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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Portions of the US are worse off. It's still easily the case that the standard of living has increased for most people.

Living standards, calorie consumption, GDP, literacy and life expectancy skyrocketed higher and faster for more people anywhere in history under the early years of the USSR and PRC but we tend to only talk about those metrics when they're convenient.

Does that math only include people who weren't deliberately starved to death or murdered? Seems difficult to reconcile those claims with history unless you're excluding pretty wide swaths of people.

If we're going to include that then you need to take into account the costs of the other side like the trail of tears, Tuskegee experiments, bananna republics backed by the CIA, the attack on greenwood Tulsa, Cuba having giant sanctions on them that destroyed their economy, etc.

I'm perfectly fine discussing the outcome of systems, or the individual aspect of systems, but you can't compare the net outcome of system A to the individual problems of system B

Edit: before anyone questions what my hisses might be they are as follows. I believe that capitalist US ended up better on a whole than communist USSR for the betterment of humanity. I also believe its inaccurate to different aspects of their systems and pretend one way was wholly better than the other

Does the average American born after 1990 have more house or a better retirement plan than their parents? There's luxuries like smartphones that have increased but the basics have been slipping out of more and more people's hands

> Does the average American born after 1990 have more house or a better retirement plan than their parents?

No, but their parents had longer to save. The average person born in 1990 has a higher average real wage than their parents did. Given the novelty of college debt, it’s difficult to say much more, but mean statistics point to a wealthier American population at all levels today than any time before. The issue is the rich have gotten richer faster, not that the poor are getting poorer.

> The average person born in 1990 has a higher average real wage than their parents did

Mean, yes, median, less so.

> but mean statistics point to a wealthier American population at all levels today than any time before.

“mean statistics” don't tell you anything about “at all levels”, and are misleading because of the increasing top-heaviness of the distribution.

> Mean, yes, median, less so

Median quite so [1]. Every class of American is getting richer, just not as fast as the ultra-rich.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/

That's household income, not wages, and not comparing like age groups across time (because of population aging.) So it doesn't support the above claim about real wages for those born in 1990 vs. their parents being true when shifted from mean to median.

Even leaving aside that outside of abject, starvation-level poverty, relative deprivation is a bigger contributor to disutility than absolute deprivation, such that everyone getting richer in absolute terms but the already rich getting rich faster would actually be a bad thing even if true.

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