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?"
The rich don’t stay rich by letting other people join their club
We are reaching the limits of an “infinite growth” mindset. You can’t make money infinitely, which is why we are witness unprecedented amounts of shrinkflation, price gouging, and of course, enshitification. And housing prices.
The theory behind capitalism doesn’t require infinite growth. A society could have continual “profit” based on the use of renewable resources. The explanation for why we’re constantly expanding our exploitation of the planet is a little more complex than just an inherent trait of the economic system. That’s kind of a nasty oversimplification that people apply.
An old unattributed saying, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” Often attributed to Kenneth Boulding but there’s no real sources for that.
The only infinite growth I could think of is just bitcoin and shit. Just dilute gambling.
That’s not infinite. Bitcoin is just one of many participants in the wider currency market. The bet of people speculating on Bitcoin is that its market share in the market will continue to grow. So the absolute upper limit of its valuation is basically that of the global currency market. In more practical/realistic terms, it has technical constraints as-is that limit its use as a day-to-day currency, which limit it to a lower point, since other currencies have to be used for small transactions, and hence, have to take some other portion of the global currency market. And so on.
Not exactly gambling. Rather, the market is trying to anticipate and calculate these shifts in valuation. Individual participants may try to catch it early to get a good deal. Many will fail, including buying at a bad deal. People will get caught up in hype because it’s a novel invention as opposed to some same-for-same replacement. That’s just the price determination mechanism. Currency shifts, and market adjustments in general, are messy. Any time one currency dies, there’s a flight to others.
Disclaimer: I have zero Bitcoin. Also this is just explaining mechanisms, not justifying or supporting them.
I’m curious about the same things - which you won’t find in this thread. Apart from a couple people who actually tried to answer OP’s question it’s just typical blah-blah.
When the USSR broke up you had Russian cab drivers in NYC with PhDs. I worked with a woman programmer who had a PhD in condensed matter physics from Moscow State U.
American PhD here.
I’ve m only half-joking when I say I’m considering driving a cab somewhere in South America.
You’re only joking because I’m sure you haven’t set foot in South America. US is getting there but it’s still heaps of levels above when it gets to thieving and shooting cab drivers specifically.
Unless you’re Chilean, in case you’re more North American than South American kkkk
Yeah I did the smart thing and walked away from research.
Total dead end, Industry don’t care at all.
At some point our species is going to have to move beyond this rapacious zero-sum logic of “unsticking” economies and “getting ahead” and instead learn how to distribute all that wealth better.
Yup, we can’t continue forever with educated but low-level workers getting 3% raises when the CEO gets a 30% raise.
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
The world was experiencing unprecedented economic growth for decades in the run up to the 2008 crash. Sure there were some rocky periods but the general trend was upwards and even in the 70s where there were problems with inflation new technologies were improving people’s living standards all the time.
Now we have growth stagnating; raw materials and international trade becoming more expensive (existing sources becoming depleted, tarrifs); then finally technological gains are happening but for consumers. I’m not sure I’ve seen a big improvement since the original iPhone.
The killer thing I haven’t mentioned yet is overcentralisation of economies in major cities/hubs. If you want the best possible job then you probably need to move to a megacity like London, Paris, New York, Sydney… but then a shortage of new housing in these places has pushed prices into the stratosphere. You better hope you have an economically active partner who has also landed their dream job in megacity! Oh and the inheritance required for a deposit on a flat.
Within countries that last problem can be tackled with better industrial strategies to some extent. Maybe grants and subsidies to open say biotech labs in more affordable parts of the country. In theory since we have increasingly become service based economies, or producers of e-goods like digital copies of videogames, this should also be possible by doubling down on remote jobs as a viable mode of working and possibly offering tax breaks/financial incentives to move to less populated areas. Here in Scotland if you want to be a primary/elementary school teacher on a remote island you can command a salary of ~2x what you would get on the mainland as part of a scheme to entice teachers to live in remote communities.
It also happens in Asia, I can say that some of them are similar to what you said. In my country, many young people have a hard time finding a job even if they are university graduates. Necessities is getting more expensive.
There are also many people and households who are trapped in huge debts from online loans.
Many small businesses stuck or fail, only the business of the oligarchs can survive. and their business destroys small businesses and harms the people.
It’s social ossification, an inevitable part of the systemic cycle.
The people at the top have wealth to enable all the best opportunities go to their children and friends’ children.
So all the plebs are left struggling for scraps.
There are more children of mega-rich than mega rich, and even accounting for portion who flaunt off or abandon family path, than there are mega-top positions, so most of the second tier positions go to them too.
Then, of course, neoliberal policies have made things less equal so that the poorer you are you now need to work even harder and be even more exception than you did before.
Edit: am British. See it here, seen it over the pond and in (the PR of) China, too.
It’s very much the same in the UK and, from what I hear first hand, also in Germany, Australia and Canada
My rough take:
The industrial revolution never stopped, we are still very much on the trajectory that accelerated in the 18th/19th centuries.
The trend is to concentrate wealth in a production owning class. WWI and WWII were temporary disruptions to this. The post war consensus saw great national projects and investment happen at just the same time that mixed skill labour was in wide demand thanks to technology’s progress at that point. The baby boomers were advantaged by this and ended up with disproportionate ownership of land and production means.
The last 50 years has been a slow return to trend. With production slowly transitioning from manual labour to mental labour to fully automated labour. The freak occurrence that benefitted baby boomers has not repeated.
The trend will continue to devalue the work of most individuals. A small proportion will be able to leverage rapidly advancing technology and take a small stake in the monopoly of the 0.001%. The rest will progressively be priced out of elevating themselves into the middle class. The result being that there becomes a vast underclass characterised by renting, inability to start a family, and insecurity but just enough comfort to prevent rioting. There’ll be a vast range of skill within that class, however effort with make only a token difference to wealth.
One problem with your ending: They can’t stop taking, so they won’t stop short of where people will riot. The rich will never reach such an equilibrium state because one of those psychopaths has to be the emperor and others will always try and usurp the power.
Depends what it is you imagine they’re taking. There comes a point in wealth when you’re not really talking about monetary amounts or assets per se but raw power, measured in whatever abstract units you wish to use. The hyper wealthy care about political and cultural power (a battle very much underway and largely won). They don’t care so much whether the average family has $10 left at the end of the month (or $200 or -$50). The numbers become meaningless. What’s important to the hyperwealthy is that whatever that number is it not be able to purchase strategic land, production, or political power. (Elon wouldn’t care if every worker became a millionaire so long as bread now cost 3 million and property a billion.) Their power is felt in their exclusive access to limited resource (certain beach fronts for example, or a presidents time).
To that end there comes a point where they’re not interested in taking “money” any more, since they already entirely dominate that power dynamic. You could make the number whatever you like they’re still in control. Them “allowing” a very very modest improvement in some living standards doesn’t cost them anything but buys a relative amount of civil order, which is how I suspect this is likely to play out.
The pivot to far right politics over the last 20 years is part of this. When you are artificially keeping a large part of a nation on the brink, and you don’t want them to accrue traditional assets like land or wealth, then a potent replacement is to “pay” them in permission to hate.
History shows that this is a foolish course and it doesn’t last long. But perhaps a few “stable enough” decades is all these materialist hyper barons care about. Wealth and power is to be enjoyed now. There’s no god or heaven only power and the future is someone else’s problem…
You’re missing my point: The point where they stop chasing money, or power, or anything you want to call it, is when they have it ALL. They are not a homogeneous group. More than one want everything, and they will burn the world down to get it. The point where stopping is even forethought will be when the guillotines are at the door or humanity is wiped out.
Go look at housing prices vs incomes in the USA, then do the same for Canada. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on how people feel up here.
Would youcare to save everybody the trouble and spend a minute just tell us?
Housing is expensive in the USA. It’s even worse in Canada.
Sounds like this whole capitalism thing we were sold was a lie. And most countries adopted it or already had that system before the U.S. showed up. Capitalism requires infinite growth, so we artificial insert these boom bust cycles to make the rich richer, and everybody else can eat a dick.
Brazil has been stuck for a number of years now, at the very least since 2016. Then again, Brazil being kinda shitty overall is just the average experience, our inequality has always been among the worst ranked in the world
No opinion on this as I’m an American, but as evidence I’d point out that ruling parties all over the world have been removed from power.
Americans are indoctrinated that you have to work for someone else to live, that you have to have a lot of nice things to look successful, that certain jobs are down the chain of the hierarchy, and that there is a hierarchy at all. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires and all that.
