I’ve been noticing a recurring sentiment among Americans - frustration and disillusionment with the economy. Despite having gone to school, earned a solid education, and worked hard, many feel they can’t get ahead or even come close to the standard of living their parents enjoyed.
I’m curious - is this experience unique to the United States, or do people in other countries share similar frustrations?
Do people in Europe, Australia, Canada, or elsewhere feel like they’re stuck in a rut, unable to achieve financial stability or mobility despite their best efforts?
Are there any countries or regions that seem to be doing things differently, where education and hard work can still lead to a comfortable life?
Let’s hear from our international community - what’s your experience with economic mobility (or lack thereof) in your country?"
At a very big picture scale, we’ve hit the point where the macro level benefit of extracting resources to drive economic and human population growth is less than the cost of such extraction and its associated pollution and other externalized costs, and the cost of providing the now very large population its standard of living.
It is now too costly to even maintain the real economy and real living standards as they are, thus everything becomes more expensive, more and more people fall into poverty, famines occur from food shortages/price hikes, more and more are killed or uprooted or financially devastated from more frequent and severe natural disasters.
Thats the latest update to the World 3 model, from ‘The Limits to Growth’, originally done by MIT back in the 1960s.
Recalibration23 is the latest revision.
Main difference is the old ‘pollution’ metric was just replaced with co2 level, which is much easier to measure accurately.
…
This is why everything is obscenely financialized.
Overwhelming financialization is a very good historical indicator that a civilization level collapse is about to occur, and it also coincides with an absurd wealth disparity, as financialization necessarily cannibalizes the remaining real economy, concentrates wealth, and makes the investment done by the smaller and smaller oligarch class less and less profitable and rational, chasing insane schemes and blowing up bubbles.
…
Here’s standard of living:
In 2050, average human standard of living will be roughly where it was in the Great Depression / WW2.
And about a billion people will have died, largely from famine/overbearing food costs, and natural disasters, intensified by global warming.
[noticing that almost all the projections fall off a cliff right about now]
Oh.
Oh no.
Okay, so, question: how much of this could be alleviated by changing how we do things? I.E. building dense apartments and walkable neighborhood commercial with good bike lanes and public transit instead of sprawled out single family home hellscapes?
Short answer (imo, beyond the scope of anything I cited in other posts):
Not much, not enough to meaningfully change any of the lines, no.
If we’d (as in the entire world) started doing that 20 years ago such that those massive and transformative processes would be complete now, it may have smoothed out those curves a bit.
Now? Starting now? Sorry, too expensive.
Why do you think the billionaires bought up all the farmland starting 5+ years ago?
They saw this coming.
Why do you think we are only building new houses in climate disaster zones now?
Because construction labor, material and land prices are too high anywhere that is remotely climate safe, and you can only make a profit if you make luxury housing.
… What we would need right now is a complete and total overthrow of worldwide capitalism.
Instead, we’re all turning fascist as dumb stupid idiots tend to when confused and scared.
Thanks, I hate it