What I don't get is how it used to be normal for a family of 4 to have a middle class income and a standard house with only one parent employed, where vacations were normal, and now decades later after productivity has more than doubled, that lifestyle is even harder to achieve.
I mean, I understand how that happened, it's that all productivity growth went to the top and stagnant wages meant people needed multiple jobs. The part I don't get is why people aren't mad at the rich and are instead mad at each other.
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
It's just really impressive how amazing a job the rich and powerful did to convince so many Americans that the problem was that people aren’t working hard enough and that lazy poor people are ruining it for everyone else. People on food stamps aren’t why you find it hard to live.
So many people are having a stressful time trying to "earn a living" because they just accept that living should be earned, and that national productivity growth shouldn't be shared equally and should instead flow only to a tiny few who deserve it.
But we all deserve our share.
Technology has advanced so much in 50 years that it takes so much less human effort to achieve the basics of food and housing than it did then. It should therefore be easier and require less work than it did then. Get mad at how it isn't easier, and demand your rightful dividend.
@scottsantens Kind of a rosy view of the past when gas was so cheap that everyone was literally burning diesel to heat their homes (which had almost no insulation) plus there was a huge influx of imported goods from countries that had child labour and sometimes outright slavery. Yeah, stuff was cheap back then for a lot of reasons, not all of them good. Lack of real wage growth is a problem, but we shouldnt pretend that the differences in buying power now vs previous decades is all due that one issue.
