AEIdeas

From the article: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last."

There have been many postings to Hacker News recently with similar themes. The situation described increasingly looks like the situation in the worst-off countries in western Europe, where an ossified social welfare system insulates the older generation (approximately people from the oldest people now living down to people with birth years before 1970) from the economic situation of the younger generation. The United States used to be much less like that, but the Silent Generation (roughly, the people born during the Great Depression) throughout their lives acquiesced in government policies that resulted in an enormous income transfer to people in their generation at the expense of younger people, including Baby Boomers like me.

[AFTER FIRST EDIT: A friend who is a Ph.D. policy analyst for the federal government sent me a link the other day raising the question "Has the US median household income really stagnated over the past 30 years?"

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-7-most-illuminating-economic-charts-of-2012/

(point 6 in the link). I think the statement is surely correct that actual ability to spend on the part of Americans on goods and services they desire has increased in…

The data doesn't support many of your views. Specifically, the claim that modern engines are somehow less reliable than the "good old days". I know you're only reporting anecdotes from people you'd consider to have a good view on the matter, but you have to keep in mind the biases involved with those views. A mechanic sees nothing but broken cars all day long. Their views are going to be skewed by their experience. Those views are not reflective of the much greater population of vehicles that experience no problems at all.

The reality is that cars have never been more reliable:

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/02/when-it-comes-to-new-vehicles-todays-models-are-cheaper-and-more-reliable-than-ever-before/

> “The long-term dependability of three-year-old models has improved year-over-year, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2013 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study.

> “In 2013, overall vehicle dependability averages 126 PP100–a five percent improvement from the 2012 average of 132 PP100–and is the lowest problem count since the inception of the study in 1989.”

Simplicity makes engines easier to work on for the layman, but it doesn't necessarily make them more reliable.

I'm a total gear head. My love affair with cars started really early. At 3, I figured out how to use a screw driver by taking the tail lights off my dad's VW Beetle. At age 7, I helped my dad tear a VW Beetle's 4-cylinder boxer engine down to the case halves, then put it back together. I was infatuated…

>> But the increasing divide in between the rich and the poor and the nouveau riche will only hurt in long term. History has taught us that. I hope my American friends will learn this for the larger good.

Every time I hear this, I wonder if people just don't know that we lift more people out of poverty every year, or its just such a common misconception that is now engrained in our culture.

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/10/land-of-opportunity-almost-93-of-all-new-millionaires-worldwide-in-the-last-year-were-americans/

"Land of opportunity: Of the 1.8M net increase in global millionaires last year, more than 9 out of 10 were Americans"

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/17/2633881/poverty-data-shows-importance-safety-net-programs-millions/

"The official poverty rate was essentially unchanged at 15.1 percent in 2012, and alternative measures show that safety net programs like food stamps, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and tax credits for the working poor keep tens of millions of Americans out of poverty each year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday."

Maybe we have different ideas of what poor is?

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty

"“The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.”[3] In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD…

The U.S. imported more oil for a while, decreasing domestic production, and then recently began importing less oil and increasing domestic production again in areas that had been left as reserves or hadn't been commercially feasible before the record high per-barrel prices of oil a decade ago (see e.g. http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/01/us-drilling-boom-brings-net-oil-imports-to-a-20-year-low/ ; there are other sources available online if you don't like AEI).

So we have to look at world oil production, not just domestic. And, although world oil production is still growing, that growth is clearly in decline as most new sources for oil require far more effort to extract than in the past (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Oil_Production.png).

I'm not a peak oil alarmist. It's entirely sensible to expect that as oil becomes more difficult to extract, its price will go up, and as its price goes up, new sources of oil will become more feasible to engineer.

But, so much of oil production and consumption and everything associated with it is horrible and disgusting and a potential ecological and economic disaster waiting to happen. (...Deepwater Horizon...)

We shouldn't need peak oil scaremongering to move us off of oil dependence quickly. It should make sense to do so anyway, especially as other technologies continue to improve.

In 1970, 55 percent of U.S. income was earned by households in the middle 60 percent of the income distribution. More than half of households were in what Pew Research Center has labeled the “middle tier” of households (those earning between two-thirds and twice the median income). In 2013, both numbers had fallen to about 45 percent.

It's not clear that this is an apples-to-apples comparison, but this AEI chart suggests this statistic might not be as disheartening as it sounds:

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/07/yes-the-middle-class-has-been-disappearing-but-they-havent-fallen-into-the-lower-class-theyve-risen-into-the-upper-class/

In other words, America’s “middle class” did start largely disappearing in the 1970s, but it was because they were moving up to a higher-income category, not down into a lower-income category. And that movement was so significant that between 1967 and 2009, the share of American families earning incomes above $75,000 more than doubled, from 16.3% to 39.1%.

This reads like something from a parallel universe in which Google doesn't do quality work, where legacy media companies adjusted to the Internet (by losing two thirds of their revenues?[1]), and where the US has a lot to learn from Europe because we here are clearly at the cutting edge of the digital revolution.

Americans came up with Google, Amazon, Twitter and every other company named in that article when we are implementing some ridiculous memory hole ruling and hiding links in search results. That's where our "aggressive officials" have led us[2].

The best part though was a worry over the absence of the Frankfurt School thought at a web2.0 conference.

[1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/newspaper.jpg

[2] http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20120728_FBC674.png