I remember when we started talking about self driving cars on this site in 2015, consensus was 2021-2023 is when it would begin to scale. Well, it is 2022 and it doesn't seem like it is anywhere close to reality.

Even if the tech is ready to go, by the time the regulations get sorted out, who knows when it would even begin to scale?

As I get older, I realize more and more the world moves slowwwwwwwwwww when you are living in it

Level IV is absolutely a reality and presently driving on the streets of Phoenix.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/08/here...n-phoenix.html

Regulatory and legal is the barrier, not tech. The tech is already fieldable.

When someone claims that families could survive off of 1 income back in the 50s its valid to point out that that was only true for white families. Married black women had much higher labor force participation rates than their white counterparts even then and were closer to married women today than married white women then.

Yes but this is only of very limited anthropological interest in those vast regions of the developed world where married black women only made up about 0.1 to 1% of the work force, if that, in the 50s.

Its of almost no economic impact or import in those regions.

Hint. The world is bigger than Yanklandia, and things that are important at certain times in Yanklandia, might not be important in the rest of the world.

Hint: You joined a conversation specifically about the United States

It's of course completely valid to point out that this is not an accurate picture of life in 1985 for a huge swath of the American population.

Your missing the point .
We speak about inflation .

Compare any stock market value of corporation (pe) , compare house prices , etc .

Everything was much lower prices than today .
Why you think it is if it’s not because of the US currency being much stronger that it is today with interest rates around 10% ?

And who do u think it favours having a strong currency if not the majority of the workforce since the only way usually they have to make money it is through wages …
Being paid with a strong currency obviously helps more the bottom 50-60% since everything else cost much less .
Permitting 1 person to provide its entire family …

Ho yes , and it’s much harder to leverage and gain artificial wealth like the top 10% does since the cost of money it’s much higher ….

The value of currency have much higher economic implication than You seem to think …

Ps: I’m not even talking about other factors like disappearance of unions , lower tax , etc .
That play a role too .

U can focus on racial but on aggregate it doesn’t change much when the population u speak of made not even 10% In the 1950 or 20% in the 80 to explain vast disparity in wealth inequality between the top 1-10% and the bottom 50-60% that increasing to unsustainable level for decades ….

No, I got the "point". You were asking why you only needed 1 wage earner in 1985. I was simply pointing out that that wasn't true for many families in 1985.

Looks pretty stable over the last 100 years or so anyway. I think what people think of as a lack of progress by the middle class, median, bottom 50%, etc. is that they are no longer gaining a share in wealth at the same rate as they did from the early 1900s to the 50s-70s.

Yes but it is was true for plenty of swathes of other populations in developed countries and it had nothing to do with free rolling the productivity and output of black people because economically speaking there wasnt any.

So whilst you might be specifically discussing a specific country, you are also talking about a universal phenomenon across most developed countries, which also ended roughly at the same time in said countries.

It would be reasonable to assume the cause of this was universal across developed countries.

Racial reasons would not fit this assumption.

The sex discrimination argument seems odd.

Womens work was being free rolled, the moment they were able to earn a fair wage, the families they belonged to became poorer. This is literally what you claim above.

No. When a husband made X and a women could only make .3X women didn't work because why bother? Now in many couples the man might make X and the women makes anywhere from .8x to 1.2x it's more of a question on whether they both want to work or not. The exception is obviously low income where 1.3x might be required for survival. But even now in the US 2/3 of married women with children under 5 don't work and a majority with older kids do. Of course part of that is child care costs, but also women simply working because they can have real career that they couldn't 50+ years ago. That's why is so reductionist to just talk about inflation, completely ignore populations that have basically been 2 income the whole time etc.

Shouldn’t a good and efficient economy lift all boats ?


Clearly the wealth gap expand even more today , since 2010 was just the end of the GFC .

with multiple QE , keeping low interest rates during the 2010 decade , deficits increasing by lowering taxes , it kills even more the currency and we see incredibly bad results with unaffordable houses , pension funds getting destroy since they are oblige to buy treasuries with no return , ridiculous cost in education and health care , at the same time the wealthiest increase they wealth share even more and faster leaving crumbs for the rest ..

3-5% might not seem a lot for you , but we are at trillions of $ today , not billions or millions in previous decades …..

Trillions is vastly different in value since the population growth much slower and still in millions

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion...rica/?amp=true

« According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year. »


The Reagan /Tatcher trickle down economy concept as totally ruin the majority of people wages .

Yeah, we clearly don't have a strong economy. Politicians started measuring economic success by the S&P 500, which has been artificially growing due to suppressed yields from QE.

Unless we get a technological breakthrough, our economy will be declining over time. Growth is highly correlated by demographics and we will continue aging for the foreseeable future.

Japan couldn't overcome demographics. Europe couldn't. We are next in line, then China.

Although inflation is all the rage now and will continue on and off this decade, ultimately we will be facing disinflationary/deflationary pressures long term where we can't stimulate inflation no matter how much we print.

Well I used the concept of 1 family member in 1985 because it was th least period it was feasible .
1985 was on its last leg for that concept .
But we see clearly that offshoring manufacturing jobs over decades prevent vast amount of people to gain wealth since the majority only can count on wages to gain wealth .

What was the road to big debt at the expense of the middle class with inflation ?
1 working family member , than it went to both parents , than it was credit cards , after was multiple time refinancing houses , ending at killing the currency (and wages) with 0% interest rates with huge debt all around in government (not enough tax revenue) corporations (leverage too much needing bailout and QE) ) and individuals ( student loans for example) .

Like OAFKI said , it’s pretty much the same story all over the world .

I think you are coming in with the notion that things are getting worse and picking out only the data that confirms that, when the reality is more complicated. The average number of years spent in retirement was only 8 in 1950 and almost half of men over 65 were still working. People were poor as hell then too, it's just that preferences have been shifted. More women work now, more men are spending multiple decades in retirement. THe number of years the average retiree gets is almost triple and the percentage of men working over 65 has gone down by 2/3s. When you want to talk about what's preventing people from gaining wealth, you can't pretend like 1950 or 1985 was great for a "vast amount of people". Many back then were clocking in at menial jobs basically waiting to die.

The middle class was better off back then. Their wages were much higher and they could reasonably afford to buy a home. It's much harder now for the lower/middle class to afford homes/assets given the wage suppression over the past three decades since we've offshored labor. Those that benefitted most from the system were those that got the benefits of globalization in much cheaper goods + didn't have their jobs offshored, something like healthcare comes to mind.

The middle class had to work until they dropped dead back then.

And what do they do now?

I’m mot arguing things are great now. I’m saying they weren’t great back then.

I said they were better, relative to now. Not even sure what your argument is. Middle class can't afford things now, they could back then.

And the middle class can afford things now they couldn’t back then, like retirement where men were 3x as likely to be working past 65 as now. You can’t just ignore the data that doesn’t fit your narrative.

This is a joke, right? Look at the things people had "back then" and compare to right now. What is it that you think people can't buy?

Everything? Inflation adjusted wages have not kept up with education, healthcare, home prices, S&P 500 shares. The middle class got completely screwed over the past 4 decades.

I don’t understand why you’d want stocks or real estate to do worse than inflation adjusted wages. Can you explain that?

Education and healthcare prices grow faster than wages because the government tries to prevent them from doing so.

The middle class wages in particular have gone up substantially less over time than asset prices. The middle class of today can no longer afford to buy homes/invest as easily. Those that have had access to investments when they have appreciated at an accelerated pace have had incredible compounding growth. The top 10% own 89% of the stock market. The wealth inequality benefits the rich at the expense of the middle class.

How are the middle class better off now than before? When wealth inequality was much less the pie was distributed more evenly. It’s now becoming increasingly concentrated because the wealthy use their excess gains to buy more real estate/stocks