US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US households with no excess income after necessary expenses (as distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck.
There is another 25-30% of households that spend all of their income on ordinary expenses beyond necessary expenses. This includes things like car payments on a new BMW or a mortgage on a big house; "ordinary" is determined by expense category, not expense necessity, so a lot of spending on luxury goods is classified as "ordinary". By implication, there is effectively no ceiling to ordinary expenses.
By contrast, the median US household has >$12,000/year in excess income after all ordinary expenses. Technically these households could have expanded their lifestyle to consume that income, but in many cases they are spending it on things that are not classified as "ordinary" and therefore not saving it. The categories of "non-ordinary" expenses (which have a sensible objective criteria) are almost entirely obvious lifestyle flex things, so not particularly controversial.
The implications of these statistics are pretty wild. The median household can easily accumulate a million dollars in inflation-adjusted net worth, not including their house, over a 40 year career. And they can do it without being particularly thrifty, since ordinary expenses covers a lot of luxury spending.
Americans have very high incomes, both in theory and practice, they just would rather spend it than save it.
IMO a major deficiency in this calculation is children. Raising children costs money, and families without enough income may not feel that they can afford to raise children, and they may therefore not have children. This means that their income looks better than it really ought to, and it also reduces the birth rate. And, while the US’s birth rate is not catastrophically low, it is below replacement. This may have some negative long-term consequences for the economy.
Americans are largely solving this problem by not having children, or only trying to have children when it’s financially easy but medically difficult.
Automation may actually be the answer to a declining birth rate, and we might stabilize at a much lower world wide population as a result (say 4 rather than 8 billion). People will complain less about Waymo stealing jobs when there are no uber drivers left, but we really aren’t there yet, we still have a surplus of labor.
(not a reply to seanmcdirmid) I couldn't reply directly to 'ayewo's post, so I reply here:
I'm not sure where you are finding birthrates are climbing elsewhere.
The forecast for most of the planet is birth decline over the next 50 and 100 years. Africa will mainly still contribute to population growth, but a lot of other areas/countries are headed for net decline in population, with the results hitting us in 50 and 100 years. It is not necessarily all bad, if we cope with it in relevant ways - a "solution" that was based on populations steadily forever climbing wouldn't be sustainable anyway, for many reasons.
Unemployment is low, labor force participation is high. We do not currently have an excess of labor, and a good deal of the reason that we had inflation was that there was no pool of waiting labor to soak up money injected into the economy during covid -- so instead that money bid up prices.
We have uber drivers complaining about too many people driving for uber in my area, so I don't think waymo would be welcome. We still have people who are unemployed or underemployed, for whatever reason, and automation pushes have huge resistance (e.g. dock workers in America don't want automation to hit ports like they have in China).
You are never not going to have some people who are unemployed. Don't mistake that for the idea that the economy is demand-constrained. It's clearly not right now, and automation of Uber workers would certainly make someone unhappy, but it would also very clearly lead to economic growth and vastly more people being better off than worse off.
But I’m not so sure about your second sentence. How does a situation where world wide population drops to 4 billion come about?
Even if US birth rates are declining, birth rates are climbing elsewhere so I’m struggling to see how in aggregate, the world population declines to half of what it is today.
What are you referring to by "birth rate"? Are you referring to the general society-wide system of babies being born? Or are you referring to a specific metric relating to how many babies are born?
From definitions I find online, first order vs second order refers to systems. So if you're applying those adjectives to a specific metric, I'm not sure that's correct.
I don't think we can say that people "universally" agree about what metric the term "birth rate" should refer to, because different people in this thread are using the term to refer to different metrics. However, I do think that generally the term "birth rate" refers to the number of babies born per year (or other unit of time), and the term "fertility rate" refers to the number of babies born per woman. Fertility rate is actually somewhat more complicated than that, because it takes into account the different fertility rates for women of different ages, and then sums those together, to simulate how many children a woman would have who passes through all the different ages.
not op but i think the climate catastrophe will curb population extensively. on the one hand by simply killing a lot of people directly (mostly war, famine and displacement), on the other hand by reducing birth rates (i.e. people not wanting to have children when there's not hope for the future).
One interesting thing about birthrates that I think most people haven't really looked at is the data segregated by age groups.
In most countries with falling birthrates (save some exceptions like Japan) a huge part of this decrease is in the 15-25 age group. There is usually also a decline in the 25-29 but there's an increase or the same rates as we've had historically on the 30+ range.
What this mean is basically that we've eradicated teen pregnancy, and that's definitely something desirable in a developed society.
A sustainable population - not increasing just staying the same - requires each and every single female have more than 2 children on average.
Starting in your 30s, especially later 30s makes this extremely difficult. It takes months of perfectly hitting ovulation windows to get pregnant, and then you generally want at least ~9 months between children, so you're looking at ~2 years per child, all while fertility starts to rapidly decline as you head into your 40s.
The long and short is that a sustainable population is going to require the majority to start having children in their 20s. That figure going down has nothing to do with teen pregnancy.
As a peer alluded to, that's going to be for some ideal demographic in their twenties (probably early), hitting ovulation perfectly. Age changes things dramatically:
"Women younger than 30 have about a 20 percent chance of getting pregnant naturally each month. By age 40, the chance of pregnancy is about five percent each month." [1]
Things like IVF do not dramatically change the odds either. They're better of course, but it's far from guaranteed - it's still just a rather expensive roll of the dice.
Then on top of all of this, having children later greatly increases the chances of miscarriage, developmental issues (like Down syndrome) and so on.
Life's brutal here - you're in a race against time, yet the later you start the longer it takes, and the harder it becomes.
N=1 anecdata here, but... My wife and I got pregnant -- both times -- during the first month of trying. We were mid-30s, myself being 3 years older than she is, and my wife was old enough at the time of conception to have had a "geriatric uterus" and our first pregnancy, spontaneous fraternal twins, was considered "high-risk" out of the gate because of her age.
> Things like IVF do not dramatically change the odds either. They're better of course, but it's far from guaranteed - it's still just a rather expensive roll of the dice.
Sadly, literally all of our peers who were trying and having kids in the same demographic as us, +/- a few years, struggled hard and most needed fertility treatments. At least 2-3 of them were never able to conceive, despite the expensive and time-consuming treatments. It's brutal.
I will also add, I have a number of friends who are >= 10 years younger than I am and many of them also struggled with miscarriages in their late 20s while trying to start families.
No, if there is also a decline between the ages of 20-29 then the implication is not that we've eradicated teen pregnancy. It's that people are not having as many kids. When you have kids in your 20s you can have more than if you start in your 30s
Working a minimum wage could buy a starter home "back then". It now can hardly pay rent, and starter homes essentially no longer exist, even if someone wanted one.
the thing is, this is happening across any remotely wealthy or developed country, and in that sense the US is actually the ninth highest birthrate in the OECD and well above the average. The only OECD country with fertility rates above 2 is Israel, and that's mostly because the ultra-Orthodox have really high birth rates.
Most of the significant expenses people describe are optional. It is more rational to match your spending to what you can afford with howevermany kids than it is to match the number of kids you have to an arbitrary lifestyle.
They aren't in 'traditional' households where at least one parent stays at home. Without that daycare/nanny and other costs can become very significant. It's also not just daytime stuff. Babies need to feed every 2-3 hours, including at night, and each feeding session can be quite lengthy. That doesn't synergize so well with getting a full night's rest to go join the rat race the next day.
I think this varies wildly depending on where you live. Where I live (Melbourne), just the cost of suitable housing (a/ near a school, b/ close to most jobs, and c/ with space for 1+ children) is so high that it makes it difficult for a lot of couples to even consider children.
But it wasn't cheap "back then" either. I've spent 1 hour one way riding 2 buses to school (same as my parents to work). We had 62 m^2 (670 sq. ft.) of house for 2 parents + 3 children.
It's just now we suddenly consider that too bad. Back then it was normal, just like everyone else.
I don’t know where you were born and how old you are, but that situation was defiantly not usual when i was a child (born 1983 in Israel). If anything I think I’d need a startup-liquidity-event level windfall to be able to afford housing as spacious as my parents bought in the 80s (housing costs increased way more than wages).
It may have been when my parents were born though (mid 1940s, one in what is now Israel and the other in what was then the Soviet Union).
But your parents didn't live in Israel 2019. Israel 1983 was more like today's Venezuela or Argentina. If you move today to a place comparable to Israel in 1983, you'll be able to afford even more space than your parents.
Not sure why 2019 specifically, it's 2024. I think you also underestimate 1980s Israel - although there was a stock-market crash in 1983, it was not otherwise that poor- maybe more like today's Portugal or Greece than Venezuela.
But anyway my parents were 1983 Israelis, they didn't come with future-Israel purchasing power - so they were able to afford their housing on the income of the time :) Other kids in my class had ± similar housing. Some were poor and had worse housing, but not 5 people in a 62m flat level of poverty- for that to be common you had to go back another couple decades (e.g. my mother's childhood experience in the 40s-50s was more like that, might have been common up to the 60s).
I never had my own room. Up until age of 14 I slept on bunk bed sharing a room with my brother and my parents, so it doesn't always mean a separate room.
Eurostat [0] would have you believe that you want 3 rooms for a family of 2 adults and 1 child. That's fine as an aspirational goal, but I feel that parents with a toddler living in a signle-room flat is good enough, especially for the baby.
This. Every time I hear parents in SF Bay Area complain that kids are too expensive, I ask them what are they spending -- turns out they consider stuff like private school a necessity. The bar of "normal" is raised significantly, that's it.
I do not believe this Federal Reserve study can classify such things. It either has a metric which is so incorrect as to be worthless or a biased human judging a dataset so small as to be worthless.
There are families which cram 3 generations and a dozen people into a few hundred square feet. There are people in Hong Kong living in spaces smaller than most American kitchens. By those metrics are we ALL in excessive lodging?
Is it excessive to be in a 1600 square foot house whose mortgage is lower than rent for a 500 square foot studio because you bought when interest rates were far lower?
The Federal Reserve study classifies non-ordinary expenses with households by comparing against median data for a region. For example, having a massive house means the square footage is significantly above median for the region and classifies it as a non-ordinary expense. As far as I know, it doesn't look at interest rates on individual mortgages because I don't believe they have that data accessible. It is a pretty sophisticated multi-dimensional approach they look at household income levels, regional economic conditions, household composition, rural vs urban, local cost of living, etc. It accounts for whatever the team of economic phds who designed it could think of with the data they have available.
The point is that the Fed isn't classifying those things. "Ordinary" includes all primary mortgages, whether for a modest home or a luxury pad. It includes all personal car payments, whether for a shared Honda or a Maserati.
Question EF3. Suppose that you have an emergency expense that costs $400. Based on your current
financial situation, how would you pay for this expense?
Response Percent
Put it on my credit card and pay it off in full at the next statement 37
Put it on my credit card and pay it off over time 16
With the money currently in my checking/savings account or with cash 45
Using money from a bank loan or line of credit 3
By borrowing from a friend or family member 10
Using a payday loan, deposit advance, or overdraft 2
By selling something 7
I wouldn't be able to pay for the expense right now 13
Hard to interpret this. It either shows that 55% do not have enough money to pay the expense, or that 82% may well have the money but 37% would prefer to pay it off after their next paycheck anyway.
Perhaps because 4 in 10 Americans are bad with money. As jandrewrogers stated, Americans are not good savers. (I believe this is a big contributor to our trade deficit as well.)
> There is another 25-30% of households that spend all of their income on ordinary expenses beyond necessary expenses.
> This includes things like car payments on a new BMW or a mortgage
So you're not accounting at all for how much of your income goes toward e.g. interest on the loan vs. the principal? Isn't that kinda important?
Also, do car loans for cheaper cars somehow not fall in this picture? Why do you portray people as buying new BMWs when all cars in general have gotten so expensive?
If 10-15% of American families live from paycheck to paycheck, it means pretty much everyone knows someone who’s struggling.
Another aspect of these numbers is how much of the ordinary expenses are not luxury items but things like a car (because public transport is terrible), childcare (because people need to work to pay for it and the car that’s needed to shuttle kids around) and some healthcare (because public healthcare is nonexistent).
Americans pay a lot of money for things other developed countries would say is a basic human right.
"If 10-15% of American families live from paycheck to paycheck, it means pretty much everyone knows someone who’s struggling"
Not really. Most social groups are fairly homogeneous. Even those that view themselves as knowing a wide swat of people from all sorts of live are unaware that beyond some superficial diversity they tend to have unconsciously selected for commonality of outlook and context.
I learned this at a young age when due to circumstance I elected to do my back then obligatory military service year before going to university as opposed to all my friends that first finished their studies and then (mostly) opted for the 'conscientious objector' route and spend 24 months in civil service.
Going into the army without a degree you get to spend a lot of time with many people that can't read or write, could not finish high-school, never had opened a book or seen any of the films or heard the music your mates loved. Often violence and making baffling poor health and safety decisions were a very frequent occurrence.
What I'm saying is that unless forced by circumstances beyond your control, your circle of acquaintance is probably less a cross cut of society than you imagine.
That’s a very good point. Some people will know nobody who’s struggling while others will know many. Opening eyes and ears to the suffering of others is a deliberate choice.
The problem that I see is that a million in net worth isn't enough to have a good retirement anymore now that rent is $2-3k a month in most major cities.
This is what I’m trying to figure out. Medicare is kind of an advantage, but your out of pocket medical expenses in Thailand aren’t that bad unless you get cancer or something, then you just relocate back? American basic healthcare prices are just really messed up, so your insurance doesn’t really pay off until something serious happens.
I don't know about Thailand, but in France you can apply to join their healthcare system after 3 months. In the meantime you must have private insurance but it's a fraction of what it is here.
Spain is similar. I don’t understand how they are allowing retirees to just move there, but I have friends doing it. I’m not counting on it being that way when I retire since it sounds to good to be true (so it eventually probably won’t be true).
So the people who built the kind of society and economy where you can't live near your family in retirement - are they good stewards of the country? Astute leaders that we should unquestioningly praise? Because judging by the downvotes here it looks like they convinced the masses of this.
Ah yes, let's burden some third world nation with an entire class of people who produce no value, and raise the costs of housing and goods for everyone around them.
I'm not saying it's not smart, it's just not very savory, and isn't a great solution for the longer term.
Retirees don't earn income, so don't pay income tax. Increased demand for housing raises prices for everyone including natives. And typically, retirees require healthcare services well above the population average.
Retirees absolutely pay income tax. Withdrawing from a traditional IRA/401k generates ordinary income at the current federal tax rate. And any capital gains is taxed (albeit at a lower rate) when sold. It's a fraction of what they likely paid during their career, but it is not nothing.
Depending on the country of retiring, this could have majority tax implications. It's a big reason why people choose to retire in certain states: additional income tax on retirement income is possible, depending on the state.
Even if not zero, retirees' income is much lower than working people on average, and that income is taxed at lower rates. Further, tax paid to the US doesn't help the retirement country.
If they're residing in the other country, they're supposed to be paying income taxes to that country, in addition to taxes to the US. The taxes to the US will probably be canceled out by the tax exemption they can claim for the taxes paid locally though, but they still have to file in the US unless they renounce their US citizenship.
Very few people pay income taxes to a foreign government that they reside in unless they are actively working and collecting a paycheck. A passive income stream such as collecting social security or a pension is very rarely taxed. Even things like collecting rent as a landlord back in the home country or earning interest on a savings account there, are also very rarely taxed.
Then they're cheating on their taxes, and that government should probably look into how that person can afford to stay there with zero income. A lot of countries have tax treaties with the US to cover this sort of thing.
> Retirees don't earn income, so don't pay income tax.
The government can and often does find other ways to tax people.
> Increased demand for housing raises prices for everyone including natives.
While true locally, at a national level immigration is typically small compared to native populations. It is a manageable problem.
> And typically, retirees require healthcare services well above the population average.
In other words, they will be forced to put money into the local economy. They’re paying out of pocket, not on public assistance.
Comparatively wealthy foreigners that spend a lot of money on the local economy is any government’s wet dream. It’s a significant boost to their tax base and soft political power. I plan on retiring in a country like Thailand because as long as you don’t criticize the king, you’ll be treated like one.
Thailand is an amazing country and dollars/euros/pounds go a long way. But there are also a ton of Westerners who either ran out of money (or never had any) who live like leeches and even some who "begpack." Plenty more who just barely get by as a language instructor or such.
I'm not claiming there are no productive or welcome foreign retirees -- there are many. But I was responding to "xenospn"'s comment that they bring in money for free, which is absolutely not universally true.
How can you legally stay in Thailand with no retirement or work visa?
I don't remember the details (I had a work visa and retirement is still 2 decades away at least) but to get a retirement visa (valid for one year) you need proof of sufficient funds and health insurance.
There's a reason most countries offer no such thing as a retirement visa, except certain low income countries where overcharging clueless foreigners is the best way to get ahead in life. It's because old people are a burden on the medical system and a class of people who'll pay 5x the average for housing prices locals out. Whoever is renting out housing is probably living comfortably thousands of kilometers away.
Remittances and tourism are not the topic at hand here. It's the local economic effects of a swath of retirees permanently relocating to a poorer location.
> Why does this topic cause the dunning kruger effect to go into full stream among an ostensibly "intelligent" group of people?
If you're smarter than the policy makers of countries who look at the economic drain of taking in disabled old people and say "nope", then maybe you should be calling up their presidents and demanding to be in charge of their economic policy? You're clearly the smartest one in the world. :)
>certain low income countries where overcharging clueless foreigners is the best way to get ahead in life.
This is basically a snide way of saying that "yes, retiring to a country with low cost of living is often a mutually beneficial transaction, for both the retiree and the country in question"
* As demand for medical services grows, the price goes up, incentivizing more people to get medical training
* As demand for housing grows, build more housing
* Gradually expand issuance of retirement visas, so supply can grow in response to demand
It's not a snide way of saying it. I'm saying it only benefits a small portion of truly poor countries where people have absolutely nothing.
There's a reason countries push retirees out, barring the ones who are incredibly rich, once they develop into a middle economy. It's because a typical retiree making a low six figures or less becomes literal dead weight. Locals can make more money than them while actually doing a job.
Thailand is pushing foreign non-workers out because they're developed to the point that they don't need or want those people. Decades ago, Thailand was incredibly poor. One retiree could splurge a bit of cash and pay the wages of dozens of people. That era is gone. Now it's just people acting like they own the place and driving up prices of property that locals are now competing for.
And yes, they could incentivize more people to become doctors for foreigners. But not everyone wants to grow up to be a servant and literally wiping the bums of an elite class of elderly colonists. Some prefer to work in other fields.
And yes, they could build new houses. Your home country could build new houses too. Retire at home and just build a new house there instead of going to a "cheaper" country. If it's too expensive at home, just get more money and build more.
And no, the won't expand issuance of visas because they need to take care of their own elderly.
>Thailand is pushing foreign non-workers out because they're developed to the point that they don't need or want those people. Decades ago, Thailand was incredibly poor. One retiree could splurge a bit of cash and pay the wages of dozens of people. That era is gone. Now it's just people acting like they own the place and driving up prices of property that locals are now competing for.
Hm, I wonder if letting retirees in was helpful for Thailand in escaping poverty? The retirees didn't seem to ruin the Thai economy, as your 'burden' theory appears to predict.
>And yes, they could incentivize more people to become doctors for foreigners. But not everyone wants to grow up to be a servant and literally wiping the bums of an elite class of elderly colonists. Some prefer to work in other fields.
There's a lot of immigration from the developing world to the developed work for medical careers, e.g. NHS workers in the UK. If your people are immigrating to work in medicine anyway, maybe it's better for them to stay home so you can tax them and collect the revenue?
You're going rather heavy on narrative vibes such as "wiping the bums of an elite class of elderly colonists", and rather light on the agency of people in the developing world to make economic decisions for themselves.
If demand for medical services rises, salaries will also rise. If no one steps in to fill those roles, salaries will rise further, to the point where medical services become expensive. And retirees will go to a different country, where people want to work in medicine. Capitalism works!
SE Asia as a whole has been improving, including countries that never participated in the retiree scheme. Thailand has been relatively stable and hasn't been invaded by foreign powers and is a big hub of manufacturing. It'd be more surprising if they didn't grow these past 20 years.
The snide "hmmmm" doesn't contradict anything I've said. Only incredibly poor countries do it. Whenever they have a functional economy, they drop it. And plenty of countries went directly from poor to rich without taking in retirees. See: Singapore, Korea, China, Taiwan. If anything, countries that take in retirees seem to lag compared to those who don't.
And decisions of government officials taking a cut of money from visa approvals for retirees really doesn't have anything to do with the agency of the people. There's a reason countries get rid of these policies: locals don't like it. No need to continue to assert that forcing yourself on unwilling people is good because their rents go up.
>Whenever they have a functional economy, they drop it.
Based on my research, there are a few countries which tightened their retirement visa requirements, but getting rid of it outright is actually quite uncommon. You talk as though this is a common thing. Can you name 5 countries that outright eliminated their retirement visa program? (Not just "considering it", actually eliminated it)
Why would they tighten it up? It's supposed to be great for the economy. It wouldn't make sense to do that if it's good, would it?
And there's virtually no country that doesn't let people with absolutely massive amounts of money buy their way in. 50 people a year buying top floor apartments in the middle of town in cash affects things far less than 150000 people a year happily paying quadruple what locals would pay to rent a normal apartment.
Oh, it's pretty tough to be in your 20s in the US compared to other times. But we are comparing with other countries, and most have the very same pressures as the US, but with lower salaries.
I look at my home country, Spain, where salaries are far lower than in the US for most jobs, and housing costs are ballooning. People might not have huge student loans and very high healthcare bills, but taxes climb really fast when you go past minimum wage. You have people demonstrating because, in their 30s, they still cannot live independently. Pensioners helping their kids, because they get checks a bit over 2000 a month, which are much better than what the recent college graduates are making. If you compare median salary to median rent, or median condo price, the US is still more affordable.
For all the stresses we have in the US, there are few countries that aren't facing very similar situation.
I think you can study statistics and surveys about this. For example, is the number of people reporting that essentials (rent, food, gas) are unaffordable? Are mortgage defaults rising? Is credit card debt rising? And for all of these, which people are affected?
The "affordability crisis" is mostly that recent college grads can't afford the lifestyle they are accustomed to in the location they desire with a job they want to work at.
As has been stated repeatedly in this topic, the median US household has more disposable income than the median in any other country. That doesn't sound like there is a national crisis to me.
My sampling bias is of college grads living dirt poor, had been, have been, will be. Recent friend was praying her car would not break down because she could hardly afford gas, let alone to do any kind of repairs. Sampling bias is a bitch. Do you have numbers otherwise that it is really just lifestyle outpacing income for college grads? Perhaps the outcomes of college grads are skewed, devil is in the details. The experience of college grads is pretty certainly washed away when looking at medians of much larger populations.
There will be college grads struggling and non grads thriving, but on average a person just out of college is doing at least as well as the general population income wise and can expect their incomes to rise with time.
My bet is that your friend can't really afford a car but is well off enough to try, and instead of taking transit is making a bad budgeting choice. If she ditched the car, fixed her lifestyle so she was using transit or a bicycle or her feet, she would probably be fine. She's just probably signed up for things that are too far apart from each other to do that, and that will be an uncomfortable transition.
> My bet is that your friend can't really afford a car but is well off enough to try
It's an old beat up car with 150k miles that was given to them.
She goes to Western North Carolina University. There are no buses, there are no sidewalks, every road is essentially a divided highway. It's not a lifestyle choice where they are living 50 miles away from where they work. Even then, the car was used to go to Hurricane Helene Relief volunteering, otherwise it's for groceries, and to take them to trail heads to hike.
Even then, I'm speaking to the point that they have NO extra money. The lifestyle of burning $30/month in gas is not the point nor the issue.
> My bet is that your friend can't really afford a car but is well off enough to try
Second reaction - jeez - what a garbage assumption to make. Paraphrasing you: "oh, they must just spend too much to have any money. Bad life choices." Garbage assumption dude, you so missed the mark - you would be ashamed if you knew the person in question here.
Further, they are not the only person I know in that situation - and if it were just due to excess of spending money; I would have not raised it as an example of "my sampling bias".
It's very bad practice to assume and then contradict someone else's lived experience based on that assumption. It's a great way to be wrong, way wrong (and sometimes not even know it). Your bet is bad. I'm sure there are plenty of examples out of the millions of people that we are talking about, where it would be right. In this case, nope - just ignorant and wrong.
Same, but you're only proving the point that our sampling bias is of people being poor when graduating from college. Were you picturing a nice car that is driven around a lot? She was driving from Western NC to volunteer for manual labor in hurricane relief. Otherwise doesn't drive except for groceries and to go to trail heads (which are close by). Like, this is not a pissing match. The person just had no extra money for anything. Just another broke college student.
Lol, no, I had in mind a $250 Citroën 2CV that was falling apart to the extend that a second similar car was bought to cannibalize parts from. Which is what people around me had at the time.
It’s not a pissing match. Not trying to take away from their experience. I just feels it’s weird that US people always say gas and cars are so expensive when relatively, gas is incredibly cheap in the USA (not sure about cars, but given how many there are, they should be cheaper too).
The idea that I get talking to people from other developed countries is that they don't have near the difference in quality of life that America does. College grads have desired locations because life in, for example, the deep South is pretty grim.
It's only grim in comparison. I remember the story of a remote mexican tribe, that lived poorly, but happily as they didn't know they are poor. Once they got connected to civilization, they saw that others have such a nice things like sneaker shoes, and their lives changed, everyone agreed it made them unhappy.
I've traveled the world a lot, including the US South. They are VERY rich out there, but think they are poor, that's it.
one important distinction in the US is that we have a requirement to get insurance for nearly everything (car, house, etc.) and these are some of the fastest ballooning costs; and homeowner insurance in the US is actually not separately included in CPI. https://archive.ph/cvorJ
Because many of the folks here are probably high-earning engineers w/o grounding to the everyday experience. I grew up poor and have many friends who barely scrape by. My friends' anecdotal experience is no different than the anecdotal experience posted by GP about "BMWs" -- BMWs arent that common in real america.
can you clarify where "real america" is? are places like Spartanburg, SC or Tuscaloosa, AL "real america" because you can commonly find BMWs and Mercedes in these areas.
>> can you clarify where "real america" is? are places like Spartanburg, SC or Tuscaloosa, AL "real america" because you can commonly find BMWs and Mercedes in these areas.
Sure, and for all of us driving around and near Atherton or any other wealth enclave even in a normal city, all these cars will seem common. And especially common to engineers with multi-million dollar RSU portfolios who hang around the homes of other engineers with multi-million dollar RSU portfolios. It might even make us think everything is OK.
Half the country earns below the median wage. (yes, its a joke but true)
Tons of people live on fixed incomes like social security. One big medical co-pay destroys your entire budget for the year. My mom got a $2000 balance bill under her medicare provider for cataract removal. If I wasnt her backstop, this would have wiped out a year of savings.
Not everyone is a SWE, in fact most people have normal jobs with normal incomes. Yes, incomes are going up, but only median incomes. Not everyone's income is going up.
Seeing BMWs should not be a handwave that everyone is doing well. We really should have empathy for the troubles a fraction of our neighbors are going thru. In a country with a large enough population, fractions are a huge number of people.
It's not about location, but socioeconomic class. Most people live in bubbles. How many people do you know who earn less than $51k per year? Because it turns out that's the majority of Americans. [1]
Similarly, how many households do you know with combined income of less than $62k? Because that is also the majority.
You're not going to find these people in BMWs or big houses, well not without life destroying debt at least. People being completely aloof of these data (or headlines like this one) are how you get November 5th.
BMWs aren't that common anywhere in the US - if they were, they'd stop being a status symbol.
That said, they're also not uncommon - a quick look at registration data suggests ~8% of cars "on the road" are BMWs, though of course just because a car legally could be on the road doesn't mean it's being driven with any regularity (I had a co-worker years back whose pastime was buying old BMWs and fixing them up; apparently they could be had relatively inexpensively at the time, as servicing was pricey).
Which is why all this pedantry misses the point: there's nothing terribly special about BMW; total cost of ownership is probably higher than domestic brands, but you could just as well pad out your ordinary expenses with a Ford or GM payment; a new Suburban or nicer pickup can soak up just as much excess cash as that X3.
Then again, Real Americans drive increasingly old used cars.
They explicitly don’t import or make entry level BMW and Mercedes in the American market to keep it a status symbol, but you’ll see lots of 1 and 2 series BMWs in Europe and even Asia. In the USA, 3 series is entry level.
I see tons of X1s, A classes, and GLAs in the Bay Area. I think the main reason certain models don’t get imported is because of size preferences. The Yaris (aka the Mazda 2) is no longer sold here but the Mazda 3 still sells.
Relatedly, MB didn’t import the EQC into the US. Yet the GLC is the best-selling Mercedes in America. I just learned that they cancelled the EQC due to disappointing sales and will be introducing an electric GLC to the US.
I guess its relative to what the voters experienced or assumed they experienced before the 4 years vs what they were experiencing in the current election cycle. So if you are used to $3 eggs then a $5 egg would be potentially anxiety inducing. It wouldnt matter if the actual cost of eggs is $1 as the fair price in other countries.
People know they are anxious, afraid, and confused.
It’s easy to point fingers at something (anything, really) and have it stick when the actual cause - including bad health habits, unmet social needs, a constant barrage of BS on the media, and no meaningful plan or hope to actually resolve any of this - seems unapproachable/unresolvable.
Because when inflation got under control, prices didn’t go down. They just stopped going up so fast.
We’re at the tail end of the most significant period of inflation in the US since the 1970’s. While incomes are growing slowly and unemployment is low, the pain of inflation is still being felt.
Until real incomes grow significantly, people are going to feel worse off than before the period of inflation.
> Then why did the median household just decide an election largely based on economic anxiety?
Because the median voter is largely uninformed and irrational.
> Is it because all the fear mongering about $5 eggs (They are $3 at my grocery, btw) was overblown?
It is overblown in that most Americans can comfortably afford essentials and more compared to their peers and most of history. That doesn't mean they aren't any less annoyed about the current economy, which is what drives votes.
>Then why did the median household just decide an election largely based on economic anxiety?
Mosty because of marketing and social medias.
When you are targeted 24h/d by ads on what shit you should buy or subscribe to and you feel you couldn't afford 10% of it while your social medias feed seems to show a lot of people enjoying them, you feel like cost of living is way too high.
>Then why did the median household just decide an election largely based on economic anxiety?
anxiety because their standard of living went down from before the high inflation from the economic so-called stimulus, and election because they trust Trump to grow the economy by removing obstacles to growth. The US economy is more dynamic than the European economy because of less regulation and bureaucracy. As one example, companies are more willing to hire workers for a speculative new project if they don't have to pay extensive wages to lay people off if the project fails. American workers are used to it and are willing to take good jobs when they are offered, and it just makes the economy go faster, "ahead of its rivals".
The American economy keeps on chugging despite critics, but that doesn't mean the critics don't have a point.
Costs of living (read: gas and eggs) are high, many would argue "unaffordable" even though most will still pay up. This means that: No, there is no "affordability crisis" in the literal sense. But there is an "unhappiness crisis", as in people aren't happy about how much money they have to spend. That crisis, the "unhappiness crisis" fueled Trump's upset landslide victory this election.
The Affordability Camel's back isn't broken, yet, but the camel is declaring quite angrily that the point is very close.
I'm not sure gas and eggs is the problem here. When people say cost of living, most of it is just rent or mortgage. To this end, I'm not sure if either party would be willing to do anything, as it primarily benefits the property-owning (older) class, which is the main part of the electorate.
>I'm not sure gas and eggs is the problem here. When people say cost of living, most of it is just rent or mortgage.
Rent/mortgage is just one part of the cost of living[1].
Even if you have a place to stay and sleep, you still need to clothe, bathe, and transport yourself and eat and drink to live. Cost of living is literally what it costs to live.
My point was that people would be just fine if it's only the food and gas going up since nominal wages are also increasing, and you have some degree of choice to eat cheaper things. The part that tends to break it is the increases in housing costs.
I think you completely missed my original point to begin with.
People can still afford cost of living, the American economy just chuggling along despite criticism is proof of that. The question is whether people are happy about spending the money they need to spend, the answer to which is a resounding NO as evidenced by the chief motivator behind Trump's victory.
Cost of living is still affordable (there is no "affordability crisis"), but it's too high for anyone to be happy with (there is an "unhappiness crisis").
Also, the people complained loudly and clearly that price of gas and eggs are their chief concerns. Housing is also expensive, but housing is usually a one-time lump and/or a fixed ongoing expense compared to food and gas which are ongoing small and variable expenses that quickly add up.
> people complained loudly and clearly that price of gas and eggs are their chief concerns
This is probably an artifact of how the media works.
People are concerned about prices but only some people are concerned about housing prices. The people who already own a house like high housing prices. Meanwhile everybody has to eat.
The media tries to maximize viewership so when they run the pricing story they're talking about high food prices (which everybody hates) instead of high housing prices (which only the people paying them hate but the people getting the money like). Which in turn causes people to be more concerned about food prices than housing prices because that's what the media is always talking about, even if the housing prices are what's taking the biggest chunk out of their wallet.
I think it's a pedantic distinction. Affording something always implied some level of comfort: you wouldn't say you can afford the car if you are paying most of your spare income on it, even if you can pay for it technically. Spending 50% of your income on rent may be feasible for many, but to the extent that people are unhappy with it, it is unaffordable.
if eggs = food, it's crazy to me that a single cooked chicken breast at Whole Foods is $17 (yes, I get that whole foods is expensive). Ok fine, a cup of flavored black beans at a Korean supermarket in Koreatown Los Angeles is $8. A similar amount of spiced cuttlefish is $8. A package of 12 gyeongdan is $8. All of these would have been under $4, probably under $3 just 2 years ago.
I think you’re misreading the price on those chicken breasts. At the Whole Foods at 3rd and Fairfax, grilled chicken breast is $16.99/lb [1]—which I believe is the price for any food from the hot bar. A typical chicken breast is 1/3lb to 1/2lb before cooking, so you’re really looking at roughly $5.50 per cooked chicken breast.
Uncooked organic chicken breast is $10/lb [2] at the same store. Non-organic is $7/lb [3]. Since Mary’s air-cools their chicken instead of dunking it in frozen water, you’re not paying for an ounce of ice with each pound of chicken.
>All of these would have been [less than half the price] just 2 years ago.
Here in Toronto, I can't think of a single food item that has done anything nearly that absurd price-wise. Eggs and dry pasta are currently at or approaching double what they were pre-pandemic (i.e. ~5 years) and that's the biggest increase I can think of over that time period. (Milk is up a bit over 50% when there isn't a sale; sugar perhaps 60%; ketchup perhaps 30%.) A lot of these increases noticeably started in 2021.
On the other hand, there are definitely things I can still get (at least sometimes) at the same prices I remember from years ago. And I've been improving my budgeting habits across this period of time, so my actual spend has been remarkably stable.
What you describe in LA is unfathomable. I'm accustomed to being taken aback by how cheap meat apparently is (was) in the US. Has the situation reversed?
My and my friends kids have a) need us to co-sign leases; b) been scammed of thousands of dollars thru fake rental things; c) can't afford a house any time for decades; d) can barely afford health insurance; e) have to borrow money when their used cars need expensive parts replaced.
By modern standards it's huge. Everyone runs data-driven campaigns now, which is to say that they basically ignore all but the swing states, and Trump won all of the swing states.
Which is the same reason that for a Republican a 1.6% popular vote margin is massive. California isn't even close to a swing state so a Republican could flip 2M more votes there over what Trump got in 2016 and still lose the state, even though that by itself would increase their national popular vote margin by more than 2%. Trump got 1.5M more votes in California in 2024 than in 2016 and still lost the state by more than 3M votes. So Republican candidates for President ignore the entire West Coast and the Northeast -- huge population areas -- because losing there by 48 to 52 gains them nothing over losing by 30 to 70.
Democrats do the same thing in Texas and most of the South, but the blue states are bluer than the red states are red, so Republicans come into the median Presidential election with a deficit in the national popular vote and often lose the popular vote even when they win the electoral college, e.g. when Trump won in 2016 he lost the popular vote by more than 2%.
Democrats often fancy the idea of switching from the electoral college to a national popular vote thinking they would win more often, but it would really just change how both parties campaign. Republicans would start campaigning in blue states and vice versa but the safe blue states have more prospective votes for Republicans to flip. And under the existing system, any national popular vote win for a Republican is a landslide.
The better argument that people don't really like Trump that much is that he won so big mainly because the Democrats picked a weak candidate to run against him and they should have had an actual primary and picked someone better.
The criteria that makes a category of life expense "ordinary" (IIRC) is that the majority of households spend income on it, so it includes things like taxes, healthcare, and mobile phones. Typical American life as revealed by actual expenditure patterns, and BLS breaks each category down by income decile.
I can't find precise data on retirement outflows and there are many possible ways to account for it (e.g. is Social Security contribution considered saving for retirement?) but what I can find seems to indicate that the majority of Americans do save for retirement, which would suggest it is an ordinary expense.
The only category of "non-ordinary" that I recall being surprising was eating out at restaurants. I should know better, almost no one ate out at restaurants when and where I grew up, but my perspective has clearly been skewed over time by my own lifestyle.
Any reasonable argument should classify retirement savings as an ordinary expense, since those savings come out of your income stream and become inaccessible until retirement age unless you either pay hefty penalties or qualify for very specific exceptions.
The vast majority of households don’t have significant uncovered medical expenses.
There’s major issues that become rounding errors on these kinds of statistics. ~0.5% of the US population is incarcerated or homeless. It’s a lot of people and a major issue, but the US population is huge.
"But millions of Americans who owe far more than $500 may not benefit — 1 in 4 U.S. adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000, according to a KFF poll conducted for this project; 1 in 8 owe more than $10,000."
And this is likely to be a severe undercount. Given that 1 in 4 Americans can't even afford treatment and so they just go untreated rather than take on the debt.
You’re presumably misreading that, under 1/3 of Americans have any medical debt and of people with medical debt 75% owe less than 5,000$.
Which means under 1/12th of Americans have more than 5,000$ in medical debt and 1/24th owe more than 10k.
That seems like a huge issue, but only 387,721 Americans declared bankruptcy in 2022. The discrepancy is people who get a moderate medical bill often just don’t pay it for years. Until they’re forced to pay, or the statute of limitations runs out and it goes away.
Yes, you're correct. The NPR article does state that it is 1 in 4 adults with debt owe more than 5k.
The article also states:
"Health care debt in the U.S. now affects more than 100 million people, according to a nationwide KFF poll conducted for this project. The toll has been especially high on Black communities: Fifty-six percent of Black adults owe money for a medical or dental bill, compared with 37% of white adults."
The US has a population of ~335 million people. If 100 million people have medical debt, that would be 1 in 3 people. And the census date seems to back that to a point.
The problem with all of these stats are that the definition of debt can change which can swing the number fairly widely. The KFF poll that is referenced by NPR mentions the debt is framed as either actual debt or other forms of debt such as "debt that patients accrue is hidden as credit card balances, loans from family, or payment plans to hospitals and other medical providers." Which means that if this form of debt is the metric that makes sense (I think it does given that the above are all forms of debt), then the percentage of adults
is really not 1 in 4, but 1 in 3, which is even more disturbing.
Taking such an expansive view of debt and things become largely meaningless. You end up defining some billionaires as being in medical debt. Here’s an analysis that ignores debt under 250$ as trivial.
“This analysis shows that 20 million people (nearly 1 in 12 adults) owe medical debt. The SIPP survey suggests people in the United States owe at least $220 billion in medical debt. Approximately 14 million people (6% of adults) in the U.S. owe over $1,000 in medical debt and about 3 million people (1% of adults) owe medical debt of more than $10,000.”
But of course that’s a biased survey. ~88 billion of debt that shows up on people’s credit reports suggesting the actual numbers are likely significantly below that estimate.
Why would we assume that "people across the economy reduce spending" == "people across the economy will have more money"? Don't at least some (I would say many) of the people in the economy make income from this unnecessary spending?
Paycheck to paycheck means what it says on the tin that these households consume as much as they earn. Its unlikely that necessary per the government actually captures all that is truly necessary let alone what folks consider necessary to live a reasonable life much of which is certainly either uncaptured or classified as ordinary.
Redefining pay check to paycheck to a definition literally nobody but yourself uses and then concluding few fit this definition isn't useful.
Practically what probably matters is "how many years do you have to work to take care of your basic needs after you retire, and how does this change if you (a) have medical problems (b) want kids (c) [add your other variants of ordinary life choices people should be able to make]"
Almost certainly, yes. Many people live on far less than that and retirees have their income augmented by a government pension (i.e. Social Security) which is quite generous by global standards. This is all eminently achievable by the average American living an average life with kids and whatnot, many do. Making better than average life choices provides a lot of insurance against bad luck over the long run.
An under-appreciated point that extends far beyond the financial is that Americans have an anomalously high amount of optionality in life.
More than enough. The vast majority retire on less and have comfortable retirements.
Despite the narrative, Social Security pays out quite a lot and isn’t going insolvent any time soon. The average payout ($1,900) is more than double that of Canada ($850).
A retired couple would have almost $4000/month in monthly income.
Add on top a paid off home, Medicare eligibility, and Social Security, most people retire with a few hundred thousand, which is very comfortable in most of the US.
Do you feel an $8k/month private nursing home a luxury?
What I’ve noticed is what Americans consider “bare minimum” is pretty luxurious.
“I’m not even middle class” means buying a single family home in the most expensive coastal cities, multiple international (Mexico and Canada don’t count) per year, a couple SUVs less than 5 years old, lots of toys, plus $5M when they retire at 55.
Of course most people can’t afford that. That’s upper class in the US.
The big problem is transportation. Many retired people can no longer safely drive. That means that if they don't live someplace with solid public transportation then their quality of life drops. Unfortunately, all of the places in America with decent public transportation are expensive.
And before someone chimes in “that’s because of the billionaires throwing off the average!” Look at the median disposable income chart. America is still at the top.
The median American is far wealthier than the median European person, even after accounting for things Americans normally complain about like healthcare, education costs, and retirement contributions.
This results in some crazy stats, like the fact the median Mississippi resident has more disposable income than the average UK resident (and that includes financial hub London). And again, this is AFTER accounting for healthcare, education, etc costs.
The median income on that page is the median disposable household income, divided by the square root of household size. Because American households are large for developed countries, measures like that overestimate the income of the median American relative to the median European.
There is an easy sanity check: Swiss GDP per capita is higher than in the US, both in absolute terms and in PPP terms. Their Gini coefficient is lower, meaning that the income distribution is more equal than in the US. If a comparison shows that the average/median disposable income is substantially higher in the US than in Switzerland, it is measuring something weird.
I think you may have that backwards, if trying to disentangle the individual from the household, a larger household would make the median income per person lower not larger.
Also, I’d imagine Swiss housing costs could easily account for the difference in disposable income.
I’m totally open to the idea the economists at the OECD are dumb and put out bad numbers, but I’d argue GDP per capita (GDP being a flawed measure to begin with due to only including consumption incl. government spending) is a far worse measure of on the ground reality than something that accounts for actual household income and expenses.
Housing costs are paid from disposable income under the OECD definitions.
Larger households lead to larger reported incomes, because the total household income is divided by the square root of household size. If income is $50k/person and household size is 2, the reported income is $71k/person. If household size increases to 3, reported income increases to $87k/person.
On the average, Americans move out of their parents' home in their mid-20s. Swiss people typically do it a couple of years earlier. When people in their 20s live with their parents, it often indicates the lack of affordable housing. But if you combine this with normalizing household incomes by dividing by the square root of household size, higher housing costs lead to higher reported disposable incomes.
International comparisons are difficult, because pretty much every way to do them is wrong in some sense. But in general, it's better to collect data that is consistently wrong in the same way than to try to correct the issues you encounter. If your data is consistently wrong, you can at least make reasonable comparisons between a country today and the same country 10 or 20 years ago.
Subsidized services such as education and healthcare are tricky. You could try to calculate the subsidies based on the actual costs of providing the services, or as the difference between the nominal price and the subsidized price. These can lead to very different amounts, and it's not always possible to use the same approach with every service.
If the degree of subsidies varies between countries, you could try to normalize the situation by either adding the subsidies to disposable incomes or subtracting the costs the individual has to pay. In a country where the services are more expensive to produce (and maybe also less efficient), the former leads to higher and the latter lower disposable incomes relative to other countries.
Retirement contributions are another tricky question. Voluntary savings are often included in disposable income, while mandatory pension contributions often count as taxes. But you can't always tell the difference between voluntary retirement savings and other savings. But if you then count retirement income based on voluntary contributions as disposable income, you have to be careful to avoid counting the same income twice.
> When taxes and mandatory contributions are subtracted from household income, the result is called net or disposable household income
I don’t understand why Americans always have such a fetish about bragging about their disposable income. Once you allocate for payments into the welfare state, the difference becomes a lot smaller.
And that’s not even mentioning the stark difference in quality of life, beyond “quality of life” graphs. Those graphs don’t account for having to wait 25+ minutes for the store to unlock steaks or vitamins from a security case. Or for mass tent camps in cities. Or Mmss drug deaths. Uncertainty of potable water. Access to and education on safe sex, abortion, etc. Walkability of cities.
Whenever I meet Americans traveling Europe, they virtually always rave about how much better life seems over here.
Maybe we bring it up because non-Americans (and low income Americans with a lot of free time, i.e. young people) do nothing but describe America as a hellscape online, and it's hard data that demonstrates the benefit of our economic system instead of just debating about a wildly inaccurate caricature.
You don't probably meet many Americans raving about the quality of life in rural Romania, and they may not be so enthralled with the European lifestyle once they saw their paycheck and the living situation it would provide.
As far as non-walkability goes, just watch the top three videos of the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes: https://youtube.com/@notjustbikes
As far as tent camps / drug streets go, I can post videos from San Francisco, Philadelphia, LA, Oakwood, etc. but you’ll bring up it’s “only a Pacific problem”, despite Californian (together with New England) cities often being brought up as the examples for well done cities that compare well to “European”-style cities.
It just blows my mind that anything below, say, $75 is locked up at all.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen food items locked up in Europe, aside from genuine Parmesan, Iberico or expensive alcohol, and even then not consistently. Usually even the lower priced non-food stuff (think a $50 space heater) isn’t locked up.
Don’t get me wrong, we have smash and dash thieves here too, but usually they go for jewelry stores, fashion stores or Apple / electronic stores.
Thieves go for things that are easy to fence. For a while Tide-brand laundry detergent was famously easy to fence in some cities[1], so places had to lock up Tide.
[edit]
Teenagers who shoplift also go for things that are embarrassing or illegal for them to buy (condoms and alcohol respectively). So those are likely to be locked up as well.
1: My understanding is that drug-dealers &c. would accept payment in Tide and then sell that to organized crime, that would wholesale it to mom+pop corner stores.
That Tide factoid is darkly humorous. The selling it back to stores part makes me think of The Wire, Omar stealing a heroin shipment from Prop Joe and then selling it back to him: https://youtu.be/-q2LWHZ6O_M
In America’s defense, I’ll say that certain things are done much better than Europe.
There’s is certainly a better awareness/acceptance that growth = good. The entrepreneurial spirit also runs much stronger in your culture.
National (well, global) security is taken much more seriously, which I feel like is a facet of American federalization and thus unity. You won’t see a combined (and certainly not unified) European army for at least another few decades, everything thinks their own interests, independence and pride are too important.
I’ve lived my entire life in America (over 40 years) and I’ve never seen any food item “locked up”. I think that would be an indication that you are in a shitty area. Similar to the pictures I’ve seen of Burger King employees working behind bulletproof glass.
You're flaunting your ignorance (or naivety) of America for all to see, though.
Most stores, even in internet-stereotype "hellscapes" like San Francisco, don't lock up bottles of fruit juice among other sundries. Anyone who actually lives here would know that, like me.
>As far as tent camps / drug streets go
Only a problem in the real megalopolises like the cities you just named. The vast majority of cities (and there are countless many in this literally vast country) are generally fine (some level of crime and homelessness will always exist as a matter of nature). Again, anyone living here would know that.
Internet memes are fun, but if you're going to passionately argue about something you would be wise to actually do your homework first.
Yes, in a high crime area. It's article-worthy because it's an anomaly. The only thing locked up in stores in my area is drugs.
> As far as non-walkability goes, just watch the top three videos of the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes: https://youtube.com/@notjustbikes
lol ok, am I supposed to take this as an unbiased source?
> As far as tent camps / drug streets go, I can post videos from San Francisco, Philadelphia, LA, Oakwood, etc. but you’ll bring up it’s “only a Pacific problem”, despite Californian (together with New England) cities often being brought up as the examples for well done cities that compare well to “European”-style cities.
See above. You continue to cherry pick examples that no one is denying exist and pretend they are ubiquitous.
Maybe I should go take some videos of homeless in central London or Paris and claim that's representative of the entire EU?
> You don't probably meet many Americans raving about the quality of life in rural Romania
Actually you probably do, but such raving is about as valuable as residents of NYC raving about the quality of life in upstate New York -- it's a case of stated preferences vs. revealed preferences.
I mean I live in America and I have never experienced a store needing to unlock steaks or vitamins from a security case, seen a mass tent camp, or lived near many drug deaths. Our water is top quality, I took sex ed in high school (back in late 90s/early 2000s), and my wife and I walk or bike almost every day in our neighborhood. We don't live anywhere rich or fancy either, quite the opposite. Just a normal city of around 200,000 people in a lower population state.
Could you name a similar-sized city that has the same qualities as yours?*
I’d love to learn, because I’ve mostly gotten the impression that the smaller an American city is, paradoxically the less walkable/bikable it gets due to lack of public transit, sidewalks, bike lanes etc.
*or your own city, but I understand the hesitation on geolocating yourself
I never said it was walkable per se, in the sense that is commonly used to mean everything you need in life is a few blocks away :) I'm not sure the large appeal with that anyways.
I work from home so no commute, but my wife does drive to work. However the grocery stores are less than a mile away and her work is a 5 minute drive (the nice thing about small cities / towns is that if you have to drive, it usually isn't very far).
That said, we do indeed walk or bike almost every day for exercise and to get outside. Myself I only use the car once or twice a week really when we go to stores or out to eat. But even if I lived in a "walkable" city I'd probably do that anyways because we'd want to try something new.
Hey feel free to stay in Europe, seriously we don’t care what you think of the way we live. If Europe was so awesome my parents would have stayed there, but thankfully they moved here for a more prosperous future for their kids.
You keep making statements from things you've read online about the US, but you've never lived here as far as I can tell. I've lived in Europe, and it's not for me. The difference is I'm not shitting on Europe. In my firsthand experience, some (not all) Europeans have a superiority complex towards the US. To those and you, get over yourselves.
You know, it's possible for both Europe and the US to be really, really nice - to different people. But some people need to feel superior. I have lived in both places, and I prefer the US.
I may be wrong but I don't think it is about "superiority" ... I think Europeans look at how US workers (VAST majority of them) are treated by their employers and go "who in their RIGHT MIND would live like this - regardless of what the 'income/compensation' for that might be. America has an entirely different way of life. I have been "best man" at 5 weddings and have christened 11 kids. I hardly see any of them. Everyone is "busy" running around, work work work, then errands etc etc... in most of Europe this would be unheard of, there is higher value placed on social aspects of life. Hence the myriad of studies and stories and... about general loneliness in America (these studies often include people that are married and have children).
Another personal example - my sister is highly educated, has two PhD and I consider her the smartest person I know. Years ago we were discussing something and I mentioned that one of my dear friends is seeing a psychiatrist. My sister scoffed... And I was taken aback to say the least. How can someone that smart and that educated dismiss someone who is basically a Doctor and spent years educating themselves in this field. After talking through it I realized that if you have robust social life, myriad of friends, different friends to talk to about different things (as well as family) you just might not need a psychiatrist to talk to... Just an entirely different kind of life/existence...
It doesn't matter how many sunny stats people throw around the reality is visible on the ground. Homelessness has soared over the last 10 years and is at record breaking highs. Utility disconnections for non-payment have gone up significantly in the last decade as well. Even clean healthy tap water is unavailable to hundreds of millions of Americans and that's only counting the heavy metals, not PFAS.
People are struggling in ways their parents and grandparents never had to, and they often feel they are unable to obtain the same standard of living. Healthcare spending has gone way up too as prices keep going up at a rate above inflation and more people having been getting sicker.
There's a very real reason for the disconnect between the "soaring economy" and how the majority are feeling about it.
Given that only two hundred million Americans would be more than half, I’d need to see some data that the majority of the US doesn’t have access to clean drinking water.
Are there parts that don’t or even a disturbingly high percentage, I could believe, but the majority of Americans not having clean drinking water is a high claim
>And that’s not even mentioning the stark difference in quality of life, beyond “quality of life” graphs. Those graphs don’t account for having to wait 25+ minutes for the store to unlock steaks or vitamins from a security case. Or for mass tent camps in cities. Or Mmss drug deaths. Uncertainty of potable water. Access to and education on safe sex, abortion, etc. Walkability of cities.
As an American in an unremarkable medium-sized city, this sounds like a caricature based on unrepresentative viral anecdotes.
* I've never had to wait long for something to be unlocked. Most things are not locked. Maybe a bit more stuff is locked up post-BLM.
* I can't recall ever seeing a tent camp in my current city. I can't recall ever seeing more than, say, 10 homeless tents in the same place. Big camps probably exist somewhere, but not where I see them.
* I don't know anyone addicted to drugs, but that probably says more about my social network than anything.
* I've never lived somewhere without potable water. If you offered me $1000 to find you some non-potable tap water, I wouldn't know where to go. Flint maybe? Googling suggests that Flint's water was fixed years ago. EDIT: I did find this map; my guess would be that a violation is not equivalent to the water being 'non-potable': https://hdpulse.nimhd.nih.gov/data-portal/physical/map?age=0...
* Was taught about safe sex as a teen.
* In my 30s, I still have no driver's license (should really get one some time). Walkability is acceptable, could be better depending on the area.
>Whenever I meet Americans traveling Europe, they virtually always rave about how much better life seems over here.
There might be a selection effect, where Americans traveling in Europe tend to be dissatisfied. Europe did not seem notably better when I visited, but my visit was not extensive.
[Upthread commenter edited his comment removing some stuff]
It’s trivial to find complaints on the epidemic of security cases in American stores, and especially the fact that there’s not enough personnel in stores leading to long waiting times.
In a similar vein, are you really going to claim with a straight face that America isn’t extremely car-centric anymore?
> As someone who actually moved there, I can tell you the numbers are also anecdotally felt on the ground if you go outside of wealthy tourist capitals.
Then you should travel more. I got these remarks even in smaller Croatian towns. I live in The Netherlands myself, and I’ve heard similar things said in mid-sized cities in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Gdansk, Poland, Denmark, Sweden Bulgaria, hell even in Italy in a place like Naples.
And if you’re gonna claim that wasn’t small town / countryside enough, do you really think quality of life is going to be higher in a hick town in Mississippi rather than a countryside town in Portugal?
Not to mention the sliver of vacation days Americans have.
> Not to mention the sliver of vacation days Americans have.
You are generalizing here for sure. I get almost 5 weeks vacation, 2 weeks sick, 11 holidays, and occasional personal and administrative leave. These also roll over. The people making 45k at my job get the same leave as the hire paid people.
That's because there's much more that Americans have to pay out of their disposable income, especially college (their own debt or their kids), and medical care.
It's not that great, no, but look at how much people can save in other countries: The idea of saving a million dollars outside of your home in Spain is basically fantasy. Much higher taxes, much lower salaries, and no savings vehicles that allow for strong deferred taxation: The max for the 401k equivalent is 1000 a year! So the vast majority of workers are saving basically nothing that isn't their home, and will rely on social security. Not that they would be happy to save... the wealth tax in large parts of Spain starts after $500k, and you pay yearly. 1 to 2% of wealth starting that early makes retiring early basically impossible: 4% is not a safe withdrawal rate anymore.
So it's not a matter of everyone in the US having it easy, but how hard a road most people have now elsewhere.
$20K/MO sounds exaggerated. A quick Google gives me
Palo Alto was deemed the seventh most expensive location for assisted living in California, according to a new study by Mirador, a platform that helps people research nationwide assisted living locations.
The average yearly cost of assisted living in Palo Alto is $91,177, compared to the state average of $63,927, according to the study.
Don't know why this is grey. You will reach a point where you can't hold down a steady job anymore. Age comes for us all and the "old people" working as Walmart greeters
are younger than you're probably imagining.
Being old is expensive. You don't necessarily realize how many things you do that save money rely on being at least somewhat youthful and able bodied. And 1 million sounds like a lot but that is going to be in 2070 dollars and has to last you between 10 to 40 years.
I think you forget that a lot of those things are heavily discounted for people with senior citizen cards. Healthcare and public transportation get cheaper when you get older. (The bus is free here for people over 60). Even utility bills get cheaper with a seniors card.
I think you have a vision of old people as unhealthy and inactive, I can't think of any DIY that I do now that I would not be able to do well into my 80's.
I think the major thing is that you don't necessarily get to choose what happens to you as you age. My Fil is in his early 60s and can't walk across the room without becoming winded thanks to his heart getting messed up. My mother, also early 60s has through no fault of her own completely shot knees and her standing is limited to walking between places to sit.
Their respective spouses are doing great though so they're legitimately carrying the team.
Ok I understand it's possible to use these terms as if they have meaning to some demographic somewhere, but what is the point of using them without actually referring to the necessary figures to figure out what they actually mean to the rest of us?
Also: fuck me, if americans have a 700/month car payment on average most americans you're likely to interact with on a daily basis will be deep under the poverty line. Like, the actual poverty line of "struggling to survive", not the bullshit metric used to cut people off from welfare.
It’s quite common in the middle class and below in the US to spend every extra dollar you make as your income rises. This means, despite getting promotions or raises, your a savings rate remains zero (or negative).
One primary way to increase spending is a vehicle upgrade.
Most vehicles sold are used vehicles. But if you consider only the new vehicles, the average monthly payment for new vehicles is about $740/mth.
> US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US households with no excess income after necessary expenses (as distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck.
There is absolutely no way I believe those numbers unless they have defined necessary expenses to be unreasonably narrow.
The good thing about well sourced data across millions of sample points that are prepared by professionals over decades of collection is that one should believe that data over anyone’s uninformed beliefs based on no carefully measured data over even a single person.
That's all well and good, so where's the link to the studies and the studies' parameters? It's not like I'm denying well presented findings. In absence of those, I can hold skepticism about the claims.
My definition of paycheck to paycheck would be that if you lost your source of income you would not be able to afford living (housing, food, healthcare, insurance, etc.) within a certain window of time. The data can be easily manipulated depending on what you consider essential. I would be surprised if findings by the Federal Reserve include healthcare as a necessity or essential. It's easy to say it's not an essential if a family or individual never had it.
Most people are not able to live without a source of income through working. And this _should_ be the norm - most people _should_ be working in their adult lifetime.
It should not be possible to live indefinitely without having to produce output that somebody in society needs (and thus is paying you to do so). The welfare state is to prevent the negative outcomes of someone in destitute, by preventing (or trying to prevent) crime, etc. It isn't there so that one can live free.
It's not a big caveat. How else would you define paycheck to paycheck? I'm talking about days, weeks, or low single digit months. A window of time is not indefinite.
The point of measuring people living from paycheck to paycheck is to measure their ability to have financial security. You are financially unsecure if you cannot pay for essentials for days, weeks, or a month off of savings. Many people in the U.S. are completely unable to save up for more than that. That's literally the point of talking about people living paycheck to paycheck. And usually, people only refer to being able to pay for food and housing. It rarely accounts for saving for retirement, health care, home/renter/car insurance, etc., all things that should be considered essential for living but are typically not in these studies.
Looking at the numbers: low unemployment, strong consumer spending, average income increasing at a rate higher than inflation, I'd say the majority is doing better than most years. They might not feel that way though, and we've been in a continuous vibes-cession since COVID.
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
---
Of course, I'm sure none of that would ever apply to our numbers, only to those of our opponents.
What are the actual numbers you think are fantasy? Most of the time when I see someone claiming economic statistics are fake, it's a misunderstanding or lack of context. For instance, people will say the US unemployment rate is fake because it doesn't include people who have given up on looking for work... but the U-4 unemployment metric, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics alongside the main U-3 metric, does include these people.
Because it is hilariously wrong. You have been operating under the false understanding, for who knows how long, that the media are talking about job postings when they are talking about jobs numbers.
There are some that talk about jobs filled, others are talking about unfilled postings. I guess you can laugh at your hilariously wrong assumption while reading this article.
Many thanks, I was thinking to build something similar and try to predict stock market macro movement.
Typically, right now I am relatively bearish but I feel I am 3-6m too early.
Trend is downward for both hiring and seeker, which I would interpret as employers are hesitant to invest in IT due to current US politic unknowns, typically, the tarifs and actual impacts on economy.
Nobody wants to believe they’re living in a peak, and it is hard to predicate. People claiming economic downturns are near are a dime a dozen.
That said, there are possible indicators. Yes, unemployment is low, but what form is employment taking? Is it generally trending toward fulfillment, growth and/or rewarding or is it trending toward mundane, unfulfilling and/or unrewarding?
Is everyone benefitting from the official economic growth? Or are the gains statistically lopsided?
Let’s take a common mentioned stat about wage growth. Yes since 2020 wages finally raised. But if you look at it overall since 1970[0], it still behind productivity gains. Wages are not keeping up with overall productivity growth and people are still going to notice that in some form. Everyone talks about since 2020, but that misses the broader story. (As an aside, I suspect by the end of 2025 wages will significantly stagnant again. Growth won’t continue on the best take of the current trajectory)
Then there’s inflation. Regardless of cause, an entire generation+ of people have never experienced such rapid prices rising, particularly with groceries. People aren’t going to forget this, no matter what the official line is. This also eats away at wage growth which as noted above, has not kept paced with productivity gains.
The official sources though say everything is great, or heading toward it. Maybe, especially if you’re seeing the benefits, but if you’re locked out of the majority of gains, what if any you do get will feel meaningless. This shouldn’t be discounted.
It is entirely possible that wealth inequality combined with the world political climate is starting to show more cracks in the system and this might be peak. We may be seeing the warning signs of a big changes, whether it manifests itself as mostly political or economic is anyways guess I suppose
> All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.
In the theme of the day: "Your coverage has been denied, due to [insert nonsense]", while profiteering from record profits in the billions.
Immense economical value has been "produced", benefiting no-one but the very few.
From the New-York Times [1]:
The company’s profits rose on his watch, jumping to more than $16 billion last year from $12 billion in 2021. But amid the growth, the company and its parent also attracted scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators who accused them of systematically refusing to authorize health care procedures and treatments.
In my case, it'd be growing numbers of people being easily able to afford housing and medical care, with most people putting more of their money into savings. Right now we have soaring numbers of homeless people and record amounts of household debt so I don't think we're doing very well.
Actually I think this could be distilled to a simpler metric. The economy is doing well when the net wealth (not including tax advantaged accounts) of individuals and families is positive and growing in real dollars.
Because if you are able put money into savings or investments then you probably have the other stuff you listed.
If your net worth is tied up in your home (house rich, cash poor), you can't put that money into savings or investments. My house is "worth" 2X what I paid for it 11 years ago, awesome. It's not helping to pay the increase in taxes, homeowners insurance, groceries, that have gone up, up & up.
> The economy is doing well when the net wealth (not including tax advantaged accounts) of individuals and families is positive and growing in real dollars.
Tricky to account for differences in consumer culture, no? Because the number of people who consume all they earn, no matter how much that is, is not staying equal over time or location.
I wouldn't account for it at all both because I think it will shake out in the aggregate but also because if people are spending all their money immediately I think it signals low confidence in their future economic situation.
We don't live inside a 1984 society. The closest to that currently would be North Korea. Brave New World was always more apt for modern western societies. But any such comparison is flawed, since those are just the writings of one author about a fictional dystopia were things were taken to the logical extreme for whatever critique the author is making.
HN in particular has a deflated view of the economy because our sector was going through such a big bubble from 2014 on, which got even bigger for a brief window around the pandemic. We in particular had a long way to fall back to reality, so our personal economic outlook is worse than it's been for a while, even if the rest of the economy is looking up.
Hn has a highly inflated view of the economy because we only see the top of the economic pie. I shop at cheap ethnic stores because I grew up with that food and the prices that poor people see are two to three times what they were 5 years ago. Telling this to someone who buys premium organic free range eggs is like trying to explain to a fish that a flood doesn't benefit everyone.
It’s funny you mention eggs because I live in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country with legally mandated cage free eggs and Trader Joes has them for $2.99 a dozen when people keep complaining about $6+ a dozen in the rest of the country (which is what I’d pay if I wanted the premium organic free range shit). When a famously expensive grocery store for yuppies has cheap eggs in Southern California, I figure the OP is right in their word choice: it’s a vibe-cession.
I also shop mostly at ethnic grocery stores (Superking, Ranch 99, H mart, etc) and IMO the problem isn’t inflation but general consolidation across many industries. I’m always shocked when I travel to less populated regions (even in California) and see their grocery availability, usually dominated by a single major chain like Albertsons or a local one like Publix. SoCal has competitive prices for groceries despite the high cost of living because there are so many people (and immigrants) to support many competitors, none of whom have real pricing power. My grocery budget hasn’t gone up significantly in the last five years despite switching to Costco for my meat rather than the cheaper halaal butcher.
Eggs are always more expensive at the ethnic stores here but cheap at TJs because they use it as a competitive loss leader. A lot of the country can’t support such competition so there’s zero incentive for suppliers to drive down costs.
It's not a vibe-session when the bottom 50% see inflation that five times the headline rate. It's class warfare and somehow the party of the people is the one defending it.
In the fight between labor and capital, the favored class is right there on the label of the economic system. Class warfare is a built-in feature of capitalism - no mainstream American political party is going to repudiate capitalism; the DSA is far from the mainstream and this is exactly its main bone of contention with center/center-right liberals. There hasn't been an unabashedly pro-labor major political party in the US anymore since Bill Clinton's "Third way".
Not where I come from. I grew up in the area, not far from the first Trader Joes and down the street from the second, and it’s always been considered an upscale store because it had so many cheaper competitors a few miles away. It was founded to supply the wealthy neighborhoods of Pasadena and South Pasadena.
I think you are kind of both right. When TJ’S started they intentionally wouldn’t sell things like milk and eggs because they couldn’t compete with big chains. The niche they were after were “over educated and under paid”.
So they were famously cheap for things that poor and blue collar families weren’t looking for anyway. UMC goods on a LMC budget, really.
Eggs are such a red herring. I pay $6 for eggs. You know how much I’d save with eggs at half price? A whopping $12 a month. Meanwhile my rent goes up by 10x that a year and thats with rent control. Everyone gets all bent out of shape about the price of gas and the price of food but that could realistically double and you’d only be out another what $200 a month or so. No its the rent that is the squeeze for most people not the eggs being $6 and the gas being $5. But of course that is the headlines and not the focus on the lack of housing supply due to restrictive zoning.
The interest rate is hurting everyone who can't buy houses with cash. High interest rates have also helped crash the real estate market, so even if you just own a home, you've taken a bath since the high interest policy has been implemented.
To be fair, the real estate market in the US has always been super distorted (mostly due to the existence and availability of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage itself), and encourages people to do stupid things. People should not consider their primary residence to be an investment; in truth it should be an expense and a liability. But the expectation here (fueled by market-distorting policy) is that home values always go up, and that homeowners can expect to sell their house in some amount of years at a profit.
As houses get older, their value should decrease. Even large-scale renovations often should not push the value up quite as much as one would hope. Certainly the value of land can go up, based on housing/zoning policy, coupled with supply and demand in a particular area.
At any rate, most things are temporary. Interest rates are headed downward again, and the Fed expects to make more cuts. Presumably we won't get back down to zero, but that's probably a good thing.
Also let's consider history: interest rates are still objectively not all that high right now. They're on par with or lower than what rates were in much of the 90s, and even some of the 00s. It's only the 10s that saw zero rates. And hell, go back to the 80s and prior, and the current rate situation looks delightfully low.
> High interest rates have also helped crash the real estate market, so even if you just own a home, you've taken a bath since the high interest policy has been implemented.
A note on this: so what? What matters is the cost of comparable housing. If my house has lost 25% of its value, it stands to reason that similar houses in similarly-desirable locations will have lost a similar amount, and still be affordable for me if I wanted to sell my house and move.
But again we run into the problems caused by the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage! Anyone who has bought a house with a mortgage recently enough, at a price high enough, might be in a situation where they can't move because they won't be able to sell their current house at a high enough price in order to pay off their mortgage (and still have enough of a down payment for their next house). This is a problem we've created for ourselves, and it's super annoying.
> in truth it should be an expense and a liability
I have to raise an eyebrow when someone says "truth" and/or "should", as if there's a hidden One True Way. I do think that David Ricardo's theory of rent holds.
> As houses get older, their value should decrease.
"Value should decrease" is doing a lot of lifting in oversimplifying, if not positioning itself counter to, reality. eg My area is growing by ~10k a year across 3 adjacent municipalities. Population growth (migration+births) contributes to a growing area in a way that's self-reinforcing (availability). So depreciation is often outpaced on that basis which has nothing to do with specific characteristics of structure.
How does this affect the calculations? Well, it doesn't seem to hurt as much as some might imagine. People are resilient and optimistic, long term, and happy to own the roof over their head in the short term to give themselves agency. These value motivate people to buy what's available and prices do not fall as if they exist in a vacuum.
> I have to raise an eyebrow when someone says "truth" and/or "should", as if there's a hidden One True Way.
I'm not the OP, but I notice that it's very strange that the other major expensive durable good the typical American household will own [0] is a steeply depreciating asset.
I also notice that "housing as both shelter and investment" is not universal policy. Japan does things totally differently and has historically done well by it.
House values do decrease over time. It’s the land value that increases. For example my house has decreased $100k in value since I bought it (many years ago) but the land has increased around $700k in the same time.
A well-maintained structure will also increase in value because the cost of material to replace it increases over time. It should track inflation pretty closely, but that's not always the case.
It also sounds like you're basing your statement on your tax assessment, which implies that your tax assessor has correctly allocated the value increase to the appropriate category. That has not been the case very frequently in my personal experience.
No, I'm not doing that either. I watch lot prices pretty closely in the same areas I own property. Lot pricing (acreage) in this market didn't move much during or since the pandemic. Meanwhile 1000sq ft single family homes built in the 60s and in desperate need of restoration are currently selling in the 180k-250k range, whereas pre-pandemic I could buy as many as I could handle for less than a hundred grand a pop. Meanwhile the cost of a quarter acre building lot has nudged upwards maybe 10%. I'm guessing something about this strikes you as weird, thus the assumption that I don't know what I'm about? I don't have a cogent explanation to offer you for the vagaries of local real estate prices, I'm just reporting the facts on the ground.
...and yet, the currently "high" interest rates are lower than the average in the 2000's (2000-2009), 1990's, 1980's (much, much lower) and 1970's.
There is a proclivity to wash over a lot of the difficulties, constraints, and "norms" of earlier generations and making the current economic times seem so much worse. Things like living with multiple roommates (2-4) in your 20's is MUCH rarer today, as is sharing a bedroom with a sibling. Vacationing frugally at a nearby lake, not some international expedition. Packing a box lunch. I agree that by many measures, times are tough, but also, the base expectation level has definitely increased dramatically.
This rise since 2021 can be easily seen in the graph in the article I posted also, but the catch is that the increases have been relatively flat where they can been found, and that increase followed a lowering in real wages. Whichever way the data is looked at since 2020, it isn't very reassuring to the general public that wages have essentially stayed flat with inflation, when US productivity growth has been going up. I was actually surprised about the article I referenced in the comment above. The figure I'd read of previously was that real wages had cumulatively increased around 2% since 2020, which the Brookings article seems to reference. 2% real increases in wages is strikingly low considering US productivity growth. It was the figure I was originally looking up.
If you only want to see what you want to see, it's easy to find evidence. On the other hand, look at the commonly posted wages vs productivity graphs (productivity goes up pretty much unbroken, but wages flatline since roughly mid-70s), or compare the 'US is #1!!' GDP per capita numbers against the *median* income numbers. Bit of a difference when you remove Musk, Gates, Bezos et al income from the comparison.
Why would you expect wages to track productivity in an environment where automation increasingly drives productivity gains and the means of automation are provided by employers?
You can take your pick of any point since the pandemic. Wage growth has essentially stayed flat with inflation, whether that be a slight increase or decrease. Much of the nominal wage growth with white collar workers would have been tied to promotions, which inflation has eaten the real gains of. It is no wonder that many people have a poor view of their place in the economy and it is certainly not just "vibes", like it was arrogantly written off as by many.
You realize what you said contradicts the data that has been posted repeatedly in this topic?
Real wage growth surged post-pandemic, especially for lower-income workers.
Most economists have explained the vibes as: People blame inflation for increased prices but credit their own industriousness for wage gains, and are angry they don't get to basically double dip.
"Real" is a misnomer. Interest expenses aren't included in the CPI adjustment for real wage growth. Decreases in used/new vehicle prices wouldn't necessarily offset increases in food prices for someone taking public transit.
For a worker with credit card debt, or one who already struggles to afford public transit, the real wage growth is illusory.
Way to down vote my comment without posting that data you refer to. Nominal wages surged post-pandemic in Q2 2020, but cooled off after then. Someone already replied to my comment with a Brooking institute article which confirms the figures I had previously heard, in that real wages have only increased 2% annualized since 2019.
I didn't downvote anything, and I didn't re-post data because I assumed you already had it as a participant in this discussion.
A 2% annualized increase in real wages is excellent? Compare it to real wage increases elsewhere and you'll see that "only" is not the correct modifier to use.
Meanwhile the real cost of housing is still increasing. It is a bipolar world: the haves and the have nots. If you own land: the economy is great. If you don't own land: you're screwed. Whatever metrics that say wealth inequality is down are lying. It's a polarized world of haves and have nots and people are pissed off.
Wow, talk about a deceptive article. It’s so completely shady the writer surely did this on purpose to fool people like you.
Here’s [1] the wage graph from BLS during that time period, same source as the author. See that incredible, record setting spike at precisely the month in question, never seen before or after? Gee, what do you suppose did that?
The US had just poured 2 trillion into wages for free for pandemic recovery.
This is why you shouldn’t fill your head with nonsense from such crappy sources. Liars will lead you into your own echo chamber. Read proper economic journalists until you learn enough not to believe stuff like that article.
>Here’s [1] the wage graph from BLS during that time period, same source as the author. See that incredible, record setting spike at precisely the month in question, never seen before or after? Gee, what do you suppose did that?
Given how arrogant you are, it is ironic that you're the one that interpreted the graph incorrectly. They didn't reference the spike "precisely the month in question". The figure they referenced at the start of the graph was Q4 2020. The spike in the FRED graph was in Q2. Perhaps you should think before you type next time, so you don't paint yourself the fool you claim others to be.
If they had referenced the spike in Q2, the decrease would have been >5%. If you want to start casting stones, you better be sure you're right.
Read the graph. The nov, q4 value in the graph is 376, is part of the Covid spike, and no other points in all of history that are not part of that spike are as high as the q4 value.
Zoom in if you cannot read it. A spike is not a single month. It’s a spike with an upside and downside. You think the effects of a free few trillion poured into people’s hands only affected an infinitesimal width spike?
So no, I did not interpret this graph incorrectly, and the poster chose a point from an artificial spike to mislead.
Perhaps if you aggregated inflation, which is a lagging variable, it will turn out he chose precisely the quarter that made his point better than any other quarter, in which case he really went the extra mile to provide misleading claims.
If you’re going to attempt to discredit a correct argument, at least evaluate it correctly.
>See that incredible, record setting spike at precisely the month in question
>If you’re going to attempt to discredit a correct argument, at least evaluate it correctly.
Sure, it is part of the downward slope of a multi-quarter spike, but that is not what you said. What you are doing now is attempting to re-frame prior inaccurate wording to claim that you were accurate all along. That first quote is what you said in your first comment. Q4 was the second quarter of decline following the spike. You said the spike was at "precisely the month in question", which it certainly was not. Q4 2020 was half a year after the peak of the spike. That hardly qualifies for even a very generous interpretation of the word "precise".
>Perhaps if you aggregated inflation, which is a lagging variable, it will turn out he chose precisely the quarter that made his point better than any other quarter, in which case he really went the extra mile to provide misleading claims.
Not only is this reaching, but you've just demonstrated that you don't understand what the graph you said was misleading refers to. Real wages does account for aggregate inflation.
> Sure, it is part of the downward slope of a multi-quarter spike, but that is not what you said.
That you confuse the word spike to mean only the tip is odd. The downward part of a spike is part of a spike, and the cause and use of this anomaly is not in question. Choosing an outlier high point as a basis to make general claims will always lead to misrepresentations.
Is a railroad spike only the tip? Is a volleyball spike only the highest (or lowest) part? Is a signal spike the zero width instant of maximum value?
I cannot think of a use of the word spike that means the tip and not the entirety. Looking at online dictionaries I cannot find the use you claim. I do find many definitions and examples including both the upside and downside. So I’m quite correct claiming the author choose the spike, and obtains the expected poorly reasoned claims as a result.
> Not only is this reaching, but you've just demonstrated that you don't understand what the graph you said was misleading refers to. Real wages does account for aggregate inflation.
If you dig through my posts, you’ll see I taught mathematical grad econ at a top 50 university. What you misread, then try to use Econ 101, is simply incorrect. As your other comprehension showed, you ignored the precise word “lagging” that I wrote, because real wages at a given date do not include inflation from the future.
Please read and think. You’re so bent on trying to argue you don’t read what I wrote, and instead argue your misreadings.
Let me simplify: it’s well known inflation as a result of cash transfer causes lagging inflation (pretty much all schools of economics agree on this, from Keynesian, neo, Austrians, Friedman, all the flavors of monetarists, pretty much everyone). Hence the precise Econ term lagging variable. Other ones are that wage growth usually lags inflation. This is all basic economics. It’s why I precisely put the word “lagging” in that sentence. It means future inflation above. Most definitely not a part of that spike.
Here, there was an economic shock causing the govt to expand the money supply without expanding production. This money, handed out in large part as cash, adds to real wages at that moment. This will lead to inflation, but that is not part of those real wages. Later, inflation will devalue money, making real wages decrease. Then later again, historically wages gain back purchasing power as people get salary increases. This is done (alert, another term so read carefully) because wages are called a “sticky variable” in Econ. Wages are easy to ratchet up but not down, due to psychology of humans. Wages are hard to move freely like many other variables. Ideally from a math model side, if wages were not sticky, then as the shock passed, prices could fall, and all values return to baseline. But people don’t see that, so it’s easier to ratchet up wages, which ratchets up prices, locking in inflation.
So to maximize the type of nonsense this post spreads, you can always fiddle with the chunks in these troughs to make things look much worse than they are.
So next time please learn the difference between aggregate inflation (current) and the phrase lagging variable. And don’t put claims into my writing so you can argue straw men.
I’m done. You’re trying to correct something that is simply your odd usage of a word.
Looking at the numbers the interest rate is almost 7% making most things very unaffordable for people who can't buy things like houses and cars with cash. Until that number dramatically goes down, regular people will suffer.
This view is always super weird to me; aside from ~2008-2020, the current interest rates should still be considered pretty reasonable. And remember that rates were also on their way up pre-pandemic, but got slammed back down to 0% once the pandemic hit. (I mention this bit to counter the belief among many that our current rate situation is solely due to poor management of pandemic response.)
And -- this is certainly a bit of a gamble -- but I know people who have taken on higher rate mortgages now with the expectation they'll be able to refinance within a few years at a lower rate. That's certainly more expensive even in the meantime than having a lower-rate loan to start, and there's always the risk that rates don't actually come down, but it's an option for many (admittedly not all).
You obviously didn't live through it, or you wouldn't be spouting such offensive, naive nonsense. How many working class families do you know that can afford to buy economically significant amounts of T-bills, as opposed to, you know, eating, or paying for car repairs, or kid's back to school supplies. When is the last time you saw a bank paying anywhere close to the prime rate on savings accounts, which is all a working class family typically has access to. (as opposed to pocketing the difference as profit, thank you very much)
All of the online banks pay pretty close to 4 week T-bill rates, maybe 1% off. Chase/etc are only worth keeping a small amount in, everything else should be transferred to Ally/Marcus/Fidelity Cash Management/Vanguard/etc.
I absolutely did live through it. I also watched my grandfather who had a 7th grade education double his money twice through the insanely technical investment strategy of...wait for it...driving down to the bank to renew CDs. I'd entertain an explanation of what's either offensive or naive about that.
The trend is basically back to where it would be if you just extrapolated 2019.
You can even see the origin of the "vibe-session" here, things got pretty good for a lot of people in the money shower of the pandemic stimulus combined with low "stay at home" spending. Its the return to normal that has people spun with "the economy sucks".
It's always fun to see a graph like this and realize that (aside from the pandemic), that the last time people were significantly better off by this metric was 30 years ago, while many of us were children, or not even born yet. And yet everyone is complaining that things are so bad, and that this is a new phenomenon.
In an economy where you can easily deliver packages or drive uber, there will always be close to zero unemployment. This number stopped making sense a few years ago.
> strong consumer spending
In a high inflation environment, one has to consume "strongly" just to maintain the same standards of living.
> average income increasing at a rate higher than inflation
If you underreport inflation, then the average income will increase faster. But even if not, average is not what you and I receive, and it is determined by some people making lots of money while others have stagnating salaries.
> majority is doing better than most years
You cannot prove this from the above points. Average income doesn't mean that the majority is doing better. Something called inequality will not allow that to happen.
> They might not feel that way though
That is pop psychology at its worst. Nobody cares about feelings, you just need to look at the numbers in a critical way.
> In a high inflation environment, one has to consume "strongly" just to maintain the same standards of living.
Strong disagree: you can't spend what you don't have (or can't borrow), so spending is a vital signal.
There's a natural experiment that just happened that refutes your argument: after Covid, most of the world had high inflation (with some actual recessions), but the US did better than everyone else, with stronger American consumer spending helping the recovery (leading to more jobs to service the strong demand). Your argument falls apart when you consider why UK or French consumers consume as "strongly" to maintain their lifestyles.
> If you underreport inflation, then the average income will increase faster.
There's no one way to calculate inflation (since this depends on how you choose your 'basket'). But like I said, based on vibes, everything is awful.
> Your argument falls apart when you consider why UK or French consumers consume as "strongly" to maintain their lifestyles
They don't have access to cheap credit as the US consumer has, and being smarter than Americans they refrain from going into more debt.
> There's no one way to calculate inflation
Yes, there is, it is just different for lower income earners. Economists just don't want to measure the impact on people who have to spend large part of their salaries on rents, health care, cars, all things with prices that increase higher than official inflation.
Did you purposely leave out my parenthetical to use it as a dunk? Borrowers are not dumb (and the amount of debt is also a useful signal on economic health by the way, and right now it's not terrible; definitely not in recession territory)
> Yes, there is, it is just different for lower income earners
Well, don't leave me hanging - what's the one way to calculate inflation then? Which specific mix of goods and services (and locations) should be used as a national benchmark in THE inflation equation?
I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think pre-2008-crash mortgage lending could be a counterexample. Certainly there were a lot of shenanigans going on, but ultimately borrowers made the -- IMO dumb -- choice to stretch themselves far too thin, and buy bigger and more expensive houses than they truly could afford.
Perhaps everyone today has learned from history, though. (But I wouldn't bet on it.)
Any given borrower, on their own, is unlikely to be dumb.
The market can be irrational far longer than they can be solvent, however, and not being ‘dumb’ can make that worse.
Pre’08, you had to be dumb as a borrower in 90% of markets, or you’d be flat out unable to buy anything. As to if continuing to buy in those conditions was dumb or not, is mostly something that can only be judged retroactively.
Sure, you can borrow more, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening, at least not contrary to long-term trends. Credit card debt is going up[0], but at a rate that looks exactly like (or perhaps slightly lower than) what it would be if you just extrapolated from 2019 and ignored the pandemic (and recent data in the last year shows that growth in that number may be slowing a little). Debt servicing as a percent of disposable income looks pretty good too[1]; much lower than the absurdity that was the 00s, and on par with or better than pre-pandemic 10s. You have to go back to the early 90s to get much better than that, but if you keep going back, it gets much worse.
Certainly these are just two metrics among many that people could look at, but if we're talking about consumer spending being strong, it does not appear to be because people are borrowing more today than long-established trends would expect. (I do think it's concerning that consumer debt has more or less only gone up over time, but that's a separate discussion.)
> In an economy where you can easily deliver packages or drive uber, there will always be close to zero unemployment. This number stopped making sense a few years ago.
Ah I see... your entire worldview is predicated on just assuming different facts than what your interlocutors are. Feel free to substantiate this rather fundamental claim.
> That is pop psychology at its worst. Nobody cares about feelings, you just need to look at the numbers in a critical way.
"Look at the numbers in a critical way" is an interesting framing of "make shit up."
People seemed to vote on how they felt not what these numbers said. So the vibes seem more valid than the stats at least on their real world impact in many ways.
Continuing to yell at people about the numbers doesn't seem to be an effective strategy, maybe try a different approach?
If this belief is strong enough, they would act on it. The fact that they act means the economy starts rolling, and produce the type of thriving that they come to believe! Ala, a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Therefore, it's important to find out why people believe things, despite being contrary to empirical evidence.
Right. I was born in Europe and am still struggling with North American cultural assumption that "place to live" == "own property".
Back to the original post I think there are several statistics that apply to different geographical areas or demographics in the same post, leading us to conclusion that half the continent is out on the street, and demonstrating risk of back of the napkin calculations on policy decisions, even if we assume good will and honest effort :-/
You have to understand unlike in Europe. We have no safety net. Most peoples whole savings is their home. So owning your home is a big part of having something to retire on and pay bills.
Actually, very common in some European countries as well.
In the Netherlands, you aren’t taxed on your primary residence, but all other wealth has an approximately 2% annual wealth tax. This makes it challenging to accumulate wealth through any means other than a primary residence, which was many of my coworkers’ primary way of saving.
Granted, they also have mandatory pensions, which can give you a good income in retirement, but that’s different than wealth accumulation
Oh I've lived in Canada for 25 years now and I see that around me... It just isn't something I've embraced though. There's a almost religious faith that houses can only go up, and I've lived through enough interesting times and places not to believe it for a moment (as has anybody over 60 on Canada as well).
Bullshit. American unemployment pays consdeirably more than UK unemployment. Throw on food stamps and housing assisitance on there, and the US might still be below the more generous European countries, but you definitely have a safety net.
> unlike in Europe... So owning your home is a big part of having something to retire on and pay bills
So what, like the UK? And Ireland? And argaubly all of Europe east of Germany and in Scandinaivia, all places where home ownership is comparable or greater than the US?
Unemployment is different in every state and is pretty short. I know in NJ its only for 26 weeks. Plus this isn't used for retirement. Have you ever tried getting food stamps or housing. Lets just say its not very easy. Also its setup so that as soon as you start getting a little ahead its taken away. So you end up right back where you started.
I think your number is a bit high. Looking at a few calculators, even if I push the property tax & insurance numbers quite a bit higher than I think is credible, I can't get the numbers past $3800/mo or so. More reasonable seems to be around $3400/mo. So that's $40k-$46k/yr, well below that overinflated $70k-$100k figure quoted upthread.
Also your math is off: even at your $4200/mo estimate, that's $50,400/yr, nowhere near your "not too far off" $60k. And that puts it at 30%-50% below the $70k-$100k range, which makes that range laughably inaccurate.
> Apartment in a moderate-cost area is about $70,000-$100,000/year.
That doesn't even pass a minimum-effort sniff test. I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, and I'm in your quoted range for a 4-bedroom condo.
My sibling lives in a more affordable, but desirable, area and spends a little less than half of what I spend a year, for a single-family home with a good-sized yard that's more than twice the size of my condo. (And they bought last year when interest rates were high.)
Your own stats don't even make sense. You claim it costs $70k-$100k/yr for housing, but that to afford a home, a family needs to make $107k/yr? That doesn't make sense. If housing costs that much, that family needs to make north of $200k/yr to afford it.
You’re forgetting lots of people rent. Lots of people can’t afford to own, and almost all of them rent. The other factor is dual, or even 3+ incomes in families living together.
lots of people that can afford to buy many houses rent because it makes very little financial sense (for those who understand slightly-above-basic-math) to own a house in the US
I wish more people in the US believed that, it'd make my retirement planning so much easier. Incidentally if that statement were even vaguely accurate private equity would most likely not find residential real estate an attractive investment, which they most certainly do. All of my real estate has doubled in value over the last 5 years and through the magic of depreciation I'm on track to get back more in taxes over a 20 year span than the original purchase price of my investment property. Home ownership: shit makes perfect sense to me.
That thinking is very location-dependent. Cities and counties across the US vary wildly on the ratio of cost-to-rent to cost-to-own, and that number is sometimes less than and sometimes greater than 1, depending on where you are.
A big problem with renting is the capriciousness of the rental market in many places, which you can't solve with "basic math". That plus the availability of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in the US means that rental costs can be much more unpredictable than buying. Some people will -- very reasonably -- pay a bit more for peace of mind. And that's before we get into the topic of no-fault evictions, and how that can wreck a family's housing situation, sometimes with not too much notice.
Renter protections in the US are not great compared to in many other places, and that can make renting unpredictable and more "costly" in other ways.
That's not a measure of an economy though. Housing and especially dense affordable housing isn't widely built in the US and the supply is artificially constrained, usually by NIMBY politics.
In some form or fashion yes. Theres a reason why there are so many homeless tent camps everywhere. These people are not choosing to be homeless. They just can't afford a place. But remember a lot of them still have jobs. At Walmart, Amazon Warehouses, etc.
Can you clarify? Because I'd find it hard to believe that half of Americans are literally homeless. It might make more sense if you're referring to home-owners.
Pretty sure half the US isn't living in tents. I feel like I'd notice that, especially living in a city with a larger-than-average homeless population.
I agree that homelessness is a problem, but you appear to be arguing in bad faith. If 50% of the US actually "can't afford housing", we'd have $170M people living in tents, and that is demonstrably not the case.
I would believe a claim that states that a large portion (maybe 50%, maybe more, maybe less) of the country are facing financial insecurity that makes them feel like their housing situation is precarious. But that wasn't the claim put forth upthread.
What we can't see is the amount of people that are living with roommates and in toxic situations they'd love to exit but are unable to due to a lack of housing options and a lack of money.
Can you provide the question you asked ChatGPT? Because the number is wildly inaccurate. I own a home and I pay less than $15,000 a year. Tax and maintenance. In a high cost of living area.
HN love to look down on ChatGPT, yet are willing to hide behind it when it’s convenient.
> Family needs to make $107,700 a year to own a home.
I don't see how that computes. The internet suggests that, on the high end, a family will spend around $10,000 on home repairs, maintenance, and insurance, which is in line with my experience. So almost $100,000 in yearly property taxes for a typical family home? Not a chance.
I suspect you are thinking of buying a home rather than owning a home, but homes are bought with wealth, not income, so an income figure here doesn't make much sense if that is, in fact, what you are thinking of. If that is not what you are thinking of, I, for one, don't understand what you are trying to say. This figure doesn't seem to have any applicability.
I think you're being overly pedantic in your concern for the difference between "buy" and "own".
Most people in the US will say they own their home even if they have a significant mortgage against it. You can be upset that people are not using the word correctly, but that's kinda pointless.
If you keep posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, we're going to have to ban you. We asked you this just recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41604621), and you've unfortunately continued to break the site guidelines.
What do you mean by this? In the US, over 60% of people have a mortgage [1], which almost always means it's coming from some percentage of their income. When you get a home loan, the banks only real concern is your credit score and income. Anecdotal, but I don't know a single person that doesn't have their monthly mortgage scaled to their income, since I don't know a single person under 60 without a mortgage that's coming from their income.
> In the US, over 60% of people have a mortgage [1]
A mortgage is the rental of wealth. It is independent of the home. But, even if we want to conflate them for the sake of discussion, it is still dependent on many variables that does not round to a single number. The rent on a $20,000 mortgage is quite different to the rent on a $200,000 mortgage. Two buyers buying identical homes for identical prices, but who come with different amounts of wealth, will have very different rental payments. A single number is meaningless, even if we assume 100% of people are paying mortgage rent.
But, as you point out, ~40% of the people don't have a mortgage, and therefore have no such cost to begin with. The idea that they also need $107K doesn't make any sense.
They're presumably saying that's the income needed to service the mortgage (where what most people call the mortgage payment includes escrows for insurance and property taxes, on top of the literally mortgage principal and interest components).
That still feels like a fair over-estimated amount to me, but I think that's what they were getting at. (It could also be a figure of the amount needed to qualify for a mortgage on a place with some amount of downpayment.)
It could be an overestimate, it could be an underestimate, or for a specific family buying a specific home it may be spot on. It is kind of like saying that it costs $5,000 to build a software application. That statement is true, but meaningless.
I fail to see how it's "misleading". U3 doesn't include people who don't want a job. That seems... fine? If you don't want a job, and don't have a job, why should you be factored into the health of the labor market? Isn't it more misleading to lump people who want a job but can't find a job, with people who don't want a job and aren't working?
>Source: Bankrate's Wage To Inflation Index using the Department of Labor's employment cost index (ECI) and consumer price index (CPI)
Using BLS's weekly wage data adjusted by CPI gets the opposite conclusion, so my guess is that there's something funky going on with the employment cost index. For one, it includes benefits, so if health insurance costs go down, then "average income" (as computed by bankrate's index) will go down, even if your take-home is the same. At best, the only thing you can conclude from that is "employers' spending on employees is rising slower than inflation", which is slightly different than "employees' incomes are rising slower than inflation".
Well the facts don't care about your feelings. A lot of people seem to want to feel bad about the economy and are searching high and low for reasons to feel that way.
is your buying power the same as it was in 2020? did your wages increase since then to match what it was in 2020? because I know mine didn't and I've not heard of anyone, or seen any data, that says otherwise.
My wages have increased 30% since 2020, exceeding the 22% inflation I got from that calculator.
The data shows that far more people are in my situation than in your situation. Do I need to spell it out for you? People are acting like they are doing better in the numbers, responding on polls that they are doing better, but they all think everyone else is doing bad or the economy in general is doing bad.
Can you imagine how bad it would be if our actual economy did as poorly as the rest of the world? We went through a mismanaged global pandemic, and came out smelling roses when it comes to the US's economy. We are in a fantastic position for world domination. China and Europe shat the bed. India is up and coming and may be an economic rival, but they are not there yet.
If you think this economy is bad, try going back to 2008. To 1992.
So please, yes, spell it out for me. The facts do not care about your feelings, no matter how strongly you have your feelings, or who told you to have the feelings and to feel helpless.
It's important to understand that the stock market is a leading indicator.
Everyone doesn't immediately get laid off when the stock market tanks. Everyone doesn't immediately get a raise when the stock market is roaring.
A lot of people are just now experiencing the stock market mini-crash of 2022, when the pandemic helicopter money dried up. In two years a lot of people are going to be experiencing the investments that are being made in the market right now. Most of them are going to wrongly ascribe those good times to the person holding high political office even though that person had nothing to do with it. This won't be the first time it has happened.
I don't think so. It is probably loosely correlated with the economy at best.
The stock market can soar in times of cutbacks which hurt non-asset owners but which benefit profit margins. The stock market can boom on liquidity surges that do not translate into economic investments. The stock market can crash while the overall economy does fine(wasn't 2000 basically this, with the economy not really suffering until after 9/11?).
Honestly nowadays industry seems to be just about maximizing stock value through hype and CEOs are basically hired just for that. Like all stocks are meme stocks now, profits be damned because you can always do some accounting maneuver, and as long as stock goes up you're all getting your bonus.
I wonder if my impression that this has increased a lot in the last decades is correct, and what would be the impact of this on the whole "stock market as indicator of economy" thing.
I think financial education is a major problem. People need to be taught about investing. I'm talking long term investing, not day trading, crypto, etc. Start early, invest regularly. This is the simplest way for a normal person to build wealth within their lifetime. Wage increases aren't going to get you there.
Why have everyone buy a share of some companies and rely on that risky gamble to insure their future? The markets were never meant to be a way to redistribute wealth, but to sell risk away, to anyone willing to take them.
Using markets as the primary way to redistribute wealth seems convoluted at best, and yet another perversion of their original purpose.
The "mini-crash" is already a non-event for any medium or long term investor. Anyone who invested since the beginning of 2021 is still up 50%. I'm assuming VTSAX or similar index fund. It's not even a blip.
Asset prices are extremely high. When politicians or business journalists say “the economy is doing well” they mean asset prices. The stock market is high on a number of metrics, which is great if you own a bunch of equities. Housing prices are soaring, which is great if you own real estate.
Food, housing, energy, healthcare, education. Real wage growth and job security measured against the prices and durations of those things. That’s what matters to people who don’t own significant real assets, those are the things that can get extremely bad (someone tries to murder the CEO of United Healthcare on the street bad) without showing up in the numbers you see in the press.
Simon Kuznets himself, the inventor of GDP as a metric sternly cautioned policymakers about treating it as a summary statistic.
> Food, housing, energy, healthcare, education. Real wage growth and job security measured against the prices and durations of those things. That’s what matters to people who don’t own significant real assets, those are the things that can get extremely bad (someone tries to murder the CEO of United Healthcare on the street bad) without showing up in the numbers you see in the press.
You're correct that they do matter and can get bad, but are not bad currently as regularly reported in the press.
Lower income households in the US did better than everyone else by these metrics coming out of COVID.
We need to differentiate living paycheck to paycheck out of necessity vs. choice. It might be surprising but there are a lot of people who choose to do so because why save when you could die tomorrow.
This is an under appreciated problem with inequality.
Ideally, others success should be net-positive/neutral for others.
In practice, inequality has these perverse impacts at least:
(Wealth is a spectrum. “Rich” and “non-rich” below stand in for any significant relative difference.)
1. The non-rich often put unrealistic pressure on themselves to keep up with wealthier lifestyles.
But beyond that self-inflicted wound:
2. The rich can afford outsized amounts of critical or survival type services and assets. Like land. Fresh vegetables. This imbalance raises the cost of meeting basic needs.
3. Markets respond to more rich by creating higher end services and products. Some have subjective value (fashion), some are luxuries (massages are beneficial, but not critical for most), but many are practical.
For instance, computing hardware, internet access options, expensive healthcare interventions, medications, private transport growth relative to public transport, etc.
4. And the rich also perversely put unrealistic social and employer pressures on the lifestyles of the non-rich. I.e. dress and personal technology shibboleths, etc.
—-
It is worth pointing out that the large role of real estate as a passive wealth compounder, tracking up with the product of increased overall economy and inequality growth, is perverse enough.
But the common arrangement of property taxes that tax both land (the limited and exclusionary asset) and its development (the non-exclusionary asset we should not be disincentivizing in any way), adds another perversity to land economics.
When a problem compounds already, it doesn’t need any more perverse incentives!
If property taxes were replaced by just land taxes (renormalized to be revenue neutral) it would:
1. increase the return on development, and
2. increase the costs of holding (absolutely or relatively) undeveloped land!
Which would both increase development (i.e. housing, multi-housing) and increase supply of (relatively) unused land.
This would be a net win for those who are impacted or concerned about inequality, but also those with a libertarian or capitalist viewpoint. As it removes a wealth tax. (Which isn’t just a double tax, but an unlimited repetitive tax on the same already taxed/unrealized non-exclusionary wealth!)
Whether rich or poor, improving one’s property with already taxed capital or self-supplied labor, would not perversely raise one’s taxes.
I mean, I don't have access to anyone's internal brain-state other than my own, obviously, but I have had at least one coworker outright tell me that this was their mentality. This coworker made roughly the same yuppie engineer salary I did, and didn't have any familial responsibility, and flatout told me that he didn't have much interest in saving money, he likes to spend it and live for the now.
Granted, I think that this is mostly a product of the fact that he was pretty young (22 at the time), and I haven't really talked to him in 11 years, so it's very likely that he doesn't do this anymore.
> a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck.
Is that not true in other economies? Was that not true at some (mythical?) point in the past? What number, specifically, would you like to see before you're willing to declare "The Economy is Good"?
Basically the point you made is an example of the Economics of Vibes. It's non-falsifiable and allows you to justify any position you want. We're about to start a global trade war, it seems, based on those vibes.
In point of fact household savings rate as a proportion of household income is not particularly low right now. In fact it had a huge spike during the pandemic (lots of assistance and nothing to buy, same thing that caused the inflation burp).
The average apartment in a moderate-cost area is 5833 per month? Where is that number coming from?
The average rent for an apartment in the United States is between $1,559 and $1,748 per month, depending on the source (google AI). This would be $21000 per year in rent.
> That means about 50% of the US can not afford a place to live.
No, at best the conclusion is that 50% of the US can not afford to own a home. But not owning a home != homelessness. Renting still exist. Roommates still exist. There's a house in my neighborhood that has 3 (El Salvadorian, I believe) families living inside of it, and they are contributing 3x income to make it work (this depends on zoning laws though).
> at best the conclusion is that 50% of the US can not afford to own a home.
More particularly, 50% of the single person households in the US. This does not apply to a couple unless they are aiming for the Leave it to Beaver dream of a stay-at-home wife.
The problem is that moderate cost area is of now has a lot better quality of life, with plenty of things in short driving distances, compared to what it was back when housing was "affordable".
You can go browse Zillow across US and find ~100k houses, which even at higher interest rates are affordable on a $60k household salary. Of course the quality of life is going to be much worse than what you normally know, but it would be similar to what your grandparents had when they bought the house.
> Apartment in a moderate-cost area is about $70,000-$100,000/year.
... in what sane world is that a "moderate-cost area"? $70k/yr is well over $5k/month, and looking right now at the prices in my metropolitan area, you have to pretty much get a combo of 3 bedroom, luxury, and city-center to get something that expensive. And even then, I'd consider this metropolitan area to be high cost, just not obscene cost like SF or NY.
> That means about 50% of the US can not afford a place to live.
And yet, they do. I don't think your numbers lead to your conclusion.
Being single and wanting to own your own home is going to be the closest situation to your conclusion. 50% of those folks being unable to achieve that dream sounds plausible.
The median rent is $1621. One bedroom and studio apartments will be on the lower end, and a $60K salary is likely to be sufficient.
For everyone who wants to obtain housing for themselves and a significant other, they have $120K to work with. Now the house looks achievable.
>50% of the population has enough cash savings for three months of expenses
The median amount of cash in bank account is $8k
The median US household networth is $193k.
Further, the wage increases in recent years have happened mostly at the lower end of the income scale, not at the top!
When polled, the US population is very happy about their own economic situation, yet still believes that we are in some sort of terrible economic downturn.
IMHO, the reason for this disconnect is housing. We haven't built enough, it's made people very unhappy, and restrictive zoning prevents fixing it. The housing theory of everything could even extend to the current political situation in South Korea...
Although, does that reflect in higher quality of life? Some statistics say no. The best quality of life is where there is good access to quality healthcare, education, clean air and water, culture, and low crime. When taking into account all the above, somewhat surprisingly, Austria and Switzerland come as top places to live. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_quality_of_life_indices
And the US is massive and diverse, with many states larger than those other countries. If you look at quality of life across US states, it’s likely the best states (think New Hampshire versus Mississippi) would outrank all those countries, since the average across all states ranked #3.
You're misreading that. The survey ranks USA as #3 overall, but #22 on quality of life. The overall ranking is mainly thanks to the agility (#1), power (#1), entrepreneurship (#2) and cultural influence (#3). The other categories aren't that good: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/united-states
The living paycheck to paycheck stat is meaningless. It generates headlines, because bad news wins, but if you dig in, even the surveys that ask about this reveal that a large percentage of people living paycheck to paycheck are very financially secure, both objectively, and according to their own assessment. I don't have time right now, but I'd encourage anyone reading this to go find the actual source for this stat and read their full report. Last time I looked, it was freely available.
Many of those people living paycheck to paycheck have a budget where they're saving or investing a significant amount of their money, and accordingly, money feels tight. This is the financially sound way to avoid lifestyle creep, but it doesn't mean you're in a precarious position. Or alternatively, they're paying for really expensive, but optional things like private schooling and expensive cars or vacations.
Obviously some people are struggling, but this paycheck-to-paycheck stat is not an accurate way to quantify that. It's best IMO to look at objective metrics like the poverty rate, or people's objective financial picture (available via surveys.)
The most common one is saying that someone is paycheck to paycheck but they're also funding their 401(k) up to company match, etc.
It's usually just the inverse of saying most people don't have ready cash savings laying around; because there's no need to when you have credit every which way all the time.
Much better to look at the debt load on people and how that changes over time. Someone who makes $5k a month and spends $3k on debt service and lives off $2k is going to feel much different from someone who makes the same $5k, lives on $2k, and spends $3k on candles or whatever (since they can stop buying candles anytime but you can't easily stop paying down debt).
When I hear "living paycheck to paycheck" I think it means your recurring expenses (rent, utilities, food, etc.) consume all your income every month and you have nothing left to save. No savings. No investments. No 401K. If you don't get your next paycheck you can't pay the rent.
I think your definition is completely reasonable, but it's not how people answer the question (again, based on reading the report, which has a lot more detail.)
> It's usually just the inverse of saying most people don't have ready cash savings laying around; because there's no need to when you have credit every which way all the time
This is quite a precarious situation to me. People should not need nor be encouraged to rely on debt to live life, especially month to month.
The default mode should be working people make enough to, if budgeted moderately well, can pay for everything plus save money away post tax[0]
Anything less and you’re only growing systemic issues over time
[0]: including tax exempt savings like 401Ks is ill-reflective of people’s ability to save money aside for emergencies and unexpected costs
That's exactly the point he's making. That exact slight of hand underpins all those "huge percent of population living paycheck to paycheck" headlines.
I love seeing this in those periodic ragebait articles about how a family earning 400k+ is "paycheck to paycheck" after maxing out their retirement accounts, paying for private schools and vacations, mortgage on a $2m house, car notes on two newer luxury cars, etc. etc.
"After long term saving and paying for my indulgent lifestyle, I just don't have anything left at the end of the month!"
Somewhat offtopic, but I call these articles "parading the idiot". Where a newspaper or other media outlet runs an article interviewing a person where the subject is clearly out of step with everyone else in their assumptions.
See also articles where a property investor complains about how hard they are doing financially because they have to sell one of their eighteen investment properties.
I find it pretty egregious that someone who is saving/investing a chunk of every paycheck could be considered to be "living paycheck-to-paycheck." I feel like the most obvious definition most of us would assume is that nearly 100% of your paycheck gets spent on goods and services, and/or bills and debts, before your next paycheck.
The Federal Reserve has pretty detailed studies on this that take a nuanced view of spending behavior. Households with no excess income after necessary expenses are in the 10-15% range. The methodology is designed to exclude the diverse scenarios under which having no apparent excess income is an artifact of lifestyle rather than an economic reality.
This is literally me. I live paycheck to paycheck but also have a six figure sum of money I can tap into if needed.
How I got here is living way below my means in my twenties, saving up tons of money, and nowadays living at my means while still maxing retirement. I also have almost all that saved money invested, which just grows the pot as it sits.
So basically I spend all of every paycheck, after retirement has been deducted, but if I lost my job I could maintain my current life with zero income for a few years before running dry.
That is not living paycheck to paycheck by any reasonable definition. If you could stop contributing to savings/retirement/investments and suddenly have a ton of additional disposable income, then it's not that.
>That is not living paycheck to paycheck by any reasonable definition
Well then now we know that the media will happily use unreasonable definitions to bolster stats for click bait stories and headlines.
People assume paycheck to paycheck means "Spending each paycheck entirely on absolute necessities to live" but the survey definition is "Do you save any money from your take home pay every pay period".
This is how you get people at every income level reporting they live paycheck to paycheck.
I think you really underestimate how much people spend on stuff that is a non-necessity. People at every income level fall prey to the “if I’ve got extra money in my account, guess that means I can spend it”. There are, 100%, people living paycheck to paycheck that make 200k because they’ve made some terrible life choices and have outrageous debt to service, essentially.
I know several people who spend 100% of their income, saving none of it. Not because they have poor saving habits but because they've already saved more than they'll likely ever need for a comfortable retirement.
At which point, it actually kind of makes sense to blow your entire income on lifestyle.
where is this implication from? to me living paycheck to paycheck means you are living THE LIFE to the fullest. no “savings” or any BS like that. you make $50k a month, spend it all - wait for next paycheck. paycheck to paycheck
In the context of economics and poverty, paycheck to paycheck is defined as having no ability to save because necessary spending is consuming the entire paycheck.
Necessary spending is food, utilities, clothes, rent. But not eating out, fancy housing is a nice neighborhood, designer clothes, etc.
> Many of those people living paycheck to paycheck have a budget where they're saving or investing a significant amount of their money, and accordingly, money feels tight.
I don’t understand. Isn’t everybody living paycheck-to-paycheck then?
From that article: "As Dogen puts it, they’re effectively “scraping by,” in part because they’re still living “paycheck-to-paycheck,” despite their generous salaries."
That's right: they're each making $250K/yr, and living paycheck-to-paycheck as they describe it.
Yes, of course, but that’s if you are eating out frequently, have a recent model year car payment, have a pretty loose leisure budget (or lack of), live in above average cost of housing, etc. Raising your spending to you means doesn’t make you living paycheck to paycheck. One can live in SF for less than 100k.
Something I wonder, along these lines, is whether we're measuring the right thing. For instance, does "thriving" depend on things like life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, quality of health care, pollution, crime, incarceration, traffic deaths, and so forth? The way I think about it, "economics" is supposed to study the quality of life, not just a few isolated numbers that happen to be in units of dollars.
Do any of our "rivals" have entire regions with the levels of poverty seen in places like Mississippi, southern Ohio, or northern Michigan? I grew up in an area with patches of poverty like that.
Indeed, this is exactly what I'm talking about, an article cherry picking one number. I haven't been to Mississippi, but I've been to other areas of deep poverty in the US. I don't think there are regions of France with poverty like that.
The article addresses this directly, arguing the point that the social safety net has a cost which is what is curtailing the economy in some respect:
For all its economic power, the US has the largest income inequality in the G7, coupled with the lowest life expectancy and the highest housing costs, according to the OECD. Market competition is limited and millions of workers endure unstable employment conditions.
Europe’s social safety net needs to be paid for, warned Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, in a speech in November. Boosting competitiveness is necessary for long-term prosperity, she argued: “Failure to do so could jeopardise our ability to generate the wealth needed to sustain our economic and social model.”
Objectively? Yes. People are living better than before the pandemic.
However, incessant propaganda works. Fox News and AM talk radio convinced people that the prices went up by like 10x and the country is on the brink of collapse.
If America isn't doing well, what does that make the rest of the world? An absolute metric isn't going to be objective, but from a financial and jobs perspective America certainly has it alot better. Which is what the article is about.
You're working harder perhaps, but many in other places have straight up no jobs or millions applying just for the most basic jobs. Many of those people would kill to get into America.
There's a lot of debate over the true state of the economy, but it seems that, one way or another, pessimism abounds.
Consider, the top voted comment on an article about how good the economy is a disagreement.
I wonder how many of the negative effects of an actual bad economy can also be caused by widespread pessimism? Is it better to have a bad economy filled with happy optimists, or a good economy filled with unhappy pessimists?
It’s tied to politics. If your team isn’t in power was just voted out then the economy sucks or is teetering on the brink of disaster. However, if your team is in power or just voted in then things are looking great or will turn around soon.
> It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck.
By every metric, the economy is strong.
A large portion of the households living "paycheck to paycheck" are either doing so by choice or don't understand what the term means and are ignoring things like retirement savings when they make that statement.
Article: "For all its economic power, the US has the largest income inequality in the G7, coupled with the lowest life expectancy and the highest housing costs, according to the OECD. Market competition is limited and millions of workers endure unstable employment conditions."
That's pretty stark. But the U.S. outperformance on GDP growth and productivity growth is very real over the last 5-15 years especialy and has been documented in numerous stories like this. The looming questions seem to be
1. can Europe maintain its social benefits and living standards with such anemic growth (that is, is the goal of more humane and equal society compatible with a robust economy)
2. can the U.S. preserve its competitiveness and overall GDP performance if it imposes more regulations/taxes designed to reduce income disparities, provide more social services, etc.
> 1. can Europe maintain its social benefits and living standards with such anemic growth (that is, is the goal of more humane and equal society compatible with a robust economy)
This is already being answered by reports like the one in the FT
> 2. can the U.S. preserve its competitiveness and overall GDP performance if it imposes more regulations/taxes designed to reduce income disparities, provide more social services, etc.
No, because it will turn the US into a country like all the ones mentioned in question 1
This is a good point. Aggregate GDP is definitely not the right measure for this, and even GDP per capita adjusted for inflation and PPP does not account for economic inequality.
Median household income adjusted for inflation and PPP would probably be the least bad option if we had to choose a single statistic:
It’s funny because right after Trump was elected there was an ft article about all the metrics that showed that poor people were doing worse in real terms. One ft author uses one index to prove one point another uses others to prove another point. I’ve noticed that divide in particular between ft standard sub (40/mo) and ft premium (80/mo)
How much must I pay to not get consistently bullshat?
That's true of course and an important part why everything is so polarized. Without getting too political I don't believe the current direction is sustainable and that the start of the down spiralling already has happened.
A handful of companies (Microsoft Google Amazon Meta) will end up taking all the gains from the AI revolution as well. Capital wins because they don’t have to work as hard or worry about risks or access to talent. The playing field is tilted deeply against all entrepreneurs and really anyone lacking capital. I say this as a pro capitalism person. Something will need to change to give everyone enough influence and power.
Everyone I know is doing well and looking forward to the next 4 years. Just look at the stock market, which anyone can invest in. I started back when I was making $4 an hour, now doing very well.
Not everyone can invest in the stock market… at least not in a way that is helpful. Sure, I might be able to put $20/mo in if I’m working poor and over a few years it will double if I’m lucky.
$4/he starting wage makes you around my parents age (50+) so I’m guessing you easily earn six figures now since you hang out on HN. The crowd here does not represent poor people very well (which is fine!) but you can’t extrapolate your experience to everyone. Yea the stock market is great, but it says nothing about the single mom working two jobs to put food on the table with no energy left to tinker with ETFs.
If anything it's easier now than ever to invest in stocks. Online trades, no commissions, and fractional shares. When I started I had to pay a broker to do the trades. And still against those odds somehow it worked.
I also dislike this narrative that if your economy isn't as good as the US then you're failing. And, well, that's exactly where the US wants your economy
I came across this new paper, INTEGER PARTITIONS DETECT THE PRIMES [1] from July, 2024, but I don't have enough knowledge to even read it. I wonder if an implementation of this method would provide any speed benefits compared to PRP.
The only democratic way for a foreign agent to meddle in another country's politics is by being elected.
Everything else is just bullshit.
What you are saying is that anyone can buy a media platform, whatever platform it is, and play 'arbiter' of truth? Because that's he is doing. He has no right to defy a judge's ruling. He's not a Brazilian citizen. He has no legal representation there. His company has no legal representation there.
His only standing is his ego, which is pretty fragile, given how much of a cry-baby he is.
Many people suffer from some sort of Musk derangement syndrome and put way too much focused on him to avoid discussing the facts of this case. Because they know the facts aren't on their side.
They make this to avoid discussing that the actions of the Brazilian Supreme Court were actually illegal. It's not him "playing arbiter of truth", you will find countless brazilian legal experts, such as Sebastião Coelho da Silva, saying that what the court has been doing in the last 4 or 5 years is totally illegal.
For instance, they have no power to open an investigation where they are the victim, the investigator, and judge, all in the same time and figure to go after random people around the country. Brazilian constitution doesn't allow prior censorship (which is what happens when you block someone's profile on social media, you block the things they would say in the future). The 8/1 rioters shouldn't been tried by the highest court because they have no legislative immunity, etc, etc. Crimes and more crimes.
Regardless of anything, refusing to obey those censorship orders coming from Brazilian Supreme Court were the morally right thing to do.
Who voted for these judges? Not a single person. Why do they get to ignore the laws put in place by our actual representatives?
Our constitution is ABSOLUTELY clear on this matter.
> Any and all censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden
1. The accounts that this judge is after were engaging in political speech.
2. A government official ordering these political accounts blocked and their political posts deleted matches the "any and all censorship of political nature" clause.
3. The order is therefore unconstitutional.
As you can see, it's a very simple argument. There should have never have been an order for Musk to defy to begin with.
Why do they keep getting away with it? How do you explain this?
Our representatives move to impeach this guy as demanded by the citizens they represent, then they back out at the last second. Their lawyers advised them to back out due to the risk of retaliation by the supreme court. How can you call this a democracy, when our elected representatives are clearly cowering in fear of an unelected judiciary?
Does that mean the US is also not a democracy because the supreme court judges are also appointed by the president, just like in Brazil?
> Our representatives move to impeach this guy as demanded by the citizens they represent, then they back out at the last second. Their lawyers advised them to back out due to the risk of retaliation by the supreme court. How can you call this a democracy, when our elected representatives are clearly cowering in fear of an unelected judiciary?
If that is true, he should definitely be removed. I definitely concede that he is overreaching in some decisions. I don't always agree with them. However, if a political actor says they are going to invade Planalto to overturn the government, that is an attack to democracy, and protecting the constitution is exactly the attribution of the supreme court.
Freedom of speech in Brazil, as far as I know, ends when you attack democracy. Democracy is the most valued thing in the constitution.
However, the noisy far right-wing in Brazil is very dramatic and will create arguments that are not falsifiable just to pretend they have an argument.
There is potential for that, yes. Fortunately the supreme court has not yet decided to ignore the other branches of government like the brazilian one has.
> Does that mean the US is also not a democracy because the supreme court judges are also appointed by the president, just like in Brazil?
Major SCOTUS decisions are often posted and debated here on HN. I've never seen a case where they monocratically violated the letter and the spirit of the law. Not once.
The judges there apparently respect the laws enacted by the elected representatives of the american people. This is evidence of a working democracy. So I don't have any reason to believe the USA is a dictatorship of the judiciary. I suppose it has the potential to become one but it sure as hell isn't one right now.
> I definitely concede that he is overreaching in some decisions. I don't always agree with them.
I'm happy we agree on at least that. Really. This matter is so polarized. It's been extremely difficult to find any common ground at all with my fellow brazilians.
> However, if a political actor says they are going to invade Planalto to overturn the government, that is an attack to democracy
The supreme court and electoral court have been violating the constitution since before the elections. I saw them disproportionally censor Bolsonaro and his supporters for "fake news".
Even that was a pitiful excuse. They censored people associating Lula with communism and socialism, for example. That's not even close to "fake news", the man is a self-admitted socialist. They censored people claiming he was a friend of the venezuelan dictator as "fake news", despite the fact he is clearly associated with him. They said it was "fake news" and we had to watch Lula roll out the red carpet for the guy months into his mandate. It was a nationwide gaslighting campaign.
So not only did they censor political speech which is already unconstitutional, the excuse they used was completely false too. And they got away with it.
I witnessed them censor a political documentary a priori. Before they even watched the thing, they decided it was "fake news" and blocked its publication. An obviously biased documentary whose contents only a fool would believe to begin with. Their censorship of it is one of the most notable facts in the history of our democracy. A priori censorship is something that hasn't been seen in this country since last century's military dictatorship. That was the moment I woke up and started paying attention to all this.
What are we supposed to do? Who are we supposed to turn to when the judiciary and the supreme court usurps all power? Who do we call upon when the guys supposed to enforce the constitution start violating it with complete impunity? Nobody does anything about it.
One answer to that is what happened on January 8th. These guys decided to turn to the brazilian military. They asked the military to bring order to this mess. Military said no. We all know the aftermath of it.
So I don't believe there was even an attempt at a coup. They did not try to seize power for themselves. It was just a standard protest that ended with vandalism, like most of the others. Had the military actually tried something, then it'd make sense to call it an attack on democracy, a coup attempt.
> protecting the constitution is exactly the attribution of the supreme court
I agree. I just don't believe they are doing that. They cannot protect the constitution by repeatedly violating it.
> Freedom of speech in Brazil, as far as I know, ends when you attack democracy. Democracy is the most valued thing in the constitution.
I believe it ends when someone picks up weapons and actually tries to seize power by force. That's the only moment where democracy is justified in defending itself. Not one second before.
The constitution even mentions that: paramilitary assembly is prohibited.
I have yet to find the article that says censorship of anti-democratic ideas is allowed. Those are all valid political positions as far as I know. And censorship of political positions is prohibited. There's nothing in there that says censorship of "fake news" is allowed either.
> However, the noisy far right-wing in Brazil is very dramatic and will create arguments that are not falsifiable just to pretend they have an argument.
Well, I am not really a representative of the brazilian right wing. I am often accused of being one but I'm not.
Do you disagree with the argument that I made above? It's not some prepared discourse. It's a good faith argument based on what I believe as a brazilian citizen, and was influenced by the many discussions I've engaged in about this topic here on HN.
I've never seen another brazilian refute it. I've had people argue those points with me by citing laws lesser than the constitution, by getting into pedantic arguments over the definition of censorship as if banning the brazilian right from social media and deleting their posts wasn't a clear case of it, by arguing about "isonomy" which is completely irrelevant, by straight up calling me a moron for presuming to do the judge's job as if the contradictions weren't there in plain sight for all to see. I've yet to see a single convincing argument that proves that what these judges are doing is not censorship.
It’s widely accepted as an international norm, dating back to at least to the agreement of the Monroe doctrine with the UK, and continuing to at least 2022 with respect to Paraguay.
This somewhat misses the point of my comment, tough. The post was written in English, so one should stick to how English represents millions.
Based on that, I can say `1.000.000` is equal to MM because Brazil uses `.` to separate groups of 3 digits, and `,` to separate integer and decimal parts.
My point is to stick to using the units the language you're writing on uses.
Btw, thanks for explaining the origin of MM! I definitely didn't know that.
How to forget one of the holy wars of natural languages, with half the world using it to mean "one million million", and the other half using it to mean "one thousand million".
Still less confusing than "mph" (I always read it as "meters per hour" and have to go back to correct myself).
I'm impressed with the range of some detectors.
Some lightnings in Japan are being picked up by detectors in the US' east coast, or detector in New Zealand picking up a lighting in North Africa.
It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck.
A handful of companies are thriving, but barely any of its employees.