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Comment by NPMaxwell | Hacker News Reader

"Harris Poll’s Alienation Index... asks whether respondents agree with these five statements:

What you think doesn’t count very much anymore. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself. The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you. You’re left out of things going on around you.

Harris then averages the rates of agreement to reach an index... In 1998 ... the score was 56%. In 2008 ... 58%. [2018], it was 69%"

The rest of the article is trying to unpack why answers to those questions changed

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The Alienation Index comes from a telephone survey. The results changed very dramatically from 29 & 36 in 1966 and 1968 to 55 and 59 in '73, '74. Since then, it has varied with a small positive trend between 50 and 70.

The initial jump in the first 7 years looks like impacts of methodological changes. Since then, the portion of the population that is willing to pick up the phone and answer questions has plummeted, so that a phone survey sample is an unusual slice of the American Population and getting more and more unusual all the time

Most helpful source: https://theharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Harris-...

Majority no longer pick up because "Strangers on the phone are just trying to take advantage of us". The people that do pick up are probably the least alienated.

Or the people lonely enough to jump at any possibility of human contact. It’s unclear.

My question is this.

In one scenario the world doesn't change, only my perception of it which then means I am/ I feel alienated.

But in the other scenario, my perception of the world is clear, its just the world has changed which has then shaped my perception of it. This means that the world became worse place.

Both scenarios result in an increased alienation index.

And there are an infinite number of in-between scenarios.

How do we know for sure which scenario we are in?

I’d honestly interested to hear the perspective of who disagree with these statements. Barring the last one, this seems like a pretty rational perspective on all of US history and politics, post the 1970s.

I wouldn't say just post 1970s, but this is why we have a political system based on two sides locked in contention instead of a monarchy or a single ruling party.

The only point I would attack is "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer". The lowest poverty rate in the US was 1989, but it's still tremendously low. Likewise, the lifestyle between your favorite rich celebrity and a middle class family is not as dramatic as it was in like 1850.

1850 is an interesting benchmark. Especially considering you said that the poverty rate is increasing

It's actually declined the last four years, but it's increased slightly in general since 1989 (we might eventually get lower than that, signs look good as far as I can tell).

But we're talking +/- maybe a max of 2%. Very small changes.

The one fact-checkable statement there is false. The rich do get richer, but the poor also get richer.

There's also value there in calculating the rate of change for each.

I would love some help clearing up something I never quite understand: does that depend on whether it's corrected for purchasing power? How does this relate to e.g. the idea that you have to work more hours on a minimum wage job to buy a house? So is it fair to e.g. express the price of a house in "burger flipping hours" instead of dollars, and see the price go up, implying that the poor do get poorer?

Or is that already incorporated in the concept of "purchasing power", and are you now double correcting for something?

Purchasing power and inflation adjustment are usually accounted for properly. When people say “the poor get richer” they’re talking about the global poor, like folks who live on $2 per day. That number had drastically decreased. But in the western world the “poor” working for minimum wage and middle classes have seen almost no gains while the rich have seen massive increases in both income and wealth.

The most important thing to understand is that these time-series comparisons are much harder to analyze than they seem, because multiple variables are changing simultaneously. Consider, for example, the idea that you have to work more hours at minimum wage to afford to buy a house. Whether that's true or not, you also need to account for the fact that "minimum wage workers" make up a much smaller percentage of the population today than they did 30 years ago: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/images/ted_20140403a.png

In 1980, 15% of workers (and 20% of women) had earnings at-or-below the federal minimum wage. Today, it's about 5% for both men and women. So "minimum wage worker" identifies a much narrower, and likely less skilled, group of workers than it did in 1980.

Also, who are those workers? Today, many are first generation immigrants. I think most people would agree that even in a fair economy, you would expect there to be some time lag during which new immigrants' incomes catch up to those of people with established roots in the U.S. (Even among immigrants who are college educated, for example, U.S. employers often don't give as much weight to degrees from unknown foreign schools.) In 1980, 6.2% of the population was immigrants: https://cis.org/sites/default/files/2018-09/camarota-imm-pop.... Today, about 14%. If you add economically-challenged people mostly to the bottom of the income distribution, obviously your median is going to go down. But when we think about these time series comparisons, we are usually thinking about the incomes of similarly situated people. If the percentage of the population that is immigrants is going up, you can have a situation where income seems to be going down, even though the incomes of people in each group (native born, immigrants) are both going up.

Changes in financing and interest rates also change the equation. To a great extent, rising home prices have been offset by declining interest rates (in part thanks to things like mortgage-backed securities). From the perspective of the home buyer, what matters is the mortgage payment, not the precise division between purchase price and interest. Mortgage payments as a percentage of income are actually down significantly since the 1980s: https://cdnassets.hw.net/dims4/GG/a9ec223/2147483647/resize/.... Rents, meanwhile, are up, but not as much as you'd expect.

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