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 Originally Posted by Renton
I think you mean 1970, but no matter. The deductions to be made are that regardless of facile comparisons of wages or costs of goods between the two points in time, it's clear that standards of living have been continually on the rise since then.
No, I meant 1910. But I could have used any year. The point is that we are discussing classes, and classes are relative to each other. So we can compare the middle class of whatever time, as it relates to the other classes, to the middle class of today, as it relates to other classes. Standard of living have generally been improving at a historically noticeable pace for thousands of years, and at a pace noticeable to a contemporary for a few centuries. But that has nothing to do with the present day contraction of the middle class. If you don't think that wealth disparity is an issue (which I'm pretty sure I know you don't) then go ahead and say it-- but you seem to be trying to mask it as something it's not.
Forgive the poor wording. The point is that high speed internet is a "need" that has emerged that people almost take for granted. People who are below the poverty line have high speed internet and smart phones. Again, this is a sign of a much greater standard of living than in prior decades.
Measuring inflation is really more art than science. Adjusted for inflation numbers are kind of meaningless when discussing these things. The important thing is how much quality of life does the average wage buy today in comparison to 1970. I think its pretty clear that it buys more overall. Certainly though its easy to find exceptions to this, such as energy.
I agree it is a sign of a higher standard of living-- but it is also requiring a higher monetery output to be competitive, and that becomes an interesting dynamic when coupled with incomes which have stagnated for decades.
Art, science, whatever you want to call it, it's a useful tool to analyze the situation, so long as you weigh its input properly. Tossing it out because it doesn't fit your narrative is disingenuous. I mean, how much more of a science is "standard of live?" And I am honestly asking that, and don't mean to rest my point on it.
I'm just pre-empting. Whenever we talk about things like this and ask "what can we do to remedy this?", then government can really be the only answer. The state is the only body that can swoop in and take resources by force to distribute them elsewhere it sees fit.
The huffington post is a progressive liberal media entity. An article like this is meant to inflame middle class people into supporting a liberal agenda, hating rich people or corporations, or embracing protectionism again in spite of all of the progress globalization has made.
We're not meant to come to the conclusion that maybe the solution is that there is no grand solution, no broad sweeping change we can make to the system to make it work.
Meh, you're consistently pushing the discussions in this direction. Whatever the author meant, the article does not explicitly say any such thing, d0zer never pushed that agenda, and taken at face value the article provides interesting information which is relative to the discussion.
Is government the only answer? If government is the only answer, is it actually an answer? Is it possible that any of this could be a cultural issue? Maybe it's something that could be solved by a shit in culture-- ushering in a new zeitgeist through a shift of values instead of policy. I really don't know, but none of these things will get discussed if we constantly and pre-preemptively devolve our socio-economic discourse into these poliicy-based dichotomies.
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