Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>That's definitely not the case, since the numbers I cited are adjusted for inflation.

Inflation adjustment doesn't take into account costs that are prevalent in an era but totally absent in another: like internet access, cellphone bills, and such. Nor how much one not puts into their retirement account / savings to spend on daily needs.

If it was just supposed to be relative to the past, we would all be content for living better off than the pilgrims. Who needs a fridge, for example, when they didn't have any either? So, if we have fridges now and stuff, and even the garbage man has a cellphone, it's all dandy.

Empirically, people older than you that have lived throughout those decades know the numbers a bogus as an indicator of purchasing power, whether they were inflation adjusted or not. One could buy a house with a regular blue collar job as a household's single earner back in the 50-60s. Today, and for a few decades, not so much. Same for things such as college education. You could pay for it back in the day by working laughable gigs by today's standards.

So whether you can have "avocados" or not, if you can't as easily have a house, an education, or a steady job, is a moot point.

Note how: "after adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today".

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

Inflation adjustment doesn't take into account costs that are prevalent in an era but totally absent in another: like internet access, cellphone bills, and such.

I'm glad you've agreed with me that life has done nothing but get better. We're all winners, whereas by modern standards our parents were all losers.

As for the other things you bring up, basically none of the facts fit your story.

Homeownership has ranged from 64% to 69% since the 60's, but houses are twice as big.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Ope...

Apparently there's no difficulty owning a home.

College enrollments (as a % of new graduates) has done nothing but climb.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png

Note how: "after adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage

That's because we get more non-wage benefits and fewer dollars per hour. Real compensation per hour has done nothing but rise.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

Why not google these facts before making nonsensical arguments?

>I'm glad you've agreed with me that life has done nothing but get better. We're all winners, whereas by modern standards our parents were all losers.

Only in the sense that being a loser with a cellphone makes you a winner over a winner in the 60s without a cellphone.

But I don't think "availability/access to gadgets and avocados" is of primary concern when one considers whether "life getting better" over access to housing, steady employment, healthcare access, savings, and other such things.

An example of this "winning":

In 2015, when researchers Ann Case and Angus Deaton discovered that death rates had been rising dramatically since 1999 among middle-aged white Americans, they weren't sure why people were dying younger, reversing decades of longer life expectancy.

In a follow-up to their groundbreaking 2015 work, they say that a lack of steady, well-paying jobs for whites without college degrees has caused pain, distress and social dysfunction to build up over time. The mortality rate for that group, ages 45 to 54, increased by a half-percent each year from 1999 to 2013.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333...

>College enrollments (as a % of new graduates) has done nothing but climb.

That's the problem of numbers, they say nothing without context.

Though this one is so obvious I'm not sure it's worth discussing.

Isn't it obvious for example that college enrollments have mainly climbed because getting by (getting a job above minimum wage) without one is not as easy as it was in decades past, and are thus becoming de facto mandatory?

Remember those "middle age despair deaths" I mentioned above? "But whites with college degrees haven't suffered the same lack of economic opportunity, and haven't seen the same loss of life expectancy."

And isn't it also obvious that this "climbing of college enrollments" is happening only with increased student debt (from even 0 back in decades past), that has reached enormous amounts for millions of people?

If people in the 40s and 50s has a gun in their head to get a college degree to find a job, and if they took huge loans to be able to afford it, then they would have the same percentage of "climbing college enrollments" too...

>That's because we get more non-wage benefits and fewer dollars per hour. Real compensation per hour has done nothing but rise.

Yeah, wonder what these millions of working class losers are complaining about... Entitled scum, the whole lot of them...

You might be right that reduced status for white males is causing them to suffer psychologically. They may also engage in harmful lifestyles that reduce their life expectancy.

I'm sorry you feel that reduced status for white people is a problem, but we just need to accept that we're no longer automatically at the top of the heap. I similarly agree that the lack of work and easy ability to be idle is harming people's psyches. But this is a totally different problem.

>I'm sorry you feel that reduced status for white people is a problem, but we just need to accept that we're no longer automatically at the top of the heap.

Not an American, not a horse in the white males losing their status race, etc.

So don't particularly care for the weaselly "frame his sending this link as racism/white anger" angle ("I'm sorry you feel that reduced status for white people is a problem").

The issue pointed to is increased unemployment and scarce of blue collar jobs. It takes some twist it to turn it into some "reduced status for white people" problem in the sense of racist rhetoric. In fact it's a totally irrelevant reading, if not purposefully bad.

Reduced status as pertaining to white vs other races is irrelevant to whites losing their blue collar jobs. Whites could be getting less unemployment and still lose their status as superior to other races in American society, or they could lose their jobs and still retain their racist/top-of-the-heap status (and in fact racism often increases when unemployment rises -- just ask the Weimar republic. Germans were never poorer, but they sure increased their "top of the heap" status over jews).

And of course it's not just for white people -- it's just the demographic the research focused on. As if blacks for example have no issues with lack of blue collar jobs and lack of degrees (two things mentioned in the article). It's just that for blacks, premature deaths like mentioned in the article (and worse) have always been common, and nobody bats an eye.

I'm merely pointing something your "we're winning vs decades past" idea forgot, and which affects tons of people.

Actually no, the the upward trend in mortality is primarily a white people problem. Mid life mortality has significantly decreased for blacks and hispanics.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/5FB2/production/_...

You seem to be focusing on whites when they are the exception. Weird.

I'm also not sure why you are discussing a lack of jobs now. Wasn't the original topic that we work too hard? And what evidence do you have that we lack jobs?

Given that virtually all of your factual claims have been disproven, I think you need to offer some evidence before I take this seriously.

>Inflation adjustment doesn't take into account costs that are prevalent in an era but totally absent in another: like internet access, cellphone bills, and such. Nor how much one not puts into their retirement account / savings to spend on daily needs.

Yes it does. Have you looked at how the BLS calculates the market-basket they use for CPI calculations? It's determined by actual spending by actual people on actual goods. This information is public:

"Knowing that consumers are constantly offered new items to include in their market basket, how do changing market baskets influence the CPI? The answer is not unambiguous and depends on the importance of the change in terms of total expenditures by consumers."

https://www.bls.gov/ore/abstract/st/st950200.htm

>Yes it does. Have you looked at how the BLS calculates the market-basket they use for CPI calculations? It's determined by actual spending by actual people on actual goods.

The CPI calculation does take into account "new expenses", but in a backwards way from what I asked for above and for the reverse purpose (to hide the negative changes).

Instead of just adding something like a cell contract into the "new necessities" in the basket, they substitute lesser goods instead of comparing like for like across periods, as if it's reflecting a difference in what people want to buy (aka the "burger vs steak" substitution) instead of what they can afford to buy. They have even long substituted home owning costs for rent. So, yeah, "it's not inflation", it's just a declining standard of living instead of a fixed (or progressing) one.

If they compared like to like, inflation would be far lower. Comparing like to like directly asks the question "how much would it cost to live a 1970 lifestyle in 2017".

As you conceded above, that would be pretty cheap.

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