes to pay for macro-things like healthcare (in the US) and redistribution and massive action on the environment. If their price is a tough line on immigration and an end to the constant bellyaching about micro-things like systemic racism and trans rights, then I personally am more than fine with that.
Human rights are not “micro-things,” what the fuck? And “maybe if we let them build the camps, they’ll let us have healthcare,” is a wild take
Im in a strange position in that im unemployed at the moment but when I was employed I have done relatively well but my wife has medical issues to where she can’t work and we pay maximum out of pocket every year and then some (we try to limit over out of pocket but we spend a lot of time dealing with denials or uncovered stuff). So basically to get my lifestyle vs the norm you sorta have to use the value of half my wage and then assume a larger than normal monthly nut. Im sorta stuck having to constantly seek more wage but not to live extravagantly but just to keep pace. I don’t really want to have to be doing that I would just like to work at what im good at and be able to relax when im not working. Of course if things worked that way I would likely be working in microbiology now rather than tech. Things are definitely dystopian for me.
Really makes me pleased not to be American when I read things like this. Unfortunately this really is an American exception. These days there are even some pretty poor countries with universal healthcare. It’s just something most countries do as soon as they can afford it, it makes sense in lots of ways. But not America. You have my sympathy.
yeah the us has things (or um does sort since it now seems like its trying to be stamped out) for the poor but it tends to be all or nothing so not much is geared toward preventing folks from falling into poverty or helping people get out of poverty nationally (it also tends to keep itself just barely not quite adequate). There are like charities and states doing inititatives but boy would universal healthcare go a long way to making the middle class more stable or even to grow.
Yup, we can’t continue forever with educated but low-level workers getting 3% raises when the CEO gets a 30% raise.
I had a sociology professor (who was brilliant and enlightening) who said that the future of the economy was in services. That was in 1999 / 2000. Now we have subscription everything (with rampant price hikes) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and the like. Companies / corporations get to get fat on this shift in the business model. Workers get shafted with Uber and such. Anyone with a 9-5 career is seeing the ever-present squeeze of the markets (“we must grow at all costs or we’re dead”) slowly turn in on them and reduce their prospects.
After the end of the Soviet Union, people talked about “the end of history.” Wrong. This is the end. The beginning happened somewhere not very long in the past. We’re still at the opening, however. It’s only going to keep getting worse and worse as capitalism eats itself and the world. All the best times already happened (lucky boomers). Strap in. It’s gonna be a hell of a ride (or a ride straight to hell).
It also happens in Asia, I can say that some of them are similar to what you said. In my country, many young people have a hard time finding a job even if they are university graduates. Necessities is getting more expensive.
There are also many people and households who are trapped in huge debts from online loans.
Many small businesses stuck or fail, only the business of the oligarchs can survive. and their business destroys small businesses and harms the people.
The world was experiencing unprecedented economic growth for decades in the run up to the 2008 crash. Sure there were some rocky periods but the general trend was upwards and even in the 70s where there were problems with inflation new technologies were improving people’s living standards all the time.
Now we have growth stagnating; raw materials and international trade becoming more expensive (existing sources becoming depleted, tarrifs); then finally technological gains are happening but for consumers. I’m not sure I’ve seen a big improvement since the original iPhone.
The killer thing I haven’t mentioned yet is overcentralisation of economies in major cities/hubs. If you want the best possible job then you probably need to move to a megacity like London, Paris, New York, Sydney… but then a shortage of new housing in these places has pushed prices into the stratosphere. You better hope you have an economically active partner who has also landed their dream job in megacity! Oh and the inheritance required for a deposit on a flat.
Within countries that last problem can be tackled with better industrial strategies to some extent. Maybe grants and subsidies to open say biotech labs in more affordable parts of the country. In theory since we have increasingly become service based economies, or producers of e-goods like digital copies of videogames, this should also be possible by doubling down on remote jobs as a viable mode of working and possibly offering tax breaks/financial incentives to move to less populated areas. Here in Scotland if you want to be a primary/elementary school teacher on a remote island you can command a salary of ~2x what you would get on the mainland as part of a scheme to entice teachers to live in remote communities.
In China this led to something they call ‘lying flat’, in Korea it’s called N-po generation.
Don’t forget the reason for lying flat: 9-9-6, aka your work schedule.
More complex than just that, don’t forget:
Massively competitive education-work culture, where everyone is regularly publically ranked against each other.
Sudden doubling of house prices over the last 15 years.
Schools and work places making perpetual crunch a thing and hiring in intrepid young go-getters to replace burn out.
Wages stagnating for first time since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms.
It’s social ossification, an inevitable part of the systemic cycle.
The people at the top have wealth to enable all the best opportunities go to their children and friends’ children.
So all the plebs are left struggling for scraps.
There are more children of mega-rich than mega rich, and even accounting for portion who flaunt off or abandon family path, than there are mega-top positions, so most of the second tier positions go to them too.
Then, of course, neoliberal policies have made things less equal so that the poorer you are you now need to work even harder and be even more exception than you did before.
Edit: am British. See it here, seen it over the pond and in (the PR of) China, too.
Yes, the same stuff is mirrored in the EU. We also had george floyd protests.
Leads me to believe it’s all more a cultural phenomena. Imitation of the popular rethoric.
Or the post wWII baby boom had similar effects around the world creating a generation whose concentration of wealth has had negative impacts on their society
Economies do not stagnate simply because of popular rhetoric. There are real people making real decisions that cause this to happen. Its not fucking vibes based
It’s very much the same in the UK and, from what I hear first hand, also in Germany, Australia and Canada
My rough take:
The industrial revolution never stopped, we are still very much on the trajectory that accelerated in the 18th/19th centuries.
The trend is to concentrate wealth in a production owning class. WWI and WWII were temporary disruptions to this. The post war consensus saw great national projects and investment happen at just the same time that mixed skill labour was in wide demand thanks to technology’s progress at that point. The baby boomers were advantaged by this and ended up with disproportionate ownership of land and production means.
The last 50 years has been a slow return to trend. With production slowly transitioning from manual labour to mental labour to fully automated labour. The freak occurrence that benefitted baby boomers has not repeated.
The trend will continue to devalue the work of most individuals. A small proportion will be able to leverage rapidly advancing technology and take a small stake in the monopoly of the 0.001%. The rest will progressively be priced out of elevating themselves into the middle class. The result being that there becomes a vast underclass characterised by renting, inability to start a family, and insecurity but just enough comfort to prevent rioting. There’ll be a vast range of skill within that class, however effort with make only a token difference to wealth.
One problem with your ending: They can’t stop taking, so they won’t stop short of where people will riot. The rich will never reach such an equilibrium state because one of those psychopaths has to be the emperor and others will always try and usurp the power.
Depends what it is you imagine they’re taking. There comes a point in wealth when you’re not really talking about monetary amounts or assets per se but raw power, measured in whatever abstract units you wish to use. The hyper wealthy care about political and cultural power (a battle very much underway and largely won). They don’t care so much whether the average family has $10 left at the end of the month (or $200 or -$50). The numbers become meaningless. What’s important to the hyperwealthy is that whatever that number is it not be able to purchase strategic land, production, or political power. (Elon wouldn’t care if every worker became a millionaire so long as bread now cost 3 million and property a billion.) Their power is felt in their exclusive access to limited resource (certain beach fronts for example, or a presidents time).
To that end there comes a point where they’re not interested in taking “money” any more, since they already entirely dominate that power dynamic. You could make the number whatever you like they’re still in control. Them “allowing” a very very modest improvement in some living standards doesn’t cost them anything but buys a relative amount of civil order, which is how I suspect this is likely to play out.
The pivot to far right politics over the last 20 years is part of this. When you are artificially keeping a large part of a nation on the brink, and you don’t want them to accrue traditional assets like land or wealth, then a potent replacement is to “pay” them in permission to hate.
History shows that this is a foolish course and it doesn’t last long. But perhaps a few “stable enough” decades is all these materialist hyper barons care about. Wealth and power is to be enjoyed now. There’s no god or heaven only power and the future is someone else’s problem…
You’re missing my point: The point where they stop chasing money, or power, or anything you want to call it, is when they have it ALL. They are not a homogeneous group. More than one want everything, and they will burn the world down to get it. The point where stopping is even forethought will be when the guillotines are at the door or humanity is wiped out.
This is basically Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
