@Big_Easy I appreciate the response. I dislike sweeping generalities which is why I responded the way that I did, and why I ultimately thought you were trolling in the subsequent post. I’m new. From my perspective, I’m seeing short, broad statements applied without the full context.
On the broad statements, I think your response reverted to that to some extent, so permit some latitude as I try to clarify. Most concisely for my point, you stated “But that math doesn't math for everyone in America.” when I did not assert this in my original response. I said your blanket statement is simply untrue for a measurable portion of the population. I didn’t say even a majority, just a portion. I’m comfortable speaking to this because this is my peer group. I am not going to pretend to understand the struggles of people with a completely different set of circumstances. My point was a specific counter-factual to the broad statement you made which you recognized the nuance of, but then reverted back to a broad statement in response.
“My hypothesis is such that; a majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Are all of them a victim of circumstance? Probably not. Are they all a victim of their own bad decisions? Probably not again. So some messed-up their own lives, and some simply had bad luck. Difficult to tell which is which sometimes. But assuming the latter in favor of the former (as most folks on here do) is not correct. We only have some degree of free agency over our own lives. It's not unlimited. My greater point would be such that; living in America has gotten so expensive that in most situations it necessitates both parents working full time, or in the case of a single-parent household, one parent working much more than full time.” is not fundamentally in disagreement with what I stated originally. This is a more nuanced hypothesis than simply stating the market’s guiding hand is pointing a gun at my head. You said you’ve rehashed your argument dozens of times (I apologize but I am simply not reading 4,000 pages for full context), so the shorthand dismissive post I responded to is now more understandable. I also apologize for not properly quoting, but I switched to my laptop at one point at the airport and it was causing odd formatting issues between systems/screens. Copy-pasting was easier for legibility.
With the caveat I am going to make a lot of assumptions in what is to follow, I want to circle back to one of the earlier things I said: “I am not going to pretend to understand the struggles of people with a completely different set of circumstances.”
You are presumably closer to age with me than others you’ve been responding to, although not all. To your point: yes, America is more expensive today than it was 60 years ago when measured in terms of purchasing power. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was easier 60 years ago and I would never make that argument because you can only compare to your lived experience. I’m sure there are people who were in high school 60 years ago on this board that remember the fear of being forced by the capitalist machine to go to Vietnam and fight the Satan worshipping Communists. More than likely, some even went. Our generation suffers from survivorship bias. We only see the “winners” from that era at the expense of the “losers.” The issue is the “winners” remember the “losers” and, hey, it feels good to "win." We can’t see what the other sees. We also tend not to talk to about our struggles as much as our successes, or we overplay our struggles when they're convenient to the narrative.
I wasn’t alive during the oil embargo that followed Vietnam, or the recession and stagflation that followed that. Although, oddly, I’m a product of it indirectly as my dad was a machinist who lost his job in the 70s when the rust belt started rusting. He moved back home, took a job as a janitor, and paid his way through college—where he met my mom.
And perhaps that anecdote might exemplify the point I am trying to make. You can, and rightly so, point out that my dad lived in an era where he could afford community college while working as a janitor. The demographic you’re in disagreement with will shift the argument to point out he “rolled up his sleeves” and “pulled himself up by his bootstraps.” And you are both right, but also simply talking past each other and missing the point because you're oversimplifying it for your own ends. I don’t know if it was genuinely easier for my dad or not because there is no metric which translates generations as circumstances don’t translate with societal progression. More importantly, I didn't move back home to attend community college while working as a janitor. I don't know if it's possible or not today and, frankly, I don't want to try.
My earliest memory is my mom yelling at my dad for having the TV on with me in the room because the news was showing footage of the shelling of Sarajevo (I only really remember my mom being mad at my dad over the TV, my dad thinks that was what was on, mom says it doesn’t matter and she was right regardless). That TV cost more than a TV today even without adjusting for inflation and it didn't have a remote control. The fact I can walk into Sam's Club today with $500, walk out with a 65" TV that I don't need a second person to lift, and have change left over is an incredible leap forward in 30 years. And that ignores the fact that TV now has access to entertainment on demand that pales in comparison to anything someone could have imagined 30 years ago, the screen is 5-6x larger, and the image quality is so much better it's almost comical. It's why translating the purchasing power argument across generational divides fails. There is always a counter to broad statements.
At the same time, we likely share a frustration when others tell us what worked 60 years ago and assume it works today. I didn’t grow up afraid of getting drafted, but I grew up with America in a perpetual state of warfare. I entered adulthood at the time this country entered the worst economic crisis in almost 100 years. And now I have children entering a world that TV pundits tell me will have no jobs left for them thanks to AI and robots. But I recognize I also grew up with a computer in the house and the absurd magical ability of being able to instantly look up the answer to any question. I’ve spent most of my adult life with a supercomputer in my pocket. How do you add this value when measuring wealth across generations? And this is our shared reality. For someone who grew up in the 60s or 70s, our reality is as foreign to them as a reality of growing up with a party line is to you or me.
We fail further because we all want a single problem to point to because it would make for a logically simple solution. We do this at the expense of acknowledging the truth: there is no single root cause for how we got where we are. It's why all generalized blanket statements are going to fail: whether that blanket assertion is blaming the economic system which lifted more people out of poverty in your lifetime than in the entirety of the history of mankind before, or repeating the line “kids today are lazy" (or
@rookhawk's work ethic equivalent). The latter is reflective of a different kind of survivorship bias and fails under equal scrutiny. I have plenty of counter-factual examples to his point and I would include myself amongst them.
The blanket critique is also why I responded assuming you were a troll. If you permit me, I would rephrase your argument: the American value proposition changed. In your case, you don’t see it as attractive anymore, while others understandably disagree. The value proposition is different for everyone because what is important—what you value as an individual—is, well, individual. It's why reaching consensus or common ground is difficult. Kids today can have it both easier and more difficult at the same time and I would argue that is the genuine truth. It just matters with which metric you choose to measure and when.
On specific points where we appear to disagree:
Your arguments lend me to think you believe economics is a zero sum game when it isn’t. I concede this could simply be an assumption gleaned from shortened arguments, but the Jeff Bezos yacht becoming multiple boats for others suggests it may not. Wealth is created as a conversion of units of time when abstracted to the most basic possible explanation and this is a uniform axiom underlying all economic theories from Marx to Hayek. You can argue the conversion rate is no longer attractive because of diminishing returns and that is a fine point to make, but it’s also a product of paradigm, and doesn’t refute the underlying premise that wealth creation exists in the first place.
You talk about business taxes and I am curious what your argument there actually is. I don’t want to make assumptions. On a side note, I expressly said I don’t believe taxes are the root issue--which should also not be interpreted as a defense of the American tax system whatsoever. You didn’t need to write a rebuttal to that. Again, I disliked the generalized, hand-waving dismissive post (which I realize now was a response stemming from context I was missing) because when read literally, it supported his point. Your actual rebuttal written after my response didn’t refute that “high taxes leads to wage suppression.” You refuted the underlying assertion we live in a high-tax environment. I wasn’t supporting that assertion. I was simply taking your argument on face value and transposing it to his because it was weak. I don’t fault you for not choosing to re-litigate something you feel was previously litigated. I politely ask you don’t fault me for assuming you were trolling at the same time. I think it’s clear you missed my point as I missed yours.
You keep making/mentioning/blaming “big business” but aren’t defining what "big business" is. It risks ignoring that small businesses employ roughly half the country and otherwise just sounds like a repeated talking point without real substance.
Lastly, the “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is not true. Everyone is getting richer. The underlying truth that I believe you’re trying to argue is that certain people are getting richer faster than others. This poses the question: is it an issue for some people to win more than others if everyone is still winning? Is that a problem and, if so, why? That is a genuine question because I want to understand your view.
I do want to clarify the luck part slightly.
I firmly believe luck and opportunity are intertwined, but I’ll admit there was a period where I thought being told I was “lucky” somehow diminished my own accomplishments (as a slight against, say, my "work ethic"). What I do believe is you can set conditions which allow you to convert luck to opportunity and capitalize on it. I might even agree with you that setting those conditions today is more difficult than in years or generations prior, but that agreement would still be founded from my lived reality and reflective of my personal bias. I can try to walk a mile in someone’s shoes, but people walk something like 100,000 miles in their lifetime, walking one doesn’t tell me anything about them. I can tell a person the most difficult job interview I've ever had wasn't the first one, but the first time I needed to hire someone I didn't personally know and that person is going to struggle to understand my reasoning unless they've been through the same. It's the same way I would struggle to understand someone who was dependent on their first job interview to keep a roof over there head and the stress they surely must have felt.
Similarly, with regards to luck, you said “Just because someone lost the lottery doesn't mean we should blame them for it.” and I think fundamentally we disagree here, not on the statement (because we don’t) but on the larger implications. I believe I won the lottery when I was born in the richest country to have ever existed at the most advanced time in the history of humanity. And that is true luck. I had no control over that. But I’m also an optimist, and I suspect you’re the opposite, which is where we differ.
I do want to close with one thought to circle this back to the origin (screen-time for those of us who have already forgotten) and I want to preface this by stating I deleted social media 10+ years ago, which coincided with the start of material improvements in my life--so I will be upfront with my own bias. I don't think it's healthy that we carry around screens allowing us to compare ourselves with others ad nauseam. It can lead to unhealthy obsessions. I remember the late 90s, early 00s debates about magazine covers imposing an unrealistic standard on young women. Why is there no similar level of debate that Instagram pictures of Ferraris imposes an unrealistic lifestyle standard/expectation on young adults? That's not to say that I think that's the root cause of any particular issue, but I think it's a component of it. I also would venture a guess that parents who are on their screens more have children who are similarly on their screens more, even when other demographic factors are accounted for.
Which ties into my original response. There is a trade off for everything. The most valuable asset you own is your time and the amount of time you have is influenced by a combination of factors--many, perhaps most, beyond your control. I could be wrong, but I don't think on my deathbed I am going to sit and wish I'd spent more time on my phone. I also don't think people will realize until too late what they gave up in exchange for a flickering screen and a quick hit of dopamine. To me, that is the most concerning disruption in the societal fabric, if or when it is realized.
www.newmountaincapital.com
www.facebook.com
www.bbc.com
