CleanedStar

This argument put forth is part of a tautological one its proponents make.

Some of you may be too young to remember the good old, bad old days of the Cold War, but one thing that was supposed to be anathema to Americans were "planned economies". It was proposed, mostly by corporate types and their supporters, that the US should not be a planned economy, it should be an economy like how the US is run - the majority stockholders of corporations make decisions about capital and production.

What happens when production decisions are not planned? There is a risk capital can be spent to create a product no one wants. Isn't that half the discussion on HN - minimal viable products, agile development, and other methods to try to avoid this? Why do the angels, VCs, and now blessed founders deserve so much money? Because they took on risk.

So the VCs tell us we should avoid planned economies and have an economy with risk - where capital is wasted on products no one wants. Then we're told they deserve all of this money because our economy has so much risk. It's a great tautology if you're willing to swallow it.

"Studies have shown that identical twins who grow up in separate families have an IQ correlation of 0.74, while adoptive siblings have no more similar IQ than strangers."

First off the bat, such studies are obviously social science, not science.

Secondly - there is this idea that one can boil entire brains down to one number like a CRC or checksum - the IQ number. Then you can rank them in order I suppose. It is obviously a ludicrous endeavor on reflection. It's like the Douglas Adams joke that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. When science actually makes progress on the brain, I'm sure biologists of the future will look on IQ like we look on phrenology.

Thirdly, these social science studies of twins mentioned were done by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. He's someone who writes op-eds for the Wall Street Journal - I guess Nature and Science are too full and his work crowded into there.

The second edition of the Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould is a good book on this topic.

There was a hysterical conservative reaction to Gould's book just as there was a hysterical progressive reaction to the Bell Curve. Which shows this is really a political debate, not a scientific one. This is a political debate going back about 10,000 years, really. I am skeptical of any social scientific study that proposes it has found all the answers.

"I'm 24, and my life is in shambles, compared to what it could be."

That you think this is one positive step toward your idea of "life...what it could be". A lot of 24 year olds do not have such aspirations. So just aspiring to something is helpful.

"I seriously struggle with motivation to do just about anything. I have a midterm tomorrow in Dynamics (a mech engr course), and I have pretty much neglected the class entirely, and I am most certainly going to fail it, and I'll have to withdraw. This isn't surprising, because I've been in this situation many, many times before."

You were discussing how you think people on HN are smart. I think people on HN are limited. Not only do I think that, I am right, people on HN are limited. Including myself. Gnothi seauton. Know your limitations. Why do even the best coders say people shouldn't put more than, say, seven objects or variables in a function? The truth is, many functions would be better with a couple of dozen variables in them. Why do the best coders not do this? Because they are limited. They can only keep seven or eight objects in their head at once, they can't keep track of two hundred objects in their head at once. So they write code that their limited brains can understand. Bad coders write long functions with hundreds of variables, to where they can't keep the whole function in their head any more, and their code fails. Good coders write functions that their tiny 1.5kg, 1 cubic decimeter brains can handle.

You said you know you're going to fail the course you mention. Did you know before you started you would? I don't know the answer, but it seems like you did, or you should have. So why take the course? Why set yourself up to fail? You talk about motivation - nothing is more DE-motivating than setting yourself up to fail like that. Or trying to get that great Apple job you're not yet qualified for.

Just like big code has to be "broken up" into small functions, you have to "break up" your big goals. Set small, realistic, achievable goals and go from step to step. If you can't achieve these new goals, then obviously they're not small, realistic and/or achievable enough, so make them smaller, more realistic and more achievale.

Nothing is more demotivating than this cycle of "going for the gold" and failing every time. Things go incremently. There are setbacks, maybe small, achievable, realistic goal #4 will have some setback. So just deal with it and go on. If you can only concentrate for five minutes, your goal should be to concentrate for five minutes and thirty seconds. And go from there. Iterative and incremental are popular philosophies here.

"It is striking how fixated on the alleged behavior of our hunting-and-foraging forbearers some educated inhabitants of the developed world have become....happier and healthier if we lived like 'cavemen'"

The posters on this web site who are not part of the "1%" are often at the top of the middle class under the 1%...white, male, American, educated at college in CS, living in nice metropolitan areas in the US. What kind of work hours do we often see posted here? 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, or more. I know, I have done so myself - working for a Fortune 100 company. Imagine what hours a truck driver, or a Bangladeshi factory worker works, or some Chinese factory worker making iPads.

In Marshall Sahlins "The Original Affluent Society" he looked at how much the still existing hunter-gatherers in places like Africa worked, and did research trying to figure out what was the case 20 thousand, 30 thousand years ago. It seems hunter-gatherers often work less hours than many of the people on this site do, or truck drivers do, or Chinese factory workers do, or a lot of people do.

They also have no rent payments to make and the like. Hunter-gatherers, pastoral tribes and farmers tend to have to get forced more or less by gunpoint to the cities, including in our modern day. Why should the rural Mexican farm laborers forced off their farms by "NAFTA" come to modern America, because the unemployment rate is no longer above the 1984-2009 high like it was last month?

As the desire of the current hegemony is to pretty much ignore history completely, of course any people who look at history from ancient history to now, you want to paint them as loonies. This writer sounds like one of the apes in Planet of the Apes deriding people who want to go to the forbidden zone. And sure, it's easy to deride anyone curious about history, the economy, politics and so forth, and to say anyone interested in that old stuff is some Berkeley hippie eating the latest fad diet. She's the secular equivalent of the Christian fundamentalists who say the world was created in 4004 BC.

A new thing was introduced into the world 10000 years ago alongside farming - slavery. Read the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the bible, or modern anthropology. The "left"/"post-left" investigation of these things is mostly serious. But if Salon sees fit to point to a few wingbat hippies eating some faddish diet as a way to paint the whole study with a brush, well, I'm not surprised the website John Warnock and William Hambrecht bankroll is doing that.

That's what I was thinking. I've had skript kiddies who (probably automatically) broke into computers I ran in some form or another, usually no harm done. The idea of the government handing out national security letters all over the place, gagging ISPs, Google, whoever from even saying they'd been searched in past years, on top of the NSA monitoring, Room 641A split cables to everywhere - that is what freaks me out, not some random pervert who might hack a webcam and see me browsing HN in my bathrobe. When I was a young man, the president was having his reelection committee flunkies break into the Democratic party headquarters to bug it, and if those political shenanigans have gone on, you can imagine the bugging and monitoring of people like Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, and the anti-war people who were monitored back then and who Michael Moore shows are still under surveillance in Fahrenheit 9/11. The dangerous anti-war hippies in Peace Fresno.

As an aside...the bottom of the web page mentions help from Peter Thiel. Thiel has been standing up and saying he has had the brilliant insight that competition hurts capitalism, and this sort of thing. He says he is stating economic truths no one else has said.

While I can't concur with everything Thiel says, I think what he says about competition is correct, and he's also correct people don't say it. But they don't say these things because these ideas are part of capitalism's raison d'etre. It's kind of like him wondering why no one is mentioning the wife of the cocktail party host is ugly. It's something everyone knows, but doesn't say. I guess we should be thankful he's being candid about such things. Perhaps the 1% is so powerful nowadays they feel they can be candid about such things.

The US has a military base in Djibouti. It has a military base in Cuba - which the Cuban government has been asking the US to get out of for over half a century. The US has military bases in Germany. It is now openly bankrolling anti-government forces in Syria. The US has 10 aircraft carriers in service and is spending a massive amount of money to build a new class of supercarriers. No other country has more than 1 aircraft carrier other than Italy which has 2 - and it is unlikely the US will go to war with Italy any time soon.

None of this of course is on the chopping block. I've paid into Social Security my entire life. It's one of the few things my massive federal taxes are going to give to me in this life. Of course, this one "entitlement" (it's apparently an entitlement to at some point pull out some of the thousands I pushed into Social Security) is the only thing really on the chopping block in any form.

There was an economist who wrote a book about a century and a half ago how the economic system would eventually lead to slow growth, with ever larger recessions, depressions and economic crises, with ever higher unemployment etc. The economist was Karl Marx, and the book he explained this in is Capital. It seems the higher unemployment goes, the worse the economic crises get, the less any kind of left prognosis seems to come around, the establishment view from Paul Krugman to the Cato Institute is full steam ahead. Thus for any other kind of answer one must look outside the establishment view.

My comment was in response to this idea that Russians were crazy to think there were underground spy networks of right wing Jews in Russia. But right wing Jews openly boast of doing this. I generally come to this web site to read about B-tree algorithms and VC funding and have no desire spending too much time debating the USSR circa 1970. But anyone who is interested can Google "chabad underground" or "chabad underground russia" or "chaba underground ussr" for starters. As I said, these are not third parties, but actual Jewish participants bragging about these underground spy networks in the USSR in English - in documents and on Youtube. If you know Hebrew you can read and hear even more. I don't have too much interest in spycraft, but their open bragging after the collapse of the USSR belies the notion of the top poster that these spy networks did not exist.

As far as my comment history, anyone reading it can see this poster is full of nonsense as I never discuss the Russian air force in any respect. As far as "distaste for Jews", the reader can play a mental game if they wish - again one can read my comment history and conjure up a mental image of a theoretical Jewish person in the US. They are assimilated, secular, educated, intellectual, deracinated, grandparents were labor organizers, older cousin has stories about the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz they once lived at. Then conjure up a mental image of an orthodox/ultra-orthodox, religious, insular, Zionist, anti-communist Jew. THEN conjure up an image of a fundamentalist, evangelical, religious, insular, and Zionist, anti-communist Christian goy. I have met people in my life who could be categorized in any of these three categories. I would say I enjoyed being with one of those types of people, and had a distaste for the other two. The above post says I have a "distaste for Jews". I leave it as an exercise to the reader which one of these types I enjoy spending time with, and which two I have a distaste for.

"The idea that if a state pays for someone's education they subsequently own them is quite repugnant."

In 2005, the US Congress voted 302 to 126 that declaring bankruptcy would now not wipe away student debt.

The US doesn't let debts fall by the wayside either no matter where the lendee is in the world - the US funded the Argentina military overthrow of Argentina's democracy in 1976, and then "lent" the dictatorship money to carry out the Dirty War, killing off opponents who wanted to restore a democracy. The US demands Argentina pay that debt back today - in October 2012 US courts got Ghana to seize an Argentinian ship in order to pay that debt.

The Crimea was one idea, so was a semi-autonomous state out near Birobidzhan.

The problem with saying that it was paranoia that some people in the Jewish community were trying to undermine the Russian government, is that, especially after the fall of the USSR, right wing Jews have openly boasted about how they HAD been working to undermine the Russian government, and were using the Jewish community in the USSR to do so. The documentary record of this is extensive in not only Hebrew but English. On the one hand, they brag about how they subverted and undermined the government - then on the other hand, they talk about how crazy and paranoid the USSR was for thinking there were plots against them from the Jewish community.

Many Jewish people bragging about how they helped bring down the USSR kind of undermines these arguments about how the idea that some members of the Jewish community were working to subvert the government is crazy. Because nowadays, they openly admit it.

I read down to the first picture then got a TLDR sense. I did a find for "Jew" and lo and behold, this was the "surprise" climax of this melodrama.

For one thing, before World War II, there was a Jewish quota in US Ivy League schools. Why focus close to home in 1940 USA though when you can hear a yarn from 1970 Uzbekistan, about as physically far from the majority of HN readers as possible?

Secondly, before World War II, the center-right, even moderate trope in Europe (and the US) was that the USSR was run by Jews. The typical picture ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhiteArmyPropagandaPosterO... ) of the Red Army, run by Trotsky, and a politburo with Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, as well as others who probably were Jews with converted familiies (Krestinsky). So the right got to bash the USSR with being run by Jews when it was convenient, now they get to bash it for being anti-semitic when that is convenient. They get to have it both ways, shifting from one to the exact opposite depending on the times.

Third, after the establishment of Israel, Israel and the USSR came more into conflict as Israel allied itself with the US. Things were not that solid in that regard in 1948, but it became clearer over time, and was certainly clear after the 1967 war. This incident happened after 1967.

Jews in the USSR would go to a top flight school in the USSR, get their diploma, then immediately go to Israel or the West and get paid a high salary. In fact, certain parts of the Jewish community in the USSR encouraged this behavior. The USSR had limited resources, why should it spend enormous funds with its top scholastic positions educating Jews who were just going to leave?

The reality is this is what the other side demands. That the USSR give free Bachelors and Masters and Doctorates at its best schools, blocking those positions for Russians, and then the Jews who would get those degress would skip town with their free doctorates as soon as they get their diplomas, so as to make big money and build up the West.

Where could Jews get free education in the US? I'd like to get a free education at a top school in the US. That doens't have to be paid back, and the recipient would immediately move to China and build up their country. We don't have that now, yet people like to pontificate that the 1970 USSR should have offered that.

Also, most right wing Jews seem torn over their discussion of the USSR in two poles. On one pole they'll openly discuss (in English! Not even Hebrew) on Youtube videos and elsewhere how they used the Jewish community in the USSR to subvert and undermine the government. On the other hand, they talk about how crazy these governments were to think that Jews were trying to undermine their governments. They say they were trying to subvert the Russian government, but they can't help to boast in pride, in English even, how they did undermine the government and were successful in doing so. The US interned all Japanese people in the 1940s for much less. Yet the USSR didn't hand a free education to every Jew who wanted a free doctorate from a top university before skipping town, so let's bemoan how bad they had it in a country which no longer exists, in something that happened over 40 years ago...

Well as far as robbing people and taking their possessions - where did the state Massachusetts get its name? Or Delaware? It came from the Massachusetts and the Delaware, who were mostly killed off as their land was stolen. Africans were enslaved to pick cotton. Children grew up in company towns and were sent down to the mines, or sent to work in dangerous factories for twelve or more hours a day in the US, England etc. The English recorded this, like they do everything, quite diligently, their paper record of it is enormous.

For the corporate press and standard line, whatever the USSR did was wrong. If its economy grew it was cruel. If it devoted capital toward consumer goods and eased up on production demands, it was a stagnating economy proving socialism doesn't work. Any choice they make is called wrong, no matter which choice they make.

From September of 2001 to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 the New York Times treated the world with fabricated story after story about WMDs in Iraq, by way of Judith Miller, by way of dedicated liar Ahmed Chalabi, whose fairy tales the New York Times saw fit to print on its front page time and time again. I kind of like the idea that the vox populi can call them for their BS under their articles. Of course comments are still invisible until approved by a moderator.

Incidentally, Chalabi went to MIT and studied under Whitfield Diffie, of Diffie-Hellman key exchange fame.

"Of course, the Soviet economy is not widely held up as a model of success."

I agree with you. The country went from a civil war and foreign invasion (including by the US, something I'm sure 99% of Americans don't even know) and then 25 years later were invaded by an alliance of Germany, Finland, Italy, Hungary and other countries. Followed by a Cold War against a nuclear armed opponent and its western European allies.

Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%, the Soviet economy was booming. Massive steel factories were erected in places such as Magnitogorsk, and factories building tractors to send to industrialize agriculture. The US said Russia stole all technology from the US - until Russia launched Sputnik. You can't blame the adversary for stealing IP when they're doing things you can't do.

China also was a rural backwater, dominated by Europeans and Japanese until the 20th century. Under the leadership of the politburo of the communist party, its economy has been growing 10% a year since the early 1980s. People say that is unsustainable, but they've been saying that since the late 1980s. I'm sure their growth will slow down eventually, but they're already the second largest economy in the world by GDP. Of course, the politburo is not as left wing as it was during the height of the Cultural Revolution.

The USSR economy did stagnate when Stalin died, and people like Molotov were sidelined. Capital spending decreased, policies like detente were enacted, and the economy stagnated. The economy did very well before this change in policy though. American and European workers and firms went to the USSR in the 1920s because there was work and contracts in their growing economy, while the US economy went off the hinges. Kind of like the current US unemployment rate which is higher than anything since the mid-1980s.

If I am doing all the serving, and the cooks are doing all the cooking, what then is the Appleebee's CEO and stockholders doing? The people working at the restaurant are the ones creating the wealth. They're not "paying" me, I am "paying" them.

The comment was no more stupid then the parent comment. Now it is followed by your stupid comment. That the root of that tree has spawned so many stupid comments is a sign of its own stupidity.

Some wage slave making minimum wage doesn't hop to attention to the second a college educated "lifestyle website" owner walks in the door, let me break out the violins. Then she's going to give some condescending life advice to the guy who is supposed to wait on her hand and foot.

Lowly wage slaves have their ways to deal with annoying, self-important customers. I have friends who are waiters. Believe me, the people serving you your food have all kinds of ways to get back at obnoxious customers. If I ever have the misfortune to sit at a table with someone who acts obnoxiously toward my waiter, or sends food back to the kitchen, you can be assured that I am finished touching any food that will come out of that kitchen again, destined for my plate. You can search the web for blog posts about these things if you're interested.

"But the truth is, the USPS needs to innovate."

Tell your congressional representative, not USPS. FedEx and UPS have spent large amounts of lobbying money ensuring that USPS does not innovate. Congressional legislation is what prevents USPS from innovating.

He sounds like the worst employee ever as well as the best worker ever.

Look at this person, using the word "employee". Obviously the suffix -ee is always passive and deprecating, and -er always active enhancing. Employer and employee. Trainer and trainee. Appointer and appointee. Payer and payee.

Which is why people who create wealth, workers, call themselves workers. This person uses a more derogatory, passive term, "employee", who I suppose should thank the heavens that "employer" is a job creator. This says more about them then about you.

Karl Marx said in the Communist Manifesto that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". With unemployment at highs it has not seen since the mid 1980s, with wealth being drained to the wealthiest heirs of the 1% while the people creating wealth get nothing, this hubris and contempt will backfire on these parasites in time.

One theory I forgot to mention...of why phreaking and hacking died out as it was in the mid-1990s...

From the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, communication via a computer and modem was done for a great deal of people via BBSs. Someone, often a young man, would set their phone line and computer to act as a BBS when they weren't using the line themselves. So you had a network of independent, autonomous bulletin boards, run by young men mostly, called by young men mostly. They created their own culture.

It is not the Verizon/AT&T high speed connection, with Usenet servers being pulled, torrents being throttled with MPAA/RIAA letter being passed back and forth system we have now. I mean we're talking here on a board owned by venture capitalists. Or Slashdot, owned by a public company. Or chatting on Facebook. All of this was not so corporatized then. I mean, things like Usenet, P2P, anything autonomous and independent and similar to how things were done back then are beset upon by the powers that be. There was freedom back then, now things are back to typical USA - corporate-run, unfree, policed, boring etc.

In the early 1980s I used to call a BBS with a private section that had "950 codes". I didn't really associate with people doing this sort of thing until the late 1980s though...

I have to laugh at the article. The people I knew were not blowing 2600 tones into multi-frequency trunks, they were not even logging into their local TIRKS or SARTS or COSMOS or 5ESS/DMS-100 switch. They had the whole system "owned". The x.25 networks to - Tymnet, Telenet etc. As well as all the key Internet machines and networks. We're going back over 20 years though...Not that I think things are more secure, the opposite actually.

One of the guys I knew later went to work for the tiger team of one of the big four accounting firms. Their success rate? 100%. He complained it was not a real test though, as he could not hack into Verizon or AT&T and get in via those back channels...

As to what happened? Others I know set 1995 as the year it ended, and I agree. Between 1994 and 1996, everyone I know started working at ISPs, security companies, dot coms and so forth. Including myself. Some of the people who hung out on the IRC channels became CEO/CTO/CIO/CSO executives in companies which got millions in VC (back then and recently), or were bought out for millions, or their companies IPO'd. I would say how well some of the people who used to hang out on IRC and go to cons have done, but I don't think people would believe me. I'm not even counting stuff like the founding of Apple, which I think Jobs said would not have happened if him and Woz didn't build blue boxes. The way things really happen are covered up, or not brought up any how. "Every fortune of unknown origin began with a crime" - Balzac

Companies which purvey deadly substances like tobacco or hard liquor are listed on stock exchanges and contribute to federal political campaigns. He, with a junky educational system and disappearing blue collar jobs sells marijuana or cocaine and becomes an evil "drug dealer". It's also rather interesting how cocaine and heroin got into the hands of domestic drug distributors like Ricky Ross - something covered by the press from time to time, but not dwelled on.

Was there a poverty trap in feudal Europe, or these American lands before the Americans? There's a poverty trap because the economic system needs a poverty trap to function. It is not due to neglect, but due to a massive amount of attention that poverty exists in the U.S. - it takes a lot of work and effort to keep people poor, in a country where GDP and productivity have been rising for a long time.

What would the reason for U.S. poverty? Well it could be the legacy of the New Deal and progressivism, although that would not explain massive poverty in slums and rural areas at the end of the 19th century in the U.S. It could be due to a liberal idea of a lack of caring - although the New Deal, the Great Society and so forth brought a lot of focus on these things.

Or poverty can exist because it is a necessity, a cornerstone of the economic system. The reserve army of labor ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ) and all of that.

I would go even farther than you. It's not science reportin because it's a report by two law professors, working for the Wharton School of Economics. One of them, Klick, regularly writes for the Cato Institute on privatization, Austrian school economics, and so forth. It initially sounds like a scientific report, but one just has to consider the source.

Funny how Syria is a "regime", while Israel is not - meanwhile the 2.5 million Arabs living in the West Bank are ruled by Jews and have no vote, and no say in anything whatsoever. The Arabs in East Jerusalem have just been completely cut off. Yet Israel is called a "democracy" and bankrolled by my American tax dollars, while countries the Zionists occupy, like Syria (in the Golan Heights) are "regimes".

"I disagree. I possess a 10K-B.A., which I got way back in 1994. And it was the most important intellectual and career move I ever made."

And this is why your major accomplishments are being a professor at a third-tier school like Syracuse, and being a commissar and hack for a think tank funded by the Olins, ExxonMobil etc. What a surprise such a shlocky job is done by someone who could barely make it through college and got a crap degree.

Implicitly stated in this is the idea that all sectors of society want, and feel they would benefit, from this better education of everyone.

We could posit a counter-point to that assumption. The counter-point being the posited, hypothetical idea that not all sectors of society think that "a rising tide lifts all boats". We could hypothesize that there are sectors of society who would be opposed to the working poor getting good educations.

But with such a non-mainstream contrarian hypothesis being posited, we'd have to think of a reason for this. Why would some sectors of society be opposed to this? Well, perhaps they would have a desire for a "reserve army of labor" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ). Perhaps if they had a company, like say Microsoft, their company would pay dividends. Part of the money the company doesn't reinvest in continuing costs or re-investment, would not go to wages, but stock holders. Of course, with the small amount of stock options most Microsoft employees have relative to their wages (not to mention permatemping), in game theory it would be better for these workers, if money was to go to their wage or the dividend, for the money to go the worker. Perhaps for large MSFT shareholders like Gates, it would be better for the money to go to the dividends, and not to wages.

How can you stop the workers from demanding higher wages? Perhaps having a reserve army of labor, an inflated unemployment rate etc. would help. Perhaps a worker knowing other people as skilled or almost as skilled as him are lining up to try to get work at MSFT to get the wages he is getting, and are being rejected in interviews, keeps him being happy with his wage.

Of course this is all just wild, non-mainstream, out there conjecture. Obviously the world's richest billionaires like Bill Gates only have feelings of benevolence, and aligned interests with the rest of us. You can see how lauded he is for his charity and such in the press.

Massive advantages in education? With higher education requirements, the average worker is now forced - if they want to make the same wage they would have in 1972 - to pay for their own job training, college education etc. That people have to go into debt to get an education to make what they could have without it 40 years ago you're presenting as something positive.

The thesis of the article is middle class stagnation (the actual truth is, inflation-adjusted hourly wages have fallen since the early 1970s, they have not stagnated). These "increased benefits" are due to skyrocketing health costs which the employer has been paying, not any new fringe benefits. Because employers in the US have been fighting universal healthcare for decades, unlike every other industrialized country. They fight tooth and nail to stop universal health care with campaign donations, then cry how much they have to pay into the HMOs of their workers.

A worker who purchases the same basket of goods and services that the typical family has in 1970 is not going to "cut it". To make the same wage he did in 1970, he will now have to pay for his own job training, college degree and so forth. Employers now require more education from workers. The typical family is now forced to pay a new expense in their basket - their own training and educational costs - forced meaning if they want to remain a typical family, and not fall further then they already have.

"The gross numbers haven't increased" Not only have inflation-adjusted hourly wages not increased with rising GDP, they've actually fallen.

"spending by households on many of modern life's 'basics'" The article factors in auto payments as a basic, but not gas prices - which have risen for people since the 1950s. It does not factor in the increased amount of money going to their HMO (some of which is then sent as a dividend to GMO stockholders, there's a racket...) It also does not factor in that people have to spend more on their own training and college education just to make the same wages as someone without these things could make at a factory in 1950. You would be correct in saying food prices have fallen in the past 60 years, but their claims that the middle class now has more disposable income is false.

The fact which they can not deny is that inflation-adjusted hourly wages have fallen since the early 1970s. Many of the points they make are sophistic. They do make the point that commercial airplane travel has improved since the 1970s, but how often does the average middle class person use that? Most of the people I know who fly regularly are made to do so by their jobs and are usually unhappy having to spend so much time away from home in order to make a living.

In the early 1970s, WSJ writers could have written an article pointing at how much better the middle class in the US had done over the past 40 years. Now they have to resort to this sophistry. When they admit the average hourly wage of nonsupervisory workers has remained about the same, what that actually means it is lower than it was in the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation.

So one point they make is workers are paying more to their HMOs than ever, so the % of fringe benefits to wages has increased. This is proof against a stagnant middle class?

Then that a one income household can not cut it any more is mentioned. What does this have to do with a stagnant middle class? "The U.S. economy was [and is] flexible and strong". No kidding, I can see GNP going up as well. This has nothing to do with a stagnant (falling, actually) middle class.

The mention of 32% of disposable income - again, money is going to HMOs that went to nicer housing, cars, clothes etc. Also, I don't know what NBER report they're citing, those numbers look much lower than other reports I have seen. To believe this you would have to believe the middle class today has 68% play money with the 32% covering housing, cars and essentials.

"Joe Six-Pack when making a similar trip on a commercial jetliner. But unlike his 1970s counterpart, Joe routinely travels the same great distances in roughly the same time as do the world's wealthiest tycoons."

I know many people in their 20s and 30s with middle class jobs, many of them have never been on an airline ever. that airplanes have been improved means little to them.

The article sounds like just a lot of sophistry. The fact is that inflation-adjusted hourly wages are lower today than they were in the early 1970s. Even if you don't give a flying fuck about the average American, it means there are less consumers to buy new commodities coming out. They can go into debt to get it, but we all just saw what happened when the whole system is gamed so that these now poorer middle class people can buy houses with sub-prime mortgages.

Personally I don't have a Robert Reich/Paul Krugman/Keynesian view of this. My personal view is the economic system has much greater essential underlying weaknesses that little Keynesian measures won't fix over the long run. Which is just to say that just because I think Boudreaux and Perry are wrong doesn't mean I think Reich's suggested minor tweaks to the economy would work either.