My sister gave me a $50 gift for christmas, and it brought tears to my eyes because she's a single mother making the federal minimum wage of $7.15/hr. That comes out to $290/wk, before taxes, if she's lucky and gets a full week's worth of hours. To earn that pittance, she is physically laboring and might have to work 7 days a week to get enough hours in the schedule.

It makes me feel like a douche every time I think about it. Me sitting there in my Aeron chair, eating free snacks while reading code. And making ~10x what she does. When I really think about it, from similar beginnings, only a relatively small number of key decisions separate our two economic outcomes.

I try to give generously to assuage my guilt. But I've found that there are limits to what can be given without stirring resentment, or provoking attempts at reciprocity. That's how this $50 gift came about... I bought some nice stuff for her kid, and she wanted to show her gratitude.

There is some strain and resentment in our relationship over our income differential, sure... especially when I want to complain that I'll never be able to afford a 1.4 million dollar house on the Peninsula because I only make 150k. It's just pointless to even bring that up to him because I know I will come off as an ass. However in some ways, he has it better than me. He and his wife bought a nice 4 bedroom rancher on a half-acre lot with an inground pool for 120k- which I will never ever be able to afford around here in my lifetime barring some unicorn ipo.

My cousin who lives in LA heard that and told me I couldn't rent somebody's closet in LA for $500 / month. With all of the remote work opportunities, it actually kinda blows my mind that more people don't move down this way and work remote. On sheer cost of living it would be like giving yourself a huge raise.

Over the last 2 years at my company the percentage of remote workers have increased dramatically. They all used to sit in cubes, but now they sit at home on the couch.

I live in a city of about 60k with a median household income of 47k. My cost of living is low too and I tell everyone I love where I live. I couldn't imagine having an income of 100k-150k and not being able to live a nice life and not being able to afford "the American Dream".

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/103-Baker-St-Cooperstown-N...

...looks pretty nice, with a good sized yard.

I'm simply at a loss for words...

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/12169-Findlay-St-Detroit-M...

...1029 sq. ft. for $1700. But if you are looking for real rock bottom prices, it is hard to beat $500:

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14421-Wilfred-St-Detroit-M...

...There are photos of the interior, and it looks like it is in a good neighborhood on Google Street View:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/14421+Wilfred+St,+Detroit,...

Call me impressed. I wonder what the closing costs are on a property like that.

No regrets. Thanks for sharing your space.

I moved here from Boston three years ago. I love taking advantage of the remote work environment, living in a lower cost area, and I feel Myrtle Beach is a gem, to have such low living cost, and big city amenities, due to all the summer tourists.

I was able to buy a detached single family home, 2400sqft for half the cost of my 1000 sqft Condo in Cambridge, MA - just outside Boston.

I maintain a list of remote job sites at http://LX.tc/positions - so that I can share with those I bump into, about the prospects of working remotely.

Been going down to Murrells Inlet/Garden City my whole life.

In the rest of the country, which is fairly sparse, you can find high standards of living, minus some of the extras you'll find in the rich, dense, coastal areas (extras usually in the form of various culture and activities). However, due to the lack of local demand, the prices are lower.

This creates hugely variable economic conditions on the order of the differences between London/Paris and Budapest.

Housing, like anywhere, dominates living expenses after taxes $30k/yr income looks more like $22k/yr. There are single bedroom apartments, not fantastic, but pretty nice, around where I live that are $2k+/mo. Now you have no money for food, transport, clothing, hobbies, etc. You can find cheaper places for around $1.5k+/mo (there are no housing options here under $1200) but that still leaves you pretty thin with $4k left to spread across the entire year for other necessities.

On the other hand, in Omaha, Nebraska, I found some comparable apartments at $500/mo. Which gives you a little more than $1k/mo for the rest of the year. You'll probably blow through half of that on food and half of that on car expenses (cheap housing in the U.S. implies almost no public transport options) and now you still have no money for savings or hobbies.

The median income in the U.S. is ~$54k/year (about the same as Europe but a hair higher). But that also means children, a couple income earners and so on.

Note that the average local more or less intentionally can't afford the time or money to visit the tourist traps. If you are not rich and want to visit the museums and galleries of Chicago, or attend a Bears game at the stadium, or a music concert, you can't live in Chicago because then you'd be too poor, you have to live elsewhere and visit.

What dense, expensive, low standard of living areas provide, is extremely dense employment. No matter how unique your job is, there's dozens to thousands of positions within walking distance of your current employer. In the more rural areas you'll see a lot more sinecure behavior, retired in place, people who've worked the same place for 20 years, nobody (such as yourself) gets promoted because the company doesn't grow and nobody quits, etc. Long term relationships are comfortable and lower stress on average, yet also less exciting and less adventurous, just like with love life.

There are also minor behavior constraints. If there's 50 companies all doing the same thing in a big city, then stack ranking basically wastes a lot of HR money pointlessly shuffling people every year, but at least its possible, whereas in a rural area especially if its a company town, stack ranking would rapidly destroy the company because the applicant pool is too small to sustain bad behavior. As a gross generalization people tend to spend far less time commuting in rural areas than urban, but the rural commute has more (high speed) miles so it is more expensive, in the city a twice a day rush hour commute might waste more than two hours of precious life per day, but at least its short therefore cheap, whereas in the country it'll be a comparatively lightning fast 30 minutes each way, but at 80 MPH and 50 cents per mile, that'll be an expensive 40 mile daily commute. City people are amazed how much rural people spend on their commute, rural people are amazed how much time city people spend on their commute.

Ah, but that's an American perspective. In Britain museums and art galleries are generally free, for exactly this reason.

However, the free days are often during the weekdays and I think during work hours, so lots of working people can't really take advantage of them very often.

Yes I know Dublin isn't a suburb of London or whatever, but culturally its not that far away.

Ireland's economy and cultural sector is distinct from the UK's and much smaller. The Guinness Brewery and Book of Kells are really exceptional cases which cater to wealthy international tourists. They have little to do with local cultural life.

PS: You can actually just flat out save 1 million by mid 30's working for big co.

Yep, if you're serious about saving, this is entirely doable. I'm not at all on track for this because I'm not dedicated enough. But when I lived and worked in the bay, I knew a couple of guys who saved >50% of their take-home every year. They maxed out their 401Ks in the first few months and then redirected the money to other savings. Someone earning $100K before taxes can absolutely save a million in cash by saving aggressively for a decade and a half.

Hell, my roommate in grad school earned $30K/year and managed to save $10K one year, despite buying a (used) car. This was the result of cheap cost of living and generally just being really frugal.

This is true for Wisconsin also. I think OP is hitting the right point that many states easily allow you to live comfortably at around 30k p.a. (after taxes). It depends a lot on whether you have a family or not, party a lot or not, materialistic in general or not.

>cheap housing in the U.S. implies almost no public transport options

I am not a citizen but this isn't true for Milwaukee where I have been living for almost 2 years now. I have not needed a car because bus service is awesome and Uber (or Lyft) help me out other times. It also helps if bike tracks are good in your city, so that's another factor to lookout for.

Furthermore, having money to buy unnecessary stuff for your hobbies is not the metric to go by. The more important metric is about what you're able to save. Important questions are:

* Are you saving enough money to ensure a comfortable retirement?

* Are you saving enough money to buy your children (assuming you have/will have them) a decent education?

* Are you saving enough money to cover medical expenses later in life?

* Are you able to set aside an emergency fund?

If the answer to any of those questions is "no", then you should probably be concerned.

[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-tester-salary-SR...

If I´m not mistaken, Finland has free healthcare, education and generous welfare system (that you said you benefited from, as you should), all of these should be taken into account when making comparisons, since they factor in the taxes companies have to pay for hiring people.

That said, it still seems a bit low for Finland, but ok for a recent graduate.

Other sources aren't nearly as helpful, but they put me somewhere in the middle of all people (or something).

I'm sure some people earn more, especially closer to Helsinki, but currently I'm content with my earnings.

So don't be surprised we worry about money.

I was working at a video game publisher at the time and we tried to take advantage of it, being an American company but with roots in Japan, but there was some cultural and communication issues that helped lead to products that didn't sell too great and negated all benefits of cheaper development in the first place.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of those companies are still struggling today.

To a first approximation, how much house does your $30k income buy/rent you where you live?

(Even within the UK, I went from "choice of buying 2 bed flat or renting a 3 bed one" to "4 bed detached house" at the same salary by moving further away from London).

Cost of living varies a lot, but overall Americans are pretty rich in comparison to most Europeans (in the sense of being able to afford more imported Apple products made with child labor). Our median income is 35% higher than Germany and 50% higher than Finland. The flip side of that is that there is less of a safety net and having less money here is a lot harder. For example, our cheap urban neighborhoods are far more dangerous than comparable neighborhoods in most European countries.

It really is. However in Silicon Valley cost of living is so expensive that earning 100k/year still makes you relatively not all that better off.

Where I live most of senior software engineers make around 30k/year with higher cost of living than in the US (excepting hotspots such as SV/SF/NY/...).

People who have spent their whole lives in places like California have no meaningful perspective. You get millionaires crying due to their "poverty".

Its if you have > 1 mill in liquid assets that you are a millionaire.

If you make six figures and are "house poor", it means you're either bad at making financial decisions or you feel the house is worth the sacrifices. Either way you aren't poor and shouldn't feel poor.

I am not poor, but I am not rich enough to get access to 1MM$ mortgages.

There is a difference between a bachelor pad in Bratislava Slovakia and a suite in Trump Tower - yet both are merely "appartments".

Please stop the ridiculousness of blaming "poor" people for the recent housing collapse.

http://thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-g...

If you think software developers in SV have it bad, imagine how it must be for cleaners and food service workers in the same areas.

This is what bothers me about SV devs bemoaning how high the cost of living is. The self absorption is really offputting. Oh, you can't afford a house in Palo Alto? How sad for you. The guy cleaning your table probably commutes for an hour on BART and still spends the majority of his money on rent.

I lived in the bay area for a while. I get that housing is absurdly expensive, to the point that six figures doesn't feel like a lot. It is a lot, though. Saying things like "six figures isn't really much money" is just tone deaf. You aren't poor on six figures.

On the downside, the state is economically depressed and is probably never going to get better. NAFTA plus the decimation of american car manufacturing really fucked them. My family have jobs but they don't pay well (I've bought groceries for a sibling) and it's not likely they will ever be paid even $50k/year -- enough to own a modest home, buy a car every 10 years, pay bills, and have savings -- in a relatively stable job. My brother similarly can't leave because of a joint custody agreement.

Also on the downside, these wages make it impossible to ever really retire. You can't save for retirement if you area barely making ends meet. I don't know anyone working a low wage job that looks forward to doing the same job until they die.

You can too. Buy it now, and leave it. Once you are done with Silicon Valley madness you can always go back and settle there(May be even retire?).

("Dirty Santa" is where everyone brings one gift -- we do $10 -- and then you play a game where you either open a random gift from the pile or steal someone's opened gift. It's pretty fun. To me it's more fun than "real" christmas gifting...)

Edit: Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant_gift_exchange

Because my dad became a doctor he was able to put me and 5 of my cousins through college. He makes the original decision and my entire family is completely different today.

Granted, we wouldn't know the difference.

Not just key, those are life altering decisions. I still remember my friends who chose civil/mechanical engineering over CS'ish fields(Electronic, IT, Computer science) because they wanted a better college, than a better course. I remember friends and cousins who chose to go into fields like literature/arts. I remember kids in my school who dropped out because their father's business was good enough. Most of them aren't doing good. But back then they justified their decision on all sorts of grounds, yet they didn't have to make them at all.

At each step it felt like I was getting lonelier along the way. It was tough, but it was worth it.

People make stupid decision and they make them for no rational reasons at all.

Here is another hint, your sister and you are probably even now making small decisions over time which will make you 10x worth more than her, another 15-20 years from now.

Small decision add up to big things. Especially the kind of decisions which can change the direction of your life.

Incremental money at the lower end is worth way more. Inequality is the problem.

How do you reconcile this with the claim that inequality is the problem?

If you take a long look at that same graph [3], productivity has climbed, dramatically. Perhaps the depression of wages was caused by almost doubling the workforce, adding women.

Eh, it's probably not that big of a deal. that wsj article pointed out it's really just young men without much education that are taking the hit. I really doubt having millions of young, broke, easily persuaded males will cause much of a problem. Historically, that's always worked out just fine

Less snarkily, economists from Greenspan to Krugman have said this is something that needs to be looked at. It's an indicator of something being not right. It's clear you have an economic model in mind. It's the job of the market to push that pay edge as hard as possible, get as much productivity for as little pay as possible. Have you considered that the market might push so hard that your economic model doesn't apply?

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/07/06/just-how-stagnant-...

[2] http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/

[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Producti...

Everyone getting richer is not an accurate description of reality.

The more you already have of something the less it's worth to you, that goes for almost everything including money in this case.

It's a real shame, because it is literally impossible to solve a problem you deliberately misunderstand. That's humans for you though.

Note that the article assumes poor white people all have salaried jobs with great medical insurance plans, or at least get sick pay. Of course they don't.

Therefore the article doesn't understand that lots of people fall into the trap of not fixing something when its small, and instead end up lowering the average lifespan.

Look at, say, alcohol addiction. Lack of medical coverage means if you got treatment your whole family would get the economic death penalty via direct and indirect costs, ruining all their lives, or you can auger in and ruin just yours. Either way, all outcomes of addiction are decreasing average life span.

Besides pay one of the largest burdens the poor face are all the government fees and indirect taxes that most of us don't notice in our daily lives. That twenty dollar tag fee renewal to me is nothing, but if you have to have a car and aren't clearing much twenty bucks can mean beans and rice.

Government already has the ability to track all fees paid it directly and can make assumptions about indirect fees so that the working poor; far different from the non working poor; can be relieved of some of the burden.

The only other option for solving inequality as many bemoan is to take from those earning so much so they really don't see the point and eventually everyone ends up poorer.

As well as focussing our discussion on economic equality and social justice, we can also approach the problem from a perspective of enlightened self-interest.

Widely distributed economic equality implies a greater ability to spend, and a greater ability to borrow, and a greater ability to create wealth in aggregate.

A wider distribution of wealth, on average, yields greater wealth overall.

This doesn't imply equality -- just a distribution of wealth that is closer to a Normal/Gaussian distribution, with less of it's "energy" disappearing off into the upper tail of the wealthy -- a tail which is necessarily inefficient due to its' bandwidth constraints and limited decision making capacity.

Let me suggest one of those data-driven analyses you like: for a set of equal-population regions or some such (ideally not just countries, although that might be the only way data is available), plot a happiness measure against mean wealth (income might be easier to get figures for) and Gini coefficient, and do a linear regression or similar. That should give a formula for how efficient wealth redistribution policies need to be (i.e. how much they need to lower the Gini per dollar-per-capita expended[1]) to be worthwhile in terms of increasing overall happiness.

[1] Of course actually redistributed dollars aren't expended and don't change average wealth at all. But the redistribution programme would involve a certain amount of labour that could otherwise be used productively being redirected to administration, court battles, police etc. and the value of that labour is expended.

Or in this case, would you recognize that correlation isn't causation?

Yes, although surely segregation just moves people around and can't change the average percentage, and so the net effect would always be zero.

> Or in this case, would you recognize that correlation isn't causation?

Do you think the causal factors are different then? I think inequality directly causes unhappiness in and of itself. That matches my subjective experience and the rhetoric I hear from many others.

Inflation is a separate problem.

Back in the real world however, the relative price/value/production of things is not a separate problem...and since I'm guessing most people's objections to inequality is not its effects in some hypothetical world where all concepts are independent, but in the real world where they all connected, I'm not sure hypotheticals of this nature are often that useful...

If you want to claim that inequality somehow causes poverty (and poverty is the real problem), make that case.

> Inflation is a separate problem

It's not just inflation: supply/demand dynamics will be changed across income levels. For example bidding wars might cause rentals to go up, and the mother will be outbid (see: gentrification or recent news on San Franciso rents)

But I've been thinking about how much money I really need. I could have indulged in some expensive hobbies, but I can also get by with lesser equipment and practice the same hobbies, as long as I don't obsess over how "bad" that equipment is. And there are a lot of hobbies that either cost little to maintain, or that benefits other people. So there seems to be a lot of potential for reducing spending on oneself ones immediates and funneling some of it elsewhere (either through money, labour or time).

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - Ronald Wright

Americans are just going to have to get over themselves and figure out how to cooperate with their peers. We will take any opportunity to lash out at the ones we love. Dude's wife left him after he lost a job, he must not have been a very likable person.

Most everywhere else in the world, living conditions have approximately tripled. People with nothing hold on to what they have. The US is the richest nation in the world, lots of people born here never really wanted for anything. So they fritter away things they really should hold on to, like a rich idiot jonesing for "self-actualization".

Fuck the unions, we don't need 'em. Fuck that bitch wife of mine, I have Facebook and Tinder. I'll drink and smoke weed every day, that's what keeps me sane. These are people that need Sanders but will vote Trump.

These people are not middle class. They don't have middle class values or sensibilities. They're lower-class Americans that rode the success of the 70s-90s up to a degree of stability but never built a real life out of it, frittering away the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity they had.

You can't tailor policy to them with a prayer of allowing them to maintain their lifestyle. That lifestyle was predicated on a boom time and the party is now over. Unless you want to directly subsidize it, it's gone. You can't bring unions back because they won't join them, it's why the unions left in the first place. All you can do is alleviate some of the symptoms.

The community here are among the most understanding and generous people I've ever met, even amongst other devs.

I'm sorry, but the people I'm referring to, would not know what to do with that kind of generosity if it was offered to them on a plate. I know these people well, I sympathize with them at the bar, I send them money when they're in jail, and again when they get out. They want self-respect but are too hard-headed to actually work well with others. You have to check your tendency to give because it's like pouring money down the drain.

A homeless guy is happy with $20. The American "middle" class wouldn't be satisfied with thousands.

While the tone is harsh - he has a point on voting against their own interests. I think a similar argument for developer is already being made on HN, concerning taking a pay cut in exchange of worthless common stock. I see no need to sugar-coat calling out poor decision making in any sphere.

You can't help someone who consistently acts against their own best interests. At least, not the way you want to help them. All you can do is try to be understanding and work to keep the worst outcomes from happening.

We want a policy solution? We could fund more soup kitchens. We help the poor with government programs because the poor are desperate enough to actually use the programs. What are you going to do for the middle class? They're entirely too proud for handouts, but that's really the only thing government can do.

They won't even go to church, the quintessential middle-class charity.

You could always look to the rest of the developed world which doesn't seem to have quite the same issues

If all the software guys going through a party now, make the same mistakes they will end up with the same problems.

I'm not sure what this is considered harsh. You end up the consequences of your actions, is this concept really that hard to understand?

We need to create dignified, repeatable and reasonable paths out of misery for those people. Right now, I don't see many that exist. Those who peddle and profit off of peoples resentment and fear are reigning over them, but I don't see many people offering alternatives.

> it's why the unions left in the first place

If it was that simple, why are antilabor and unionization laws passed or pushed upon areas that allow freedom of assembly?

Many physical laborers recognize the importance of unions and are members.

If labor had a way to demand a portion of the productivity gains that went to the rich over the past ~40 years, not much would have changed in terms of lifestyle for the former middle class.

This is more or less the argument Trump fans make when they argue for a border wall, tougher immigration laws, cracking down on Chinese trade, and other protectionist measures.

Wishing other people were smarter (like us!) is a terrible thought process and very closed-minded. It's part of the reason partisans talk about each other instead of with each other.

Many of us who advocate for less inequality are advocating for changing the political decision behind the distribution of our wealth increase. For example, had median income, base year 1979, paced productivity, it would have gone from ~50k to ~90k (real). It actually went from ~49k to ... ~54k.

The issue is if you've tasted riches for a while, its hard to wash away the feeling that you are some how special and entitled to money, regardless of the choices, decisions and the work you do in your life.

Upgrades to a higher lifestyle is easy, downgrades are tougher, painful and emotionally taxing to a lot of people.

Never upgrade if you can't sustain.

What did you think McCarthyism was all about? Or Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers?

Or are the ideals something America's white working class is leaving behind? Such as, belonging in religion with compassionate & authentic people; as people no longer believe in religion and the ones who still do are less compassionate and less authentic? Or, is it to be in an marriage with a partner who you can trust will stay with you through thick and thin, until death; as society thinks a marriage where one partner is unhappy should end in divorce, because society thinks that will be better for the children than to be in a unhappy marriage? Or is it to have children who you can trust will take care of you when you grow old; as society says children have the right to do whatever they choose to do and should not be burdened with the responsibility of taking care of their parents, because that's the government's obligation?

Are America's white working class ideals in front of them, or behind them?

I suggest when as a collective, they finally have clarity to see what they really do want, rather than what other people say they should be wanting, they will move towards their ideals, instead of away from them, and then things will get "better" all on their own.

I think of my grandparents and how they lived their lives. My mom's dad was a NYC Sanitation worker, among other things. They lived frugally and eventually had a small summer cottage in the country. He had an 8th grade education, because his family in Ireland couldn't afford more. Yet he taught himself calculus up to the calc 2 level. That whole cohort of grandparents, grand uncles and aunts had a healthy disrespect for wealth. They had pride in their work, family & their church.

My dad's dad was a very successful pub owner in Brookyn, who essentially lost it all when the city went to pot in the 70s and his clientele vaporized or went to Jersey. But he wasn't a bitter man, he was a guy who lit up a room and found joy in all sorts of things -- he was a bike messenger in his 60s, which to my young ears was probably the most important job on earth. Family, community and friends are values that I think about when I think of him -- a man who lived through a lot of tragedy beyond the scope of this little post.

Misery and despair isn't a racial issue or even a poverty issue. We created a society where passive entertainment degraded the social fabric, (read "Bowling Alone") and now we're in the process of smashing ("disrupting") society and robbing people of their purpose.

That pretty much fits to a T what has been done historically to many segments of black and Hispanic society. So why should we be surprised at the manifestation of misery and desperation from discarded white people?

Some people didn't lose religion, but replaced it with something with equal devotion. You can see many of the same behaviors (including the negative ones) with people and their zealous appreciation for political parties, sports teams, social justice, environmental causes, etc. The same things that were wrong about religion were just as wrong here, but people struggle to see the real problems and replace the void properly with positive things.

While this is true to an extent, I wonder how much it was because the morals and beliefs pushed by religion seemed ridiculous compared to morals and beliefs promoted by the entertainment industry. You know, the the 'do whatever, fuck whoever', focusing just on the positive side and ignoring the negative side - painting the picture that in the worst case, you'll be a famous person (celebrity dramas).

Now it's easy to fill every minute with niche activity, like futzing around on HN. Our ability to communicate globally with friends and strangers has kneecapped our local communications (who knows a neighbor anymore). So we're suspicious of neighbors and are intimate with strangers. It's cool and amazing, but it has significant implications.

I'm not sure how you do that without some sort of "religion" (loosely defined to encompass environmentalism, scientism, salvation-through-politics, hedonism, etc.).

Sometimes I think the broader culture seems to be stripping the meaning out of life, convincing us that we are no more than hedonic production/consumption machines.

The breakdown of the family (and not simply the household, but the larger extended family), the loss of non-state civic institutions and death of churches are either a cause or an effect, but its not clear which.

And to me, there are not obvious solutions.

Then try to do things that are non-hedonistic and/or non-consumeristic (not sure if there's such a word)... Yeah, it's a LOT harder than it sounds, but that's the least we can do IMHO

and keep your family and/or friends together, and always try to leave a good image in their eye

It doesn't have to be church that brings people together, and there are other communities that have church like qualities such as car clubs, user groups, etc.

What we do lack is a church-alternative meetup for the masses that forge a community together. The closest we probably have is reddit. Just before the technological age, communities were brought together for survival, but now that we really don't even need each other for survival e.g. more efficient to hunt/build together, it seems that communities are decaying away.

I've found it interesting that in the immigrant communities, religion is a pretext for bringing a single ethnicity together for people to form relationships and business partnerships. It does seem that religion has a certain staying power only if to purely provide community under the guise of spreading a "good" morals.

Participation in social activities requires time--the presupposition that you aren't working two jobs to make ends meet.

You need to think much more basic than that: Success is having a savings account, a roof over your head in a safe stable location so the kids can stay in the same school, reliable transportation, and a job that provides enough income for all of the above.

As a European I am shocked and appalled at the jobs members of the American working class work. Here no one is allowed to work more than 38 hours per week or have less than five weeks of paid vacation, at a minimum hourly rate of about five dollars after tax.

I am not comparing the two countries which are obviously very different in many ways, except to say that poor people in America are absolutely decrepit, which flies in the face of our image of America as a developed nation.

US federal minimum wage is $7.25 (and higher in many states), with income tax being functionally negative at low incomes. You could adjust downward by 10% to account for the five weeks of paid leave but that still gets you $6.50/hr.

Give it a few years.

You are almost there...

I think it's a fair measure of success to say that a successful person owns a house, has significant savings and a decent job. Perhaps a somewhat superficial success.

With this perspective, "success" can be better than average, which is what it is a lot of the times - most lotto players thinks winning the lotto is "success", and winning the lotto is by definition to achieve a financial outcome that is above the average of all financial outcomes that can occur from playing the lotto.

Can't feel safe, or the higher levels, if you don't have the money for food or medical care, etc.

Without a job you lose food, shelter, and medical care. Worry about those things first, look up Maslow, etc.

Is that the ideal situation? Will finding this man a job solve his problems?

Applies just as much to everyone as it does to whites or the working class, and statistically the black working class has it worse.

I think most people have been convinced not to try to make that happen.

The article touches on the breakdown of other social support as well. Marriage for example. And yet doesn't touch on why this might be. I have a son and two daughters. I have told my daughters that they must get married, and my son that he should definitely not. Why? Because divorce laws are so anti-male that nowadays it makes no sense for a man to marry. (And yes, I cynically want my daughters to gain this protection).

In the UK there used to be a massive culture of socialising in "pubs" (public houses, or "bars"). Legislative changes ranging from allowing the 24 hour sale of cheap alcohol in supermarkets coupled with anti-smoking legislation that makes it illegal to smoke inside pubs have driven away a large chunk of that trade. I am a non-smoker but would prefer an open pub that allows smoking than no pub at all. This is important because pubs are also traditionally where different social classes meet and mingle as equals as well as where young people used to learn to drink responsibly under the watchful eye of the landlord and older drinkers - now they are likely to get totally smashed on alco-pops out of sight.

Then there's the impact of mass immigration on social housing and the resultant disruption of traditional communities.

The traditional working classes (my background) are already under assault even before we add in the coming tide of job losses through automation. These are all good reasons for supporting a move to a Basic Citizen's Income as soon as possible.

Not so sure about your view on marriage, though. Are you saying your son shouldn't marry because, if he finds a girlfriend and has children, marriage would disadvantage him should they ever divorce?

If you are married you seem to lose all your rights in the event of a break-up. Stay single and although you have to pay financial support, you will at least keep your house and belongings.

One of my friends had had to put up with a concerted campaign of abuse by his ex-wife. She got him arrested and held over night on false allegations, and whilst he was being held emptied his bank accounts, stripped his home of all movable possessions and even telephoned where we work making all kinds of untrue allegations in an attempt to get him sacked. It gets worse, but I think you get the picture.

I think visitation rights are genuinely an area where men have it worse. That said, I know plenty of women who didn't do well out of divorce. My mother was divorced for much of my childhood, and so were many of her friends. Several of the ex-husbands fiddled their income such that they paid minimal support while having enough money to go gallivanting around the world.

Thanks for sharing, in any case. It's all food for thought -- and clearly, something needs to be done about visitation rights.

I think one of the reasons I have a successful marriage is that when we first got together we had absolutely nothing and were just struggling to survive. Everything we achieved has been an improvement that we have done together.

Too many people nowadays seem to expect perfection from Day One and when that doesn't happen they take the easy way out by walking away.

I find it interesting that there is a negative correlation between having a honeymoon and having a successful marriage. People get married with an enormous party and then go on the holiday of a lifetime. They come back and it's all downhill from that point.

By contrast we had a 2-day coach mini-break to Scotland.

I was Best Man (and my wife Matron of Honour) for our closest friends. Their honeymoon was three nights in a tent on the East Coast (of England).

Another friend went into debt having a massive holiday in the Maldives, (against my advice - I was his Best Man also). He is now divorced. Compare and contrast.

I'm not English, but from my (lefty, somewhat uninformed) point of view - wasn't it Maggie Thatcher who "wrecked worker solidarity in private industry"? Or at least wasn't the downfall of unions around her time?

Aside: I have a colleague from Liverpool, let's just say he wasn't distraught upon learning the news of her passing.

Britain was the "sick man of Europe" during the 70s, we got bailed out by the IMF in 1976 - unions gave us the Winter of Discontent. Far too many confrontational unions protected Spanish Practices and demanded unjustifiable pay increases which bankrupted companies - not to mention earned a dire reputation for quality. I see a lot more "worker solidarity" in things like German work councils than 70s British trade unions, they didn't seem to have any concept of creating a sustainable business and ultimately wanted everything nationalised in order to separate pay from profits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Place_of_Strife

So, instead of the Labour Party dealing with the problem it ended up being Thatcher's Conservative Party.

Let's just say, one extreme to the other.

I'm actually a member of a fraternal organization (like the masons) where exactly this kind of social mingling happens. It is fantastic.

Anyone looking for more social support, consider joining one of these clubs (if you have time, which I know is a scarce commodity). They are desperate for new members, and often own assets/property.

I've been living in England for 16 years (after several long trips over the previous 15); I've seen plenty of people getting smashed in pubs as well as in clubs, never "out of sight" from anyone.

Beer consumption has gone down because of shifting consumer taste (alcopops didn't even exist in your '70s workers' paradise). The smoking ban absolutely did hit traditional pubs, basically turning them into waiter-less restaurants, but to be fair they were already being hit hard by chain consolidation and shifting consumer habits.

Supermarket sales of alcohol have gone up not because of opening times, but because of 1) price and 2) supermarkets getting bigger and less 'local', which means the woman at the till doesn't know you and will likely not stare at you like you're a child molester when you buy three six-packs (as it used to happen with local coops even in the early '90s).

Regarding the impact of immigration on "social housing" -- that's nothing compared to the impact of "right to buy" schemes. Traditional communities were disrupted because families bought out their council houses and flipped them on the market to cash in and move out. They didn't like living in working-class council-build areas, so they moved out and left those areas to the next wave of indigents. In fact, "social housing" is disappearing as a concept, and soon it won't matter who is or is not in a council house, because there won't be any council house left.

The hard truth is that the working class is made of individuals, who make individualistic choices. People like cheap Tescos, nice houses, and not getting lung cancer because they work in a pub. There is no need to romanticize the past.

I was referring to traditional local pubs, not the town-centre "vertical drinking establishments" which replaced them.

"Right-to-buy" schemes weren't the problem - my in-laws live in an ex-Council House which they bought. This was actually a good thing in that one of the problems with large out-of-town Council Estates was that they ended up containing a monoculture lacking in good visible role models for the children growing up on them. Private purchases on those estates improved that situation.

The problem wasn't "Right to Buy", it was "Right to Build" - Councils should have been allowed (and encouraged) to use the money raised from Sales to build replacement housing.

I find it interesting that you describe my pointing out mistakes that have been made as "romanticising the past". On the contrary, if you want to improve things then the very first thing you have to acknowledge is when and where things have gone wrong.

I think a good assumption is this separation was and is a basicly unavoidable result of technology and economics, not any policy or set of policies. We wrestle not with flesh and blood:http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-fle...

But as it turns out, almost all of those peasants were capable of learning to read, doing algebra, engaging in abstract reasoning, labor coordination, and operating some fairly complex machinery. Many of them were even capable of becoming software engineers. We know this, because pretty much all of us came from them, and if we can do it, they could've done it, given the proper environment. Someone advancing your argument 1000, 100, or even 50 years ago would've wrong, what makes your argument different?

Of course we shouldn't expect equal outcomes from all people, but to suggest that we've now reached such a level of access and fairness in society that everyone still at the bottom can't possibly be elevated any further seems... unintelligent.

More importantly your two positions are not excludable. It is possible that the elite of the past were wrong and some segment of the population is incapable of being raised any higher. I personally doubt this is the case, but it has not been ruled out.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Alms

I also suspect that we are a long way off that, hell who knows what the future looks like, we could end up with neural implants that allow everyone to boost their intelligence/recall.

I'm not stupid but I know there is an upper bound on my intelligence that is lower than many other peoples, not everyone can be Einstein or Hawking.

The more interesting problem is how do we optimise for people reaching their maximum potential or if that is even necessary.

(We, as a species. The particular education system I went through scores much better than the US system in every benchmark, but it's still piss poor at actually imparting skills on pupils, instead of rewarding them for accidentally ending up with them for reasons nobody really understands. I don't think any system has properly figured that out yet.)

And since college education is mostly a positional good (it helps you compete against people with worse education for limited jobs), there's a pretty fantastic charitable opportunity for an enterprising lawyer to start suing employers over requiring or looking at college degrees.

Your statement is factually incorrect, but surely honestly made (as I used to have the same misimpression of the law in the United States). You received a bunch of replies (as subreplies) on the point of companies using college graduation as a proxy for IQ. I am trained as a lawyer. Even after I was in law practice, I still had the (mistaken) belief that the holding of the Duke Power case was as you say here (and several subreplies say below). But that is NOT the correct holding of the Duke Power case. In fact, the case held that educational requirements (in the case, those were high school diploma requirements) are just as legally suspect as IQ tests not validated for that job in that workplace if the diploma requirements have disparate impact on different racial groups applying for jobs in that workplace. On the other hand, either an IQ test or a diploma requirement can pass legal scrutiny if it can be shown to be related to bona fide job requirements.

I have a FAQ on the topic[1], which is one of my most popular Hacker News comments ever.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

What I'm advocating is suing people until the perception that preferring college graduates is legally safe is gone.

Do you have a link that backs up your assertion that "employers aren't allowed to measure and discriminate on IQ".

To the extent such test have racially disparate impact, there is a significant burden in showing that the test is a valid measure of ability to do the job for which it is used as part of the hiring process, but that burden is not impossible to meet.

http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html

IQ tests are most definitely legal.

>The effect of this decision has been to eliminate aptitude tests from the hiring process. During the intervening years, the college diploma has become the "de facto" tool by HR departments to winnow the flood of applications. Many jobs today require a college diploma, while before Griggs the same job did not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Fixx

You could argue this is the principal cause of our horrifically wasteful college boom.

There is true value in education, but unfortunately the only market demand is for people who are intelligent, conscientious and educated in certain fields. Hit all three and you are in demand otherwise a life of dead end jobs awaits you.

http://sfist.com/2016/01/13/zuckerberg_neighbor_wages_campai...

I think that surveying Alston or Cambridge might not lead to this conclusion.

Maybe I misunderstood your point. Stories like that of Jaime Escalante suggest that there's a huge number of undiscovered talent and/or that better teaching makes more talent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

I've investigated many of the claims that one can teach intelligence. From Dual-N-Back to Head Start, they have all proven to have negligible effects on future outcomes and no effect on measured G. I think there are also pretty solid theoretical reasons to think that "learning how to learn" is not possible, as intelligence is that capacity that enables you to learn, you are strictly limited by your intelligence even when learning how to learn.

There is also increasing evidence in the literature that the theorized transfer effect (that learning one skill increases your capacity to learn other unrelated skills) does not exist.

These are not conclusions that I relish; I advocate them because I think they're true. Better a bitter truth than a sweet fiction.

However, I'm pretty sure I could find studies pointing to a raise in whatever intelligence metric for those with a college education (specially mathematics or physics heavy) versus a control group that went on to menial jobs.

Actually I'll just post the first few Google hits (only glanced by they severely contradict your claims):

1) http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/5/1362.full

Causal relation between education and intelligence metrics observed

2) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.2010....

Correlation between education attainment and IQ

---

Moreover, there's the even more glaring correlation (and causal relationship) between success and higher educational attainment, specially in technical fields, where obviously you need a lot of hard to learn knowledge, skills and general ability to learn (that is, I also dispute your claim that education has no effect on ability to learn). I can ellaborate and dig more if someone is interested/skeptical.

Interesting. Presuming that such a "transfer effect" is hypothesized to work the same way as transfer learning (in statistical learning, machine learning, cognitive science, etc.), this would be one of the first times mathematical models have predicted a cognitive capability should be commonplace that human beings failed to actually exhibit.

Tell that to over 30% of my gifted class who weren't able to attend college (at least not until much later in life).

Education is generally a proxy for wealth, a certain type of culture, and supportive parents, in my experience.

[1] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/the_magic_of_ed....

I was forced to work extra hours for no extra pay because I was salaried. I was under a lot of stress and assigned other people's projects until I was overwhelmed with them. I worked in St. Louis MO and my wife didn't want me to relocate and be in a different state so my job search was limited and nobody was hiring.

From the stress I developed a mental illness in 2001 and became disabled on short term disability. When I returned from short term disability I was fired for having a panic attack at work. They lost my doctor's notes that excused me and used them against me.

I tried another job in 2002 they used me to get their project to the next level, migrating from Excel to SQL Server for their database and optimizing the code. After the project was done, I was fired.

I ended up on disability in 2003, I went back to college to earn a bachelors but I was never medically cleared to go back to work.

I am 47 now, and I feel like my career is over. I had offers to work in the west coast but I could not relocate because of my wife not wanting me to leave out of state. I'm sure the working environment is different in SV and west coast companies.

But if other white men of a middle age had the stress that I had when working, I can see them developing a mental illness or turning to drug use. I never turned to drug use, but I had problems sleeping and waking up due to the stress.

I had friends who didn't go to college but learned programming by experience, they were expert programmers but lost their jobs because they didn't have college degrees and ended up working in retail jobs to make ends meet like Sam's Club.

I've known people with college degrees that didn't know what they were doing and I mentored them at work to get them started in programming. It is possible to earn a degree and still have problems doing the job they are hired for. For example programming classes teach how to write short programs that are very small, but writing larger more complex programs and how to debug them is not taught. That takes experience in the real world.

This might be overstating the case somewhat. The very term "mass production" wasn't introduced until 1926 [1]. Some of the biggest unions were only formed in the 1930s [2] and their activity was largely suppressed during WWII. The golden age of union manufacturing jobs lasted 30 years at best (late 40s to late 70s' oil shocks).

The 50 year old whites are thus at the same time beneficiaries and victims of the success created by the "greatest generation". Their parents went through the Great Depression, fought WWII, and worked out a great compromise that shared the bounty of mass production equitably between unions and factory owners. The subsequent generation encountered far fewer hardships and inevitably took for granted a status quo that had, in fact, been difficult to achieve (and long in the making). It's hardly surprising that, in their middle to old age, many have trouble adapting to the computerization of the work place (a transformation at least as momentous as mass production). In addition, winning the Cold War has proved a very mixed blessing by bringing direct competition with billions who went through their own version of great depression (and possibly warfare) within living memory.

Interestingly enough, computerization (with the official end of Moore's law) and globalization (with China's pathologically slowing growth) are now leveling off. Will this allow a reprieve for downtrodden baby boomers? The upcoming years should make for very interesting politics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_production

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Automobile_Workers#1930...

For the white middle class, life in 1950 was pretty good (unless you were sent to Korea). Life in 1960 was fabulous. At that time, a man could work as a clerk in a hardware store or an assistant in a butcher shop and support a stay-at-home wife and four children in his own middle class home with one car, one television, one phone, etc.

It was the American dream, based partially on generous union contracts for some, and general prosperity for others. Writers were in great demand; musicians could play 365 nights a year. Housing was cheap, jobs were plentiful, and salaries and wages rose every year.

Life in 1970 was different; the Japanese had beaten the Americans at steel, the Vietnam wartime economy was winding down even as Americans perceived we had lost the war, 50,000+ young Americans killed and hundreds of thousands of others traumatized and damaged. The Sixties had taken a massive toll on church, marriage, and society's general cohesiveness and morale, and suddenly things seemed awfully uncertain.

Around that time, Europe and Japan had rebuilt and were starting to compete vigorously, taking away the easy monopoly that American companies enjoyed for the previous 30 years.

It's no surprise that this same socioeconomic group is going through tough times today. The technology economy has no room for people with a high school diploma and good manual labor skills. Some car mechanics in the old days were barely literate, but fixing cars today requires knowledge of digital circuitry and software.

There are some silver linings, though. Shale energy has created a boom for drivers, roughnecks, welders, waitresses, etc. in places like North Dakota. Now that oil is legal to export, and assuming oil goes north of $40/BBL again, the U.S. will probably emerge in another decade or two as the world's largest energy exporter. Cheap domestic natural gas from shale formations has been a boon to the chemical and plastics industries. New technologies such as 3-D printing, as well as rising wages in the 3rd world, notably in China, are bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.

We probably won't see a golden age such as we experienced from 1945-1970, and unions have lost much of their clout since that time, but perhaps there will be more opportunities in coming years for blue collar and middle class workers than since the 1980s. Someone in this thread points out that technology workers may some day find themselves on the other side of the prosperity wall, as well. Nothing lasts forever.

This is why I like the idea of at least reducing the cost of a college education, or preferably eliminating it. A regular high school degree is quickly becoming useless to have, if you don't have some white collar skill-set to apply after your school, you're going to be very hungry. It's not fair in my mind to raise the standards of what it means to be "qualified" without giving the various social groups a fair chance to get there.

And of course the problem here is that there aren't enough service jobs for everyone, which is also why I support basic income so that while we retain the option for people to achieve more if they want to that we don't leave everyone else who either doesn't have a particular skill (yet) or just doesn't want to out in the cold to freeze and die. If nothing else, they're valuable consumers.

Other countries have robust retraining programs, so the bolt turner could become something else when bolt turning isn't useful anymore. This works in tandem with trade schools, which are also better-supported by governments outside the US.

(And I also am a huge fan of the concept of universal basic income!)

Over the past couple years I've come closer to the conclusion that the middle class is pretty much doomed, and it will take a big change in our economic system to cope. A middle class fundamentally requires a large number of well-paying "repetitive" or "algorithmic" jobs. Doesn't matter if they are blue collar or white collar, but there need to be a lot of jobs where the output is relatively standard - e.g. the widget was made properly, the car ended up at the right destination, the audit was completed, etc. In these jobs, there isn't really that much of a difference between a good product and great product - it's just a job that needs to be completed.

Contrast that with "creative" or "competitive" type jobs: actor, writer, graphic designer, etc. Those jobs can never support a large middle class, because by definition there is such a huge valuation difference between the best performers and everyone else - there will always be a huge amount of inequality in these professions because the best can command a much higher salary than those even slightly down the ladder.

The problem, of course, is that automation and software will eventually take away the vast majority of the repetitive jobs. If all you are left with are the creative/competitive type jobs, you are guaranteed to have a huge amount of inequality.

Consider being a chef vs being a filmmaker. If you're the best chef in a city, you'll be in considerable demand. See, for example, Tom Kitchin in Edinburgh, who is justifiably rather famous and whose restaurant is booked out months in advance.

If you're the best filmmaker in a city, by contrast, no-one really cares. What matters there is if you're the best - or one of the best 10 or so - in the world.

(Or at least, within a specific language.)

Why? Because you can copy films and sell them all over the world without additional labour. You can do neither with food.

So whilst the two are "creative" jobs, the output's transportability and replicability make a huge difference in just how good you have to be to be the best.

(Not that I'm saying being a chef or running a restaurant isn't competitive. It's very competitive. And bloody hard work in other ways. Say what you like about being a filmmaker, it doesn't involve 14-hour days 360 days of the year to stay afloat.)

So when bolt turning peters out, they won't suddenly find their higher calling in advanced application and design of bolts and fasteners.

What they will do instead is hard to know, welfare, unemployment, early retirement they probably can't afford.

Maybe a foray into boutique bolt turning, charging excess for manually turned bolts. Machines don't turn bolts like they were turned in the good ol' days after all.

I think one of your implications is that some people are just too lazy to work at a skilled job.

I'd guess that this problem is much rarer than people suppose. Financial stability is a very strong motivation to work hard. It's also true that low-paying jobs almost never allow people to be lazy! It's absolutely exhausting and miserable to work in restaurants, production lines, cleaning, etc.

The key is mobility. Some of those bored, disengaged bolt turners might make enthusiastic, happy electricians. But transitioning from bolt turner to electrician is expensive, and usually turning bolts won't pay for that.

That's where society comes in: governments, nonprofits, and perhaps some corporations lubricate the labor market by making it easier for workers to switch into positions that suit them better. That lubrication comes in the form of subsidized education and/or temporary living expenses.

Not everyone is out for intellectual progression or even a better wage. I can tell you this first hand from living in country towns, where there aren't many high skilled jobs, but plenty of happy people who just like that lifestyle.

There can only be so many electricians in a 2000 person town once the bolt turning factory shuts down, for example. So for them it would mean skilling up in an area they may not be happy about, because it is what is available, or moving town to somewhere with similar work to what they had before.

I agree with what you are saying though, at that point it is up to institutions to support and retrain them if they are to continue being useful to society as a unit, but they may very well lose a lifestyle they were quite content with.

Which is why like I said, it needs to be greatly reduced or preferably free.

It's very, very hard to get good grades while working enough hours to support yourself, especially if you have no skills (and even affluent college students rarely have marketable skills).

Not really.

"Tuition will be $51,196 for entering undergraduates and for others who arrived in fall 2015, 2014 and 2013, and $50,690 for those who entered in fall 2012, the email stated.

Room and board is set at $7,780 for a standard double room and $5,490 for a standard first-year meal plan, Mr. Murphy’s note stated."

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2016/01/14/CMU-wi...

So $13,270 for living expenses, at the presumably inflated prices CMU is charging.

Over 4 years, comes to $202,760 for tuition, vs. $53,080 for living expenses.

Point being, with tuition hyper-inflation, costs to support yourself while studying are relatively much, much less expensive. The student-loan debt crisis would rapidly become a non-issue if tuition was free.

As romantic as it is to tell tales of how we bootstrapped ourselves through college, working off hours and earning our way, it's stupid to demand the next generation do it out of some misguided sense of tradition. We have the capability to make it better for our kids, why the hell aren't we?

I'd like to see a 2 or 3 year trade school for programming and other useful trades - with low costs. Something suitable for people who aren't interested in higher ed, but do want a decent trade in life.

Here's a thought. Why can't we as a society ensure that everyone is paid a living wage according to their need.

It may take a while, but I believe this will be the only way that we can hold this society* together.

* Deep irony here, speaking as one of 'Thatcher's children'.

Not really; there's a fair amount of support for a basic income from conservatives and libertarians, for good reason. We've decided that we aren't going to let people starve in the streets if they can't find a job. Given that, it makes much more sense to just give people money than to have a huge bureaucracy with dozens of programs trying to alleviate individual aspects of the problem of not having money.

1. Unreasonably expensive 2. A net negative for the social problem they're supposed to solve

The underlying problem isn't poverty or lack of education. It's a complete collapse of public moral leadership since the 80s - not in the sexual sense, but in the business sense of "Fuck everyone in the world, because money."

Politics and business have always been corrupt. But from the 30s to 60s you could still find good people trying to do good things.

Now they're institutionally corrupt, and politics and business - especially finance, which is the de facto government in the US - have become industrial asshole factories.

This is barbarism, and it can only lead to more barbarism.

Many people simply don't have the skills or ability to contribute real value to the modern economy. 50 years ago simple physical labour was a valuable economic contribution and remunerated accordingly; today there's a constantly shrinking pool of minimum-wage jobs.

The problem is a shrinking amount of money to pay for these work that needs to be done, as its all being filtered into CEO's pockets rather than corporations paying taxes.

And when you're spending time with people, in a house with a family, with clean water, sufficient food, electricity and internet access, with regular social gatherings, can you really be said to be in "lonely poverty"?

That said, all this is physically, economically possible today, but it is probably not politically or socially possible. It will take further decline before people finally realise it is what they've wanted all along.

Deal with it and carry on.

This is such millenialist bullshit. Overall people are better off now than ever before. Yes, there are problems now, but there have always been problems. 25 years ago, the internet was unknown to the general public. Housing is more expensive, but food and clothing are cheaper, something these statements usually ignore. Civil rights for women and minorities are better - advances there far outweigh erosion in places like intellectual property. The further back you go, the better life is today. Remember when women were legally paid less than men for identical jobs? Remember being conscripted against your will? Remember when being visibly pregnant in public was a source of shame? Remember when you had to ensure you had all your food shopping done by a certain time, because shops were only half open on Saturdays and not open at all on Sunday? Remember how expensive appliances were, and that you actually had to take the time to go into the store to talk about the issue rather than ring a number or look online? Remember how time-locked (and expensive!) entertainment was, and none of it was 'on-demand'? Remember the fear of living under the nuclear umbrella and Mutually Assured Destruction? This last one has been replaced somewhat by nebulous 'terrorism', but the fear of our western democracies being literally overrun by a terrorist military doesn't really compare.

Remember when 'good job' meant 'regular pay packet', and not 'comfortable work in an office that you like'? The 'good jobs' of yesteryear were more gruelling and less fulfilling than the 'good jobs' of today. Want cheaper childcare? Then stop outsourcing to professionals and shame working women back into the home, because that's why childcare was cheap in the old days.

It's become more and more prevalent in the past couple of years to look at student debt and housing costs and simply declare that life now is worse than previously, without actually looking at what it was like to live in past days in an overall sense. Cherrypick a data point and declare that life is worse now. Yes, there are problems today, significant problems, but that doesn't mean life in previous generations was a breeze.

Am I missing some context? When was that?

(1)https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/miss-manners-...

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Pregnant women nowadays appear to want everyone to know they are pregnant, and how far along they are, by wearing tight knit tops. Not only are their stomachs huge, but their belly buttons are pooched out.

I find this disgusting. I’m in my early 60s — am I too old-fashioned? I miss the days when women wore loose “maternity blouses.” One knew that the woman was pregnant, but we didn’t have to be reminded of what was going on under the maternity blouse.

GENTLE READER: What Miss Manners misses are the days when no one would have thought of staring a lady — pregnant or not — in the belly button. She does not miss the days when pregnant ladies were expected to dress as if they were wearing the nursery curtains.

Running a business can be as easy as mowing peoples' lawns, cooking meals for the elderly, trolling garage sales for things you can resell on ebay, fixing washing machines, etc. I know a guy who bought a trunk full of garage door springs, paid for a yellow page ad, and charges $200 a pop to replace peoples' broken door springs. I could go on for pages.

Banking on the next President to fix anything is a bit naïve. There have been quite a few elected on the promise to fix everything :-)

I have for a long time worked online to sell products (and also have a day job). My wife talks about liking the idea of selling something online, but can never find a calling.

[1] http://victortanchen.com/educational-attainment-united-state...

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealt...

Aside from type of crime, there's also intense "blame the victim" in the poor white areas, because "sure he was wrong to hit you, but you've grown up with him for decades how can you pretend not to know he's the village's violent drunk, best avoided?" or "sure the guy who crashed into you was drunk and thats wrong, but you've lived here for decades how can you not know after dark the roads are only for drunks?" Whereas "most" non-white area crime is anonymous, someone just walked down the wrong street or parked in the wrong spot or walked into a gunfight they had nothing to do with.

Generally speaking affirmative action means the non-whites have a chance for the future even if they don't deserve it leading to optimism, and also means that at least some of the whites who do deserve it won't get a future, leading to pessimism which also does wonders for race relations (sarcasm).

The plight of the working class is about free trade and reprioritizing economic policy. Union busting sent business to the South, NAFTA sent it packing.

Now even high end service jobs are at risk. A local hospital voted to unionize, and immediately afterwards the ER fired everyone and ships in visiting nurses from 400 miles away. It keeps the local labor hungry and costs down in the long term.

Shameful behavior was the choice of the USA's white working class: They had the choice between prosperity without racism, or immiseration with the continuance of racism. They chose the latter. They voted against pro-growth policies because those policies were promoted by a political coalition that was also committed to extending prosperity to every citizen, regardless of race.

I made $12/hour as a "forklift operator" in 1993, just as a point of reference. And I doubt a modern college student could even get hired for a forklift operator-type job.