> Man, what a weird week. Unless it's on their own terms, it seems nobody wants to work anymore.

It's the only one with any acknowledgement that agreeable terms may actually be needed in order to attract people to work. It doesn't take a PhD to figure this out!

Utah Phillips, one of my favorite storytellers and all-around anarchist and hobo has a line I was reminded of:

That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 -he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance!

From the track Bum on the Rod off the album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere with Ani DiFranco https://youtu.be/-rw4sd4AuJE

woke up this morning feeling excellent, picked up the telephone dialed the number of my equal opportunity employer to inform him I will not be into work today Are you feeling sick? the boss asked me No Sir I replied: I am feeling too good to report to work today, if I feel sick tomorrow I will come in early

literally just an empty storefront they were able to rent on the cheap. few shoddy racks of calendars.

we had to keep walking and chatting to the customers when they came in. In December. For calendars. No chairs, no cell phones. Couple of the HS kids no called/no showed so I was often the only person there for 8 hours. Exhausting.

This was retail, and for calendars. I was a seasonal hire and had no more information about the product than the customer did, nor did I get any commission or incentive if I sold or didn't sell.

aka the Law of Supply & Demand.

Your comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of anarchism and Rand. Her philosophy is particularly odious to people on the left and is especially incompatible with anarchist political philosophy. The idea that there are special super intelligent humans who should be placed at the top of society's hierarchy and be given free range to make any and all decisions for those lower on the hierarchy is outright rejected as baseline anarchist political thought.

If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets.

And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have made that clear by now.

People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.

Today people, despite burning themselves out in their job, struggle to pay rent in a flat shared with other working people, after loading themselves up with 100k in students debt, and no chance in hell to ever own property of their own.

If the powers that be want people to be willing to work, that work has to pay off.

If it doesn't, well...we're at the beginning of a retirement wave unprecedented in human history. 2 low-birthrate generations to follow. And our entire economic system is designed around constant growth.

I leave doing the math on that as an exercise for the reader.

That doesn't take away from the point that ideally no one should have to work themselves to the bone just to afford a humble lifestyle, but if middle class people in developed countries are really asking for perspective, I think it's worth bearing their relative privilege in mind.

And the 50s and 60s weren't that great for e.g. black people or women in the US either.

Also more classes of people now have much better things: women, minorities.

Labor is not the only input to productivity, so there is zero reason labor rewards should match productivity. As capital expenses increased to obtain modern productivity gains, the reward should go towards capital, which enabled purchase of upgrading tooling. Also as people demanded more rights and benefits, some is taken from wages. When you track total cost to employ, which is what an employer pays to have an employee, you can see all the gains. BLS tracks this and many other related variables (like wages, total remuneration, and a host of other costs and benefits employees have gained over the decades.)

And corporate margins are pretty much the same as ever, net profit ~10% of revenue, since time immemorial. That 10% is what provides cushion so businesses don't implode every hiccup, leaving lots unemployed. [1] has some 1950-now data. There's plenty more places to find more. Fairly constant profit is why stock returns have averaged what they did over 100+ years. If now had vastly more profitable companies, it would have vastly increased returns.

[1] https://cdn.pficdn.com/cms/pgim-fixed-income/sites/default/f...

No, you can't.

People lived in smaller houses, but the vast majority of the increase of property values is _land_. If you want a house that's anywhere near as cheap as the average was 50 years ago, you get to live somewhere with no jobs. That is not equivalent.

As for everything else, the majority of the modern day luxuries we enjoy amounts to a rounding error next to the actual necessities that people also had back then. Consumer electronics are _cheap_, not having them will not meaningfully increase anyones wealth.

Want to read what did increase? Houses got bigger as I stated [2].

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/55910/farmrealestate...

[2] https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

EDIT: worth noting as well that the source you cited was specifically for farm real estate, not residential.

Here is a source for land price: https://www.aei.org/housing/land-price-indicators/

On the last chart, change the indicator to Change in Land price (standardised). Note that this is only for 2012 to 2021, not even 10 years, and the _smallest_ increase is 44%, while the highest is 807%!

Some numbers from each: Feb 1954 house price $206,717 inflation adjusted. April 2023, $392,780 (the largest value). House sizes: 1950 was 983 ft^2. 2014 was 2657 ft^2 (feel free to chase down sizes for now if you like). 1950 was ~$210/ft^2. 2023 likely ~$147/ft^2.

Care to check the math? Sure seems like housing has not increased (well, it actually decreased significantly by this check) when correctly measured.

Houses cost more now because people want more, and also because they make more than in 1950, inflation adjusted.

Next, new houses in most of the country are built on new residential land as cities expand. Where do you think that land comes from? Farmland. Farmland provides a price floor on new housing, as developers buy it up and add subdivisions.

As to your oddly chosen subset of land: your list is not inflation adjusted. It's also the top 100 metro areas, not the median of house prices in the US. Of course you can pick smaller and smaller subsets to get the answer you want.

The median house in 1950 was under 1/4 acre. From the table below on price per acre, it sure would seem land is not the major factor in house costs.

So, can you provide the correct stat or not? Don't pick the highest cost subset of land. Don't pick non inflation adjusted values. And make it the median of all housing.

Here, I'll help. Here is median price per acre of land with housing on it in the US, by state [3]. It also has the median price per acre, including farmland. Use Excel, check the correlation. If you are to do it, you can also population weight these, add median house cost per state (easy to find), etc.

It's pretty clear the cost of a house is not majority the land, except perhaps in a few really dense, extreme outliers like NYC and SF.

No wonder you believe the highest component of house cost is land. You have not presented actual numbers, only picked the subsets that you like.

Try again. Also, please address the now 3 links I presented about housing costs when size adjusted.

[1] https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

[2] https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...

[3] https://www.inmyarea.com/moving/buying-land-analysis

>median home prices since 1950, inflation adjusted, have not even doubled since 1950

"Not even doubled" = basically flat.

Sure buddy. The single biggest purchase most people will ever make, let's call an 80% increase a rounding error.

>No wonder you believe the highest component of house cost is land. You have not presented actual numbers, only picked the subsets that you like.

If you're going to put all this effort into finding stats then you should first work on your reading comprehension. Here's what I actually said:

>the vast majority of the *increase* of property values is _land_.

They're now choosing to buy a > 200% size home. And this is because inflation adjusted median household income has gone up, tada! you guessed it! Over 200%!

And here's some real number voodoo for you - put inflation adjusted median income and median house size over time into Excel and look at the correlation. What do you think happens there?

So, here's the facts, which you don't care to address: 1) House cost is around flat per inflation adjusted sq foot for decades. 2) The main component of median house prices in the US is NOT land, as you claim 3) The reason houses now cost more is because they are bigger (and looks like a slight lower amount per sq foot than 1950), and.... 4) the reason houses are bigger is because household wages are equivalently bigger, correlating quite well for at least 70 years, so people choose bigger houses because they can afford them, as well as 2 cars, many TVs, more trips, relative food cost has declined, and on and on.

Now, I cited good data for all of these. Do you still dispute any of them?

Go ahead and cite some good data - median, complete US market, any time period, that supports any of your claims otherwise.

> Here's what I actually said:

>>the vast majority of the increase of property values is _land_.

The link where I gave you average per acre cost for housing completely blows that out of the water. Did you not look at it? Here are the steps: 1. Look at the per state average acre for housing price. 2. Look up median house acres (< 0.25). 3. Look up median house prices. 4. Multiply the acres per house (0.25) by the acre cost to get the amount of land cost per house. 5. Subtract 4 from 3. 6. Note how large 5 is compared to 4. 7. Note that it's mathematically impossible that the small amount in 3 can contribute to the inflation adjusted increase in house prices from 1950.

Here, I'll even do a decent estimate for you: from the list Florida has the median land price of around $35000 per acre for housing. Average house land is still under 0.25 (one site said it's now 0.19). So land per house in Florida is around say $8500. Zillow says average Florida house price is ~390,000. This likely has doubled in price and size since 1950 (and if it's an outlier, then some other place in the US counters it, thanks to the magic of medians).

Tell me again that the current cost of $8500 land in a $390,000 house is the cause of the near doubling in price? Did the land cost negative $400,000 in 1950?

So, keep claiming your claim. It's so mathematically impossible as to be ludicrous at this point. If you want to continue to make that claim, show me the numbers broken down just like gave you.

Or are we done since you keep ignoring facts you dislike, and misrepresent the double prices ~ basically flat by completely ignoring that the doubling in price is also a doubling in size which was my very first point (and a doubling of incomes which is why it all fits).

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-pos...

Inflation adjusted median income has gone up over 200%... what do you think inflation is?

Total braindead understanding of how productivity and labor works, but it sounds great if you own the tools.

This is what people miss about the conversation: That temporary period of brief prosperity was partially due to some of the relative differences across the world. Raising living standards across the world came at a small price of popping that bubble.

Although median disposable income of Americans is still significantly higher than the rest of the world.

We saw this dream start to disappear as we un did those things in the name of freedom.

Now, we produce more per capita than we ever did before and we get less of that pie as wages have stagnated and taxes go to corporate hand outs and entitlements (healthcare and social security), which are more or less a corporate hand out since they no longer provide pensions for people that work a life time for them.

It's unclear to me why the conversation is centering better standards of living elsewhere as if we haven't added a couple billion people/consumers to the world in that time.

If favorable, but short lived conditions were behind this sudden change, then it would affect the entire economic system, not just the workforce.

How well people are off is a function of how many resources there are to go around. Since the end of WWII, these resources only ever increased. So did worker productivity, aka. the amount of resources produced per worker. So if people are worse off now, that leads to the very easy deduction that the fault lies in how these resources are distributed, not with a scarcity of the resources themselves.

Or to put this another way:

If the previously better conditions were just a fluke that couldn't be expected to last, how come that corporations seem to rake in ever more money as time goes on?

This is a very US-centric view.

Demand for resources across the world has increased dramatically as everyone’s living standard increased.

The situation isn’t going to make sense if you continue to ignore the rest of the world and try to understand the United States as if we lived in a perfectly isolated bubble.

As has productivity.

Also some industries can barely keep up. We have seen this during the pandemic. “Chip crisis” is a great example.

And can we see this in any dataset, that the post-WW2 boom eventually gave more away in charity than it produced?

This argument is repeated a lot anytime someone mentions the working conditions in the 50s/60s, but how is it any relevant? Is there some natural law that says that mistreatment of blacks for example have to always go hand in hand with livable wages? And that anybody that likes the latter from the 50s/60s must also want the former?

Oh, and Europe also ended up enjoying a similar stability and uplifting economy a few decades later, as the economy recovered there too, without having those other groups to exploit, and even for countries which lost their colonies the decades prior.

The economic rise since the 60s though (in productivity, GDP etc) hasn't translated to similar stability, because the unions were left to die, and neoliberal politics and attitudes became the norm, while the banks and capitalists got a free pass to anything they wanted.

>Less frequently, they already know this and simply don't care, and it's always useful to give this group an opportunity to be explicit about their priorities.

I think it's more that people making your argument are with the side of capitalists, and you want to make a bogus argument as if livable wages and job prospects are racist and only feasible when combined with exploitation, to absolve the current neoliberal order as "the best possible world". So they weaselly mark anybody pointing to those things as pinning for the rasist aspects of 1950s/60s too.

Educate yourself on history, there is a world outside the United States. There are struggles that have nothing to do with race relations in the United States.

There is a very narrow band, and very specific regions in the US where that is true unfortunately for the the rest of us the people and regions where this is the reality those people hold outsized control over the media, and government so it gives the appearance it is a universal reality. The World Is Becoming a Better Place[1]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5s6aZCPSg

Also, wasn't this golden age in the US fueled by concentrated demand for industrial goods after the second world war? Without an unprecedented imbalance in the economy I cannot see this happening.

Some people that hate imperialism also demand it's spoils back (?).

You are right that it's possible for one person to support a family. For most people working in the tech industry here on HN they could probably figure out a way to do it. But is it realistic for all families everywhere to be able to support themselves with just a single worker? If it were so simple to achieve, we would not see child labor. We would not see any poverty at all. Clearly we are not yet at the point as a species where we can enjoy a post-scarcity or job-free utopia. We could certainly be doing a lot more to work towards that than we are, though, and I think that's a more interesting point of discussion than looking back through rose-tinted glasses on a few decades of post-WW2 America.

You have it backwards. We wouldn't see any child labor if employers weren't trying to cut corners on wages while the people at the top of the economic pyramid rake in billions. Ownership is way overcompensated in this society, most owners/CEOs do not provide that much value and are just collecting economic rents because they occupy a position in social/economic networks with high bridging centrality coefficients. It may involve some work to get there, but culture, luck, and marketing also have a lot to do with it too.

https://cse.buffalo.edu/tech-reports/2006-05.pdf

(In case you can't reason your way into it, some positions are gained through nonzero amount of luck rather than pure "hard work and grit" or whatever boomer nonsense.)

The above is just a short list. Live like 1955 and you can support a family of 5 with, a car, vacations every year and a nice retirement. You won't have many of the other luxuries people enjoy today. If you don't want to that us fine, but don't say it can't be done.

Before there was starbucks there was a local cafe and coffee shop, before the Internet there were newspapers and magazines to pay for.

It can't be done. We've lost something. We have also gained things. don't get me wrong, I like having the Internet.

If only I could give up Hulu and Netflix, I could afford to go back to college and go on vacation every year? Let me guess, I also just need to eat less avocado toast and I'll be able to afford the downpayment on a house.

That’s £120 pm, or £1440 annually. Doesn’t seem like it would make that much of a dent. Probably the number one thing you’d need to do is cut down on food costs, which is doable, to be fair, as it’s quite easy to spend 10x or 100x more than what you need to stay fed.

That ignores any interest on the savings. So yeah it seems like "small" regular spending in your 20s (e.g. $100/mo total) can add up to an entire down payment in your early 30s.

Alternatively, assuming your rent would be at least $1000/month, you might live with your parents for an extra 13 months (or fewer for higher rents) before moving out on your own.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

Also, what would happen to people with not so well off parents?

If someone's parents were able to provide a place to live until 18, why is 19 suddenly impossible? You don't need to be well off to let your kids stay with you a little bit past legal adulthood. Surely there's room for a couch or a bean bag or something to give them a huge leg up right out of the gate, assuming you were in a marginal position where you otherwise needed to immediately kick them out and downsize.

Some people are going to have rough situations and can't rely on a family at all. Some will need to emancipate before reaching 18. How common is that? If it is common, that seems like the real problem to address.

Yes, because a single worker today is maybe fifty or a hundred times more productive than a worker in the past, thanks to modern equipment.

Your question is much like asking why we can't afford to feed lobster to prisoners anymore.

Yes, it seems the under 30 crowd would rather go to college/university instead these days. A degree can cost about as much as a modest home. Almost nobody attended college in the 1950s. Hobbies always come with tradeoffs.

> And yes urbanisation has increased but not that dramatically.

15-20 points, at least in the USA. That is quite dramatic. If today's cities saw 15-20% of their population leave for rural areas, prices in those cities would drop like a rock.

> What hasn't really happened though is any significant new cities forming

Very true, and fantastically increased farm profitability since the 2007 time period has driven farmland values through the roof, which has made it much more cost prohibitive for cities to expand like they used it do.

Fairly sure housing affordability is a bigger problem for those without tertiary degrees though!

> 15-20 points, at least in the USA

I'd think if there was an era where urbanisation was highest it would be in the 50-60 years prior to the 60s, and I'm not aware of house prices dramatically increasing in that time (happy to be shown otherwise though!). But in that earlier period many quite modest-sized towns grew massively to become the cities they are today (*), so arguably there weren't quite so many people all trying to crowd into the same few cities.

(*) though in Australia at least, something of the opposite has happened in the last ~75 years - many modest-size towns have lost their populations to larger cities.

US data suggests that college graduates have seen the largest decline in homeownership over the past 10 years.

That said, you are right that college filters out those with disabilities and other life challenges, and that means those without degrees are infinitely more likely to have something like a crippling mental disability which would prevent them from owning a home. Which, indeed, makes drawing any aggregate parallels between graduates and non-graduates rather useless.

> I'd think if there was an era where urbanisation was highest it would be in the 50-60 years prior to the 60s

In fact, there was a bit of a counter-urbanization movement during the period. Cities were considered to be for the poor. Anyone with means wanted to live on large estates out in the countryside. There was also that whole "White Flight" thing. All that goes back to the people not wanting the houses.

It's easy to forget now that we've put in incredible effort to make cities more livable, but cities were industrial hell holes during the 50s and 60s. Not to mention that crime was starting to become a big problem by the 60s. They were not desirable places in the slightest. Today's cities are entirely different.

It is true that things are much more affordable when they are considered undesirable.

Keyword "luxurious".

People first and foremost want to be able to have a roof, food, some leisure time, and so on, not luxury.

And people could have a lot of that for more than "a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries". Between common wrong tropes, movies, and ignorance of history, the past is hugely downplayed as to these aspects.

The "industrial revolution" era of Marx and Dickens time, actually worsened (for the first 2 centuries or so) the working conditions and increased the working hours for huge swaths of the population. People had to be forced (via law, violence, and destruction of their prior livelihood) to go work in factories (and many fought hard for keeping their rural way of life).

BUT

I would point out the wealth distribution in our economy.

If it was more equable would this luxurious lifestyle for all still be possible ?

The US has a GDP per capita of $80K, so if it were distributed equally, everyone would “get” $80K. Since in reality the distribution is very skewed a lot of people would earn more.

Of course, that’s if we artificially constrain this to the US. The world-wide GDP per capita is only $12K. So if we’d be really equitable with the whole world, we’d all have to make do with a lot less.

Is the same old discourse, if poor people get more money they will put it back in the economy and consume it generating a bigger economy and better life quality for everyone.

And gdp is kindaaaa useless as wealth pays an important role.

Economic inequality in income grew since the 80' and that's simply a fact

We could indeed hypothesize that GDP would increase due to poorer people having more to spend. On the other hand, in this scenario the successful business owners no longer earn outsized reward for their risk, so perhaps entrepreneurship and innovation is stumped. It’s very hard to predict the effect on GDP

Pedantically, you actually want GNI, not GDP, here. (But they are close enough in practice for the US–and identical on a worldwide basis since there is no foreign income—that it doesn’t materially change anything else in your comment.)

I think this is a bit of a rose-colored rear-view mirror, and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. Most people in most times had to work pretty hard. If you were a farmer, you worked pretty much all the daylight hours every day. Immigrants in the early part of the 20th century worked very hard, often the man running a small business or doing factory work and the woman cleaning, sewing, cooking, bookkeeping, etc. for hire. And all of that is when the men weren't off fighting a war as a conscripted soldier.

The "working man" who could support a family on his income alone was a product of the post-WWII economy. And he didn't really have to save for retirement, he had a defined-benefit pension (the kind that bankrupted many of their employers in subsequent years).

The fact that today, people can feel pretty picky about the terms of the work they do is a sign that times are pretty good, despite what people may think and say.

That is true, but understandably, people are not thrilled about the prospect of their conditions being worse than those their predecessors experienced.

Especially not if, at the same time, they experience an uninterrupted period of economic growth and ever growing profit margins for the corporations they work for.

We are living in the best of times as measured by infant mortality, lifespans, literacy, poverty, and technology.

Psychologically, people seem to experience less hope and optimism that the future will be better. That is an important concept as well - regardless of whether you think people are delusional - their subjective perceptions still matter.

The ones who get to complain are the "Peters" whose futures were stolen so their parents could live high on the hog, no?

it's better in terms of people not having to do brutal physical labor.

but it's worse it's ever been in terms of mental labor and mental health. For older folks they may not understand, and we as a society as a whole not understand, how much mental impact growing up with social media and endless amounts of stimulation has an affect on the entire generation. Social media is still incredibly new only several decades old, with every year getting more and more stimulating. We have no idea the consequences of such over a long term impact on mental health.

You may think "just don't go on it" but it's a whole different story for younger kids, when everyone in your peer group is on social media. If your entire social network is dependent on social media, "just don't use social media" becomes incredibly difficult, and you become exposed to algorithms designed to ceaselessly deliver dopamine to your brain.

On top of that work, has become a lot more and more mentally draining vs physically draining, making it way harder to factor how tiring it is. As someone who studied Neuroscience in undergrad, the biggest takeaway for me learning it was Neuroscience is still an extremely new science, and our understanding of the brain is very very limited, funnily enough despite how much advancements we made with ai. So understanding people's mental exhaustion is very difficult to measure.

Endless mental dopamine delivery, combined with rapid technological pace requiring younger individuals to learn more and more, faster and faster,

I argue, that "times are not as good" as people think they say. There is a different kind of pain involved from working long hours in more natural/stable but physically arduous tasks in the fields or whatnot, vs 8 hours in some confined space indoors of having to constantly learn something new of an ever-changing landscape of new technology without stability where you can be rendered useless in a span of a couple years (ie artists and ai image generation). The pain of being in some confined space is not new to the older generation, but it certainly is getting worse because of how faster automation is rendering certain knowledge and jobs useless much faster than it ever did.

Social media may cause some problems but it won't leave me with a slipped vertebrae from bending over pulling weeds all day.

The median salary would be six figure if the share of productivity gains was distributed like it was in 1970.

If you doubled everyone's salary, the gain would almost certainly be absorbed by real estate or some other necessity.

Regulations on maximum working hours, access to fair housing, education, healthcare etc might work better.

Providers of necessities can demand large portions of people’s income due to lack of supply. It’s a basic monopoly. We see that in real estate, health care, education, elderly and child care.

They can’t charge endlessly because at some point people are priced out. Homelessness, lack of education, delaying medical care until an emergency and relying on laws that non-payers cannot be denied treatment.

But they can travel up the supply demand curve and take from everybody that can still afford it, because the supply is constrained. TVs are cheap, because of competition from overseas. Land or health care prices are not.

What do you think would be the best way to help ensure everyone gets a fair share?

I suspect this includes people of all ages, so if we distribute this only to working age, that’s probably close to $100K (six figures)

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/average-salary-by-ag...

median wage at 45yo (the peak) is $64k.

GDP/capita is that maximum hypothetical number where the full gross domestic production is evenly distributed to all people.

I assume it includes everyone regardless of age, so the average salary when only considering people working if probably $100K or above

And while I'm not a professional economist it does seem that you are correct in that demand-pull based inflation (cost of goods) tends to only happen in periods of economic expansion, while cost-push inflation (size of money supply) tends to be the driver in slower times.

I wonder if this creates some serious perverse incentives in the dating scene in these parts of the country. Like people who understand this economic situation and unfortunately write off what might have been great partners because their line of work will never afford the standards of living their dual high income peers are able to achieve.

We can argue about what should be done to improve the situation in the Bay Area, but realistically any major changes will take decades to work through the political process. That's going to be too slow to matter for any younger people who are trying to build a decent life right now.

As for dating, the skewed gender ratio in "Man Jose" also makes things difficult in a way that transcends economics.

for who?

We know that it isn't. Productivity of the workforce is ever increasing. The generated wealth simply doesn't make it to the workforce.

Some of it does - real wages in the US are higher than in the past: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Real wages have effectively flat-lined over the past 50+ years.

And I don't, by any measure, mean that all of it does, but nowadays we have luxuries we simply didn't have before, are these not fruits of that increased productivity?

Who's we?

I know I am living a privileged comfortable life, yes. I am certain many people in my chosen profession as a software dev do.

But I also know that there are alot more people struggling to provide basic necessities for their families, despite working 40+h per week. And I am not talking about cellphones here. I am talking about a roof over ones head, clothes on ones back, food on the table and medical services.

I believe the level of lifestyle you may want precludes you from making a single-income household. I am very content with few things even when the times are good. A hike or walk with the family outside doesn't cost much unless you're shopping and eating out all the time while sipping $5 lattes. Plus childcare would cost a pretty significant chunk of rhe second household income, so why not let one parent be with the kids fulltime?

On the other hand, people's requirements have simply inflated to much higher standards, while technology semi-automated some of the housekeeping stuff - washing clothes, dishes, making food, heating, cleaning.

https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-...

House: you can still find houses with plenty of room for ~$100k. It just needs to be in an affordable area: think McKeesport, not San Francisco.

Car: for $5k you can get a 2005 Ford Focus or Honda Civic. They're reliable cars that will get you from A to B perfectly fine, easy to repair and fuel efficient.

Education: a Computer Science degree from WGU costs $18k for the average student, and can be as low as $4k if you accelerate.

Career: plenty of remote software jobs paying above $100k, which can fund a good life in most of the US.

I get it though, the average person wants a nice house in a wealthy area with good schools and low crime and two new cars and gets a degree from a school they can't afford in a field without high paying jobs, and they cannot even code. That's completely their fault, no sympathy from me.

For those people, there's an easy solution: just don't have kids. Kids are crazy expensive, and not required for a good life.

I hope what you say is true- mass retirements followed by a plummeting birthrate. We surely do not need so many people, when the overwhelming majority are useless. Robots will be here soon anyway to replace most of the workforce

I think most people have started to notice that this is the actual purpose of all these insane policies against workers in the industrialized world. Every vise imaginable is being used to squeeze young people. From rent and real estate extortion, taxes and tributes, to inflation. Then the solution given to them is "Oh just don't have children. You don't deserve to procreate since you have to keep working for us to be comfortable."

There is another word for the kind of policy being supported by you.

But I agree that a lot of the whining is due to expectations that are decoupled from reality. A recent survey of college students showed that they expected to earn an average starting salary of $103K. Most are in for a rude awakening.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2022/05...

I would say my family history is that of a "working man" that closly fits that narraive..

My grandfather was a WWII vet, after military service was a factory worker that raised 4 kids, in their own home.

Let me eliminate some of that illusory rose tint from your worldview. That home with 2 adults and 4 kids was a 950 square foot 1 bathroom box on .25 acres of land, with no garage, basement, or luxury of any type. my family still owns this property.

In comparison me a single man, lives in a 1300 sqft home.. by myself, with 2 car garage, full basement, etc. My home is considered "basic" by modern standards, some would even consider it below minimum standards for a family of 4...(I bought this home from such a family because they felt it was too small for them)

No builder would ever consider building either my home (which was built in the 60's, nor my grandparents home (built in the early 50's) as today home sizes need to be 1500-2000 square foot, each bedroom needs it own bath, kitchens need to be near professional quality, etc etc etc etc etc.

In short home prices are sky high because buyers would never consider, and probally could not legally, raise 4 kids in a 1 bath 950 sqaure foot home.

We often to not actualy compare apples to apple when we look at the conditions of the past. Sure a man could buy a home for his family in 1950... That home was about 1/2 the size of todays home, and had FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR less amenities and comforts of the modern home

I live in a place the same size as you, minus the garage and the land, as a family of 3 so far.

There are plenty of potential homebuyers who would kill for this, and I know of nowhere in the USA that it would be illegal. The problem is that cities limit the number of homes that can be built to ludicrous low density setups like "one house on 2 square acres", and there are enough homebuyers who will pay for the house three times that size with a bathroom per bedroom that the builder doesn't bother to worry about the potential buyers who are not being served and have to move out beyond the edges of public transit to afford anything. And these density limits remain because old people swan around moaning that it's inhumane to build studio apartments when everybody wants a 12 sq acre bathroom, and why are there people in tents on the street?

Also Prop 13 in California that transfers wealth from new buyers to boomers who bought a home when it was cheap, and to wealthy buyers who can afford to buy a teardown and rebuild it around a single remaining wall.

But really, almost all of society’s current problems are pushed onto the public by the political power wielded by elderly boomers and retirees. The rest of us would like to do something about climate change and LGBT issues and cost of education but none of that affects boomers either. The elderly are fundamentally disconnected from the future of society because they will not participate in it, and unfortunate most people are not actually mature enough to demand sacrifices without an expectation they will share in the benefits. The meme about “old men planting trees in whose shade they know they will never sit” is not true, and it’s unfair to punish the living and their future from the hand of the dead. To use the term a bit differently than usual, the constitution is not a suicide pact.

We have a lower age limit on voting and there is perpetual talk about raising it to try and curb the political influence of the younger cohort (much like class war, one side is playing hardball, while the other side doesn’t even know they’re playing). Instead, we should keep it the same and add a cap at the age at which you can first draw early social security benefits.

I have heard all the retorts, what about the good boomers etc. But it’s just not good policy to have what are effectively transient participants (similar to how immigrants don’t get to vote) without a long-term stake in society being the ones in political control, even if some of them are well-intentioned.

Again, boomers keep trying to push exactly this change in reverse by trying to raise the voting age. They know there’s a class battle being fought here, but as usual the other side has talked themselves out of even playing the game, like if you don’t acknowledge it then it goes away.

My grandfather immigrated to Australia in 1948, got a job assembling cars at the Ford plant, and worked there until he retired.

My Grandmother never worked. They bought a very nice house, had two boys, never really had any debt, plenty of money in retirement.

A generation later my Dad was earning $10k/year as a teacher, and my mum and dad bought their first very nice home for $30k.

So today how many people earning $100k/year can buy a home for $300k?

(As reference, my partner earns $78k/year and bought a modest home for $480k the month before covid. Now there is not a single home in this small town for less than $600k.)

Very true...

My home when I bought it was about 2x my annual income, my home today is worth on the market about 2x my current annual income.

The average factory worker (or teacher) in my area could easily afford to buy my home in a standard 2 person income situation.

Now if you go into the new construction area's of this city, the houses there start at 2x the price of my home. I am a relatively high income earner though that is offsite by the fact I live alone so no dual income. On paper I could afford one of those homes, but I would never go that far into debt, which is why I own the home I do. I bought in a modest neighborhood and a modest home.

Currently average home prices in my area are 3.5x median household incomes, which is up from 2.25x in 2016... This is largely drive by the new construction of these high end homes fueled by low interest rates.

I doubt it.

How many such modest houses in your modest neighborhood are available now? How much has the housing supply in your town grown, and how much has the population grown? Are all these buyers actually making a direct choice between these two kinds of houses, or is only one of those choices actually available to buy?

In my zipcode +/- 10% of my home value... 30 or so....

>How much has the housing supply in your town grown, and how much has the population grown?

No idea on supply... We average about 1% population growth per year. Slight decrease during the pandemic, slight increase in the last couple of years.

In the same zip code there are 18 New Construction properties for sale, all 2 - 3x my home price. Which would not include the homes being built for buyers under contract.

Now saving 30% a year of a $78k income means you have to save for 20 years to have the full price of the house. ($480k), so you're forced to get a loan, and likely a much bigger loan

I do agree that demographic changes are going to cause economic problems. That is basically unavoidable now.

If you want a high quality of life today and aren't worth $10+ million, the best way to get it is to get out of a city.

A common fallacy. There are light-years of difference. An indentured servant is bound to serve a particular master. A free worker, even earning only enough for necessities, is still free to decide how to meet those necessities, and who to work for under what terms. That's a lot of freedom. No, of course they will not have as many choices as a rich person. But they are very far from indentured servitude.

History has also made it clear that people can be made to endure living conditions they don't like or a very long time.

I submit that, historically, life for the common people was far, far more often barely tolerable or even intolerable, than agreeable.

We like to hear about peasant and slave revolts in history classes, but overall those were few and far between.

We are talking about the basics, not avocado toast or international vacations.

The juice just ain't worth the squeeze in America any longer.

Second, in a low interest rate environment, any crazy idea gets funding. This squanders time and resources as many bad ideas get funded which would otherwise be laughed away. The low interest rates also encourage monetary inflation which first pushes up asset class prices, and later filters into retail prices. Wages are always the last segment to see price rises as pressure must be put on businesses to raise the price of labor. Essentially, when a company cannot get employees they will begin raising pay for open positions or they will go out of business. This pressure takes time to build. We see it now in fast food and groceries, and we saw it some time ago in the blue collar trades.

The major fix for this is higher interest rates… significantly higher. People would need to be willing to accept a slower growth rate in exchange for more predictable and more stable long term growth.

And the upper rungs of corporations will have to accept lower compensation.

What an incredibly privileged perspective. Do you think that actual indentured servants would agree with you on this?

Slave/indentured servant -> live-in servant -> servant -> service worker -> self-employed service worker (contractor)

At each step along this 'evolution', the beneficiaries of the labour have freed themselves from the burden of supplying some of the resources needed by the worker (shelter, food, holidays, sick pay, health insurance, safety and other equipment, education/training, etc). In theory this has been balanced by increased monetary compensation. When that compensation isn't enough for the worker to meet these needs, what should we expect? That they become indebted?

The government has grown enormously in my lifetime, sucking up much (most?) of the productivity increases.

IMO the productivity loss is misidentified as a government issue, it's actually a large org issue.

Maybe during the 1950s, when two (2) World Wars had blasted multiple empires to dust and essentially gutted a generation of workers aka males between the ages of 18-40.

Sure enough the US, still standing after entering the wars late and not seeing huge casualties or direct combat in-country, was positioned to lead a post-war economic boom.

Now it's back to pre-war conditions, which curiously enough, resemble the Guilded Age, and its associated strikes

Because I can't help but note that in North America that there were plenty of people who couldn't do so but were of the "undesirable classes"....

And the reason those who could afford such were able was because they were effectively standing on the backs of those "less privileged".

Afaict, even when it's not racial such things still existed in most places at the time.

But you’re fundamentally right. It’s really easy to manipulate indices like the CPI (and oh boy do they have some interesting ideas about what people need in life), and it’s really easy to exploit summary statistics like the arithmetic mean to drag “average standard of living” metrics around with a few categories of goods (mostly consumer electronics) to push the absurd notion that anyone outside the investor class is doing as well as they were 10, 20, 30, 40, … years ago.

The United States burns 45% of its corn and smaller but still ridiculous percentages of its other big agricultural outputs as ethanol at a net disaster on carbon emissions. We let poor and homeless people interact with courts and ERs in vast numbers who need housing assistance, basic medical care, and sometimes substance abuse treatment at (people debate this exact number) somewhere in the hand-wave 10-100x range of a markup. Cops and judges and the amortized cost of lawsuits against police departments and ER doctors and ER nurses and ER equipment have a cost structure closer to a military than cheap, tax-subsidized housing and registered nurses.

The United States has absurd surpluses of arable land, exploitable energy, deep-water harbor capacity, riverine transport capacity, exploitable mineral resources, highly desirable and massively under exploited coastal real estate, you name it, it’s easier to list things that are in any way intrinsically scarce here…Coltan maybe?

The United States is in a position unique in history in which its sovereign debt is denominated in its own currency and that currency is the world’s reserve currency and that sovereign debt is the “risk-free return” r-nought embraced by modern global finance. This means that we can tailor the money supply exactly to the level of productivity that it’s used to represent, which means that being a politician or economic regulator is as easy of a job (if your goal is the public welfare) as it definitionally can be.

The United States is basically the only developed nation with no intrinsic demographic challenges (the ones that are ravaging all the other developed nations) because there is a seeming boundless supply of (statistically) young, law-abiding, productive people who still have kids wanting to immigrate here across a porous land border.

Scarcity or want of really any kind is a very, very, very expensive “luxury” (it’s not quite a Veblen good but it’s certainly conspicuous consumption) that we as a society seem prepared to spend whatever it takes to get.

Once you strip the paint jobs off of either Foucault-style postmodernism or Randian objectivism (a challenge that Noam Chomsky describes as a real feat of linguistic manipulation) you’re left with effectively the same actionable value system of there being 2 kinds of people in this world: for the lefty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they are the product of constructed forces external to them (I mean, except for us of course), for the righty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they aren’t smart or motivated enough to invent Reardon Metal and therefore insignificant (I mean, except for us, of course).

The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.

The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.

The most dangerous man in the world isn’t a Navy SEAL or a Zeta, the most dangerous man in the world is a man with nothing to lose, which is why we’re up to 4 mass shootings a day (by Mother Jones’s definition but pick one), which is per-capita more than Syria.

This little brochure is a bit hand-wavy on the math and takes a bit of poetic license, it’s not meant to be the book that someone needs to write about this. So it’ll be a trivial exercise to pick it apart in that god-awful “>”-prefixed bad-faith style, but it’s not going to be a fundamental intellectual or epistemological or ethical error that’s going to motivate people to do so, it’s that this is not a comfortable thing to see in the mirror.

> The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.

This rings true, and seems an insightful point. But I lost the plot in the following:

> The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.

I don't really get how this "result" follows, or what prescription you're hinting at. Are you just saying we're very productive but fail to distribute among the citizens? That seems like a garden variety left talking point, which is a bit.. anti-climactic. Not that I even agree or disagree overmuch, but the tone of your post made me think you were building towards a more heterodox take. Am I missing something?

Establishing the financial economics of productivity and its relationship to the Western Liberal Enlightenment conceptualization of the public good along a non-differentiable surface of capture from WWII to the present is a masters thesis alone.

The level of ambient violence in a surveillance kleptocracy with a nascent domestic security apparatus breaking through that of a country in the grips of a 7-sided civil war, this being the tip of the iceberg because the non-violent people with no hope are suiciding with fentanyl at some staggering multiple of that, and this being caused by capture is hard to prove but easy to see absent an agenda.

I don’t want to see a climax more intense than how far we’ve already traveled down that road.

I'm glad it worked out for you (and me) but we must acknowledge that luck is indeed a significant contributor.

Let's imagine that instead of getting into programming you began working odd jobs in a field that is generally low income. Some would make it to the top but most will not move forward despite working hard.

From a personal anecdote I have a close relative who is an incredible hard worker in a job adjecant to elder care. As far as I can tell their work ethic is higher than my own (no time for water cooler talks or "code is compiling") but unless things change drastically they will never make more than minimum wage.

It's fair to say that natural skill plays a big role. Despite best effort they wouldn't be abel to get a programming or othe office job because just finishing their apprenticeship took increadible effort and diligence.

In their mid twenties their parents still support them (a little bit) and being anything close to a sole bread winner is highly unrealistic.

There are economic reasons why some people are paid better but I'd say "pure luck" is a larger portion then most of us would like to admit.

Some people get a yacht and a nice holiday home for their 12 hours shifts and some get to pay their rent.

Safety nets are needed, and typically are underfunded. With one in place, most people can rebound to their most able.

Likely luck then; would you be in the same place if you didn't happen to be interested in a field that makes big money with no formal education needed?

You could disallow corporate ownership of dwellings of any sort, and heavily tax ownership of more than two homes per family unit.

You could provide significant tax benefits to lifestyles that approach self-sufficiency, such as people in rural areas that grow their own food.

You could mandate a quota of completely remote workers for many industries, encouraging the diffusion of people and opportunities across the country, instead of everyone rushing to expensive cities in hopes of finding work.

Does that mean no high density residential? I can’t see how individuals build apartment buildings.

I would have thought that "build to let" would be the rarer case, but like I said I might be blind to the idiosyncrasies of the US here

I suggest (and have suggested numerous times) that we disallow ownership of property for profit. Create a system that allows people to “buy” property short term through government loan structures that have very low interest rates and allows them to create an equity building mechanism early on. On paper it would have all the benefits of purchase with all of the benefits of leasing as well.

The flood of new available property would absolutely crash our current economy, since it’s so extended on property ownership, but we did it wrong and we need to correct.

"From 1978 to 2021, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,460%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (1,063%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 385% between 1978 and 2020, according to the latest data available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18.1% from 1978 to 2021"

Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/#:~:text=Fro....

Subsidies or government backed contributions won't be the answer. Universities have a societal function and could conceivable operate without profit in mind, but they still chose to be greedy and act like for-profit businesses once government backed loans became a thing. The government tried to fix access to education by directly injecting cash via students instead of fixing it through the universities. Taking the same approach with home buyers would be a mistake because real estate obviously is meant to be for-profit and acts that way, so they will obviously raise prices as well.

So you'll probably need to fuck over a lot of banks, investors, construction and real estate companies to get housing prices accessible to the wider population and change economic interactions in that market. I wouldn't count on that though - the government will probably choose to fix it through backed loans or subsidies again, if they do anything.

Does it really bother you someone could be ignorant of something here?

Someone who understood basic economics wouldn't assert that investors are ruining the housing market for individual family buyers without explaining how the housing market or one particular housing market is different from all the other markets were investors are helpful for bringing products and services to individuals and families. I am sympathetic for example to the argument that the housing market in Vancouver and perhaps other parts of Canada is being distorted to the detriment of families by wealthy Chinese wishing to establish a safe trove of assets outside the reach of the Chinese government. But there are more barriers to Chinese investors (and Chinese visitors) in the US than in Canada, and the US is 9 times more populous than Canada, so that makes any particular severity of distortion cause by Chinese investors at least 9 times less likely in the US than in China. Non-Chinese investors who have an accurate understanding of the other investments available to them, on the other hand, will tend to invest in housing only when they seriously expect the demand for housing to increase--"expect" as in actually willing to put money on the outcome, not merely to opine on the outcome in internet forums--so their investment helps out families on net by helping to increase the supply of housing to meet the increase in demand.

>Does it really bother you someone could be ignorant of something here?

I'm not sure I understand the question. If you'd phrase your comment as a question about economics, I wouldn't've replied like I did (with a complaint in the form of sarcasm). Most humans are vulnerable to misinformation if it is repeated sufficiently often by a sufficiently diverse set of writers or speakers, and certain economically-impossible or -implausible arguments are repeated often enough on HN that I consider it worth my time to try to counter.

So the housing market is different because housing serves as shelter. Investors owning multiple properties are eschewing the actual utility of the asset and only focused on its value. From the perspective of a society wanting to house its citizens and improve quality of living, it's a very inefficient use of the asset and the land that its on.

Because investors often have more cash than ordinary family buyers, they are able to outbid family buyers. This happens regularly and is one of the core reasons for the argument made initially.

Because investors might buy and sell housing more often than a family who actually inhabits a home, this increases the money velocity in the market and drives prices upwards as more sales are made. Canada is a good example of this: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-25.2/page-1.html

All of this means that some portion of the house's price is only based on speculation (other parts being land, construction quality, location, amenities, etc.). This means that investors that buy houses to speculate are simply increasing prices with no material improvement to the asset.

If we were talking about stocks or assets-that-aren't-also-necessities, these reasons wouldn't be a problem.

Chinese home buyers IIRC have a cultural aversion to having strangers living in any home they might want to live in themselves in the future. But with the except of the Chinese investors (which IMO cannot be numerous enough to distort the huge US housing market) investors either rent out or sell the housing they own, so I don't understand in what sense you think investors are "eschewing the actual utility of the asset": someone still gets to live in the house, even if it is not the owner of the house.

>All of this means that some portion of the house's price is only based on speculation (other parts being land, construction quality, location, amenities, etc.).

I concede that that can be an accurate statement (though it is not how I would put it) on a temporary basis, but I point out that when an investment causes current housing prices to increase, there will invariably be a time in the future when the same investment causes housing prices to be lower than they otherwise would be by approximately the same amount. And the I ask you, Why do you care more about situation of families now than about their situation in the future?

A common sentiment is that wages haven't kept up relative to costs of living, so we have problems now that need to be solved because we are already 'behind'. If that's true, it will further mean that families in the future will have less equity due to delays in purchasing a home relative to previous generations who could more easily afford necessities and luxuries.

So ideally we should give a break to home buyers now to help compensate for that at the expense of larger investors and organizations who can frankly afford the loss (collectively). The alternative is to keep investors happy and rich with profits at the expense of the population's needs and financial trajectory.

So you don't think that adding demand without adding supply makes prices go up?

Or you disagree that prices going up makes it harder for a family to buy a house?

Edit: I see you added to your comment...

> so their investment helps out families on net by helping to increase the supply of housing to meet the increase in demand

And I still disagree, because this isn't what we see happening.

>because this isn't what we see happening.

What we see happening has alternative explanations, for example: there are millions of very-high-paying jobs in the Bay Area, which is course is generally a good thing, but it has the undesirable effect of making it hard or impossible for families that do not have one of these very-high-paying jobs to live here because there are strong barriers to the creation of new housing, which forces the people with the high-paying jobs to spend more than want to spend on housing, which (happily for them) they are able to do (because of their high income) but which sadly makes it impossible or very onerous for lower-income families to live in the Bay Area. Most of these barriers are in the form of regulations imposed by local governments. Where I live for example in Marin County, growth is controlled (kept below the level investors as a group would prefer to have it at) in part by denying new housing projects the ability to connect to the Marin Municipal Water District, I have heard.

The flaw in this argument is that it assumes markets are perfectly efficient, when in reality they are affected by several factors.

> there are strong barriers to the creation of new housing

Right, this is one of those factors.

Others include land limitations, interest rates, government incentives and backstops.

Plus even if you're right that decades from now housing will be more affordable that's of little use today.

So if i am reading the very first graph right, the top 10% wealthy in USA in 2023 held about 96Trn out of 140 Trn.

The top 10 % is not usually middle class

Individual saving for retirement was cooked up in the 80s. You used to get your pension and be set.

I don't know how to find numbers, but I think that is better than pensions every were. It still isn't very good though.

At 35 i’ve already got ~500K in my 401K.

I guess it won’t work for people not saving enough into it and not actively managing their fund allocations over the years.

You are relatively well paid. Most people in the US received total less than $500k cumulative post-tax income by 35. Median incomes don't reach that level. Here are median personal income figures over the last 17 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

Those are aggregated across age, and younger people tend to earn less, so the median total income working 18 to 35 will be lower than if you add up the age-independent figures. But even if that weren't true, and if people could miraculously save 100% of everything for 17 years, live on nothing but air and get totally free housing, most people still wouldn't have seen 500k by 35.

As well, necessary expenses (housing, food, transport etc) take up a higher proportion of their income than yours, because of lower income while necessary expenses don't decrease proportionately. So the proportion they can realistically save is lower than yours. For many it's a struggle to save anything, but even for those who can and are willing to sacrifice a lot, $500k by 35 is dream money.

Active fund management are not enough to make up the difference. Most people if they want $500k in a 401k by 35, have to earn significantly more than they actually do. Of course if everyone did that, prices would rise to compensate and $500k in the 401k wouldn't be worth as much.

I started at 50K out of college and am still not quite to 100K a year yet.

All I have done is maxed out my 401K every year since 2010, and put the money into low-cost index funds.

~60% of the balance is from principal alone and the ther 40% is from the stock growth.

I think that social media really tipped the balance of fairness in the working world... With social media, suddenly Trust fund Babies could fake success, and promote schemes that helped them to profit. The Social Media model was set up to raise Trust Funders and Popular individuals far above everyone else, and it killed hopes of upward mobility for people who didn't fall into any fame or wealth category unless they became famous for negative reasons or for ridicule.

It's not that no one wants to work anymore, it's that people are tired of weak work schemes, and being used and then thrown away in order to elevate others. It's not until real opportunity for growth, entrepreneurship, and excellence returns that things will begin to get back to normal.

Talking about is as "Nobody wants to work anymore" is an injustice... Millions of people are working very hard every day on content creation that rivals TV programming and others are regularly posting their best and fully composed and edited work on Internet sites daily, most without any pay in HOPES of being discovered for their work, as proof of that.

But to take those same people, use them up, and then discard them... it makes them lose hope that their work is meaningful. Why try, when the world tells you repeatedly that it does not need or value you?

The only people I can see being happy with this arrangement might be more libertarian minded, where the goal was never outside the scope of their own self betterment.

The problem is everyone who works on something they’re passionate about (even if they suck at it) thinks they ought to be compensated, even if their contributions amount to exactly Jack shit.

Meanwhile, I do decent carpentry on the side and am hit up _regularly_ for it, simply because I’m willing to show up. And I make as much per hour as I do in my day job.

The work is out there to be passionate and make things and be successful, but you 1) have to show up and work and 2) have to not suck at it.

The ideal that people don't succeed because of the quality of their work is a fallacy... Many people who do succeed who have a shoddy/marginal history of work is also yet another example of why that ideal is not accurate.

Who's responsible for deciding where it's located? Maybe that person didn't work hard enough at thinking through the ramifications of their location. You can come up with a 1000 excuses but I guarantee the person more likely to succeed has answers for every one of them.

Not to say that luck doesn't come into play, but it's not the dominant factor and in a lot of cases can be worked around with hard work or extreme talent.

I can site a personal experience example. In Portland, for a while, nobody would visit anywhere north of Alberta on the east side of the river. Around this time, a young person by the name of Matt was selling barbecue out of his little truck up near Ainsworth and MLK. In some dirt lot with no support beyond folks like myself writing Yelp reviews, he was selling the best barbecue in the city.

Now, they have multiple locations there and are sure to grow.

Location doesn’t fucking matter. Talent matters. People will show up and buy and fill their limited stomach space. Not for 3rd best or 2nd best but for the best. And blaming them for not wanting the best is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

What thing does a landlord make? What are the hours on the job of owning dividend-paying securities? Being successful in this economy has literally nothing to do with "making things people want" and "putting in the hours".

In the comment above yours someone made the opposite example of a Baker who works all day making fantastic cakes but nobody buys them because his shop is in the wrong place, and the reply was that it's still his fault because he didn't spend enough time figuring out where and how to sell his wares. Making a good decision is just as much making a "thing" as making a physical object.

I think you are also mixing up wealth and success. A very rich man whose stock portfolio does not keep up with inflation is still very rich, but he is not successful.