I like the idea of visible vs invisible here. It approaches what I think is one of the biggest issues of the day which is "Why do so many people think that the economy sucks when the official statistics don't look too bad?"
Ignoring how easy it is for statistics to be misleading, let alone outright lies, the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution. It doesn't matter how well an economy is doing, if the majority of wealth is accruing to a small minority.
> the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution
They actually aren't. Median income is measured as a median for a reason. Poverty line statistics are taken at the low end. Local CPI and price data is taken and reported. And all of those numbers are, indeed, getting better and not worse.
I repeat this everywhere this subject comes up, but the real reason things look like they're getting worse is unsavory. More than two generations back, people were on balance poorer but they were black, so they didn't matter. Or they were immigrant, or single mothers, or institutionalized, or otherwise invisible to the white-picket-fence set who were all buying their family homes on one income.
Well, all those other demographics have done super well in the last half century, reaching parity with white men at the low end of the spectrum.
And those white men are the pissed off groypers detailed in the article. Not "Americans" in the abstract.
I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part.
> I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part.
So you favor a race to the bottom, but you want a single race to go to the bottom faster than the others in order to become more like minorities in the sixties.
That kind of morbid attitudes is why Pareto developed his notion of optimality and efficiency.
To be clear: I don't "favor" anything. I was making a point about the demographic that is upset, and a connection as to why. Social policy is hard, but things don't get better by perpetuating inequality. Surely you agree with that part?
Groypers (to continue to wave the label as a broad brush) aren't actually poorer than their compatriots. They're not even poorer than their ancestors, really. They're mad because everyone else is doing so much better than their ancestors.
Again, when you see someone cite a statistic that "You used to be able to afford a home with one working class income", you're being fed a line. That wasn't ever possible (until the last two or three decades) unless that income was being paid to a white man.
"Moot" wouldn't be correct here. It is applied to a question, one whose assumptions do not apply. There are definitely moot questions involved here, but the usage above isn't about that. It is about statistics, which are not themselves questions. So they can be mute but not moot.
This US is a big place, I don’t think it’s accurate to start an article with “traveling accross America” when you only drove around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of South FL.
… and then compare to two cities in different European countries and think THEY are representative. There are many cities in Europe I can name that feel terribly dilapidated.
I think the article has the nugget of some good ideas and would love to hear them explored a little more rigorously and with more critical thinking.
It also seems to focus on those with student loans and degrees they'll never use, when we've never had much more than half of HS graduates enroll in a 4-year college the following year and over 60% of the population over 25 lack any college degree.
US didn’t have many large prosperous cities in the west or most of the south until very recently. Railroads and AC really changed where people lived in America.
I was going back to 1940 as recent history, back in say 1840 the largest southern city was New Orleans followed by Charleston, SC at 29k people and Louisville, KY at 21k.
To wonder where the wealth went you need to look at places that where at some point wealthy. Wealth however takes time to accumulate because waves of immigrants or kids from population booms don’t tend to have a lot of wealth.
It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
No. It's not the subscriptions or lattes. Those are markets that have real competition.
It's the sectors of the economy that have become consolidated. Food, insurance, banking, healthcare. There is very little competition in those markets and prices are artificially high because huge conglomerates manage to siphon off a larger and larger stake, while preventing small players from offering an alternative either through market power or regulation.
Unlike subscriptions, it does not show up on your credit or debit card statement because the price of everything just goes up by a little percentage here and there.
I call it Rent-seeking, of which, subscription fees are just a part.
The biggest issue here is that the "meta" of capitalism has turned to toll booths and rent collection. This is why people say that American capitalism is turning into neo-feudalism, the people making the money are not the people producing things of value, its the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies that can continuously tax the peasantry.
> the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies
Largest household expense after housing is usually (sometimes indirect) health insurance premiums. For a family of 4, this is running on the order of $30k annually now. That's creeping up on half the median household income (which often requires two workers).
Hiding this very real expense in tax deductions for employers obscures the fact of just how large it is.
If yes, then conceptually we're on the same page, if no, then I think this is wildly off base.
If rent is not a subscription fee, then you're probably talking about virtual goods like entertainment and games. I think consumers get a ton of value from digital entertainment and media, the problem is that literally everything else in the physical world feels like it's getting more expensive and falling apart.
Young people have virtually limitless virtual entertainment and media options. But they have almost no options when it comes to affordable housing or transportation.
The cost of housing has outpaced inflation every year for 2 decades (basically the entire lifetime of Gen-Z) and owning a home feels more and more out of reach every year. The average age of first time homebuyers is now over 40 years old, and the average age of all homebuyers is over 50.
The average cost of a new car in the US is now over $50,000. Public transit projects if they're being built at all are years behind schedule and billions over budget, and existing infrastructure is falling apart. This is in a time where wage growth has stagnated.
It's completely understandable why young people feel they're getting a raw deal, and wealthier and older people seem more out of touch every year. Actual physical needs : housing, transportation, healthcare and food feel viscerally more expensive every year.
Capitalism seems to only want to address these needs by pushing more and more substitution of virtual entertainment: Have more games, more apps, more stuff on social media, more cat videos, AI generated content in endless quantity.
It's almost like the internet is the Heroin of our age, a drug that keeps both the stock market and individual consumers high so they're less conscious of how much everything in the physical world sucks more every day.
TLDR; if you're founding a company do a hardware startup. We're maxxed out in how much our digital services can improve our lives.
"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula."
In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation.
Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about.
I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
Are you sure paper wealth truly translates into world of atoms. The fact that market values some hypothetical future profits of TSLA at 270x current profits vs Ford 7x is cool but can you actually deploy a significant fraction of that into real physical world?
No, but I dont think it matters if wealth truly translates as a 1:1 relationship.
What matters is that the wealthy specifically invest in the mobility of wealth itself. They will absolutely pay a premium to make the wealth move more easily from one place to another. Many will gladly pay $10 to make $5 more mobile, so to speak.
A prime example of this being many cryptocurrencies which can be argued are a means of making large sums of wealth more portable.
Again to do what? at scale there are many physical constraints. You can't take physical resources used to create a 500M yacht and build 100 apartment buildings. Those crazy valuations exist in part because none really tries to convert any significant portion of that paper wealth into physical things.
I'm not sure if I'm following this example. A 500M Yacht concretely uses a large amount of materials/engineers/building expertise, right? It's not the exact same skills as building apartments but it is concrete "atoms" in terms of materials, engineering, sweat labor, fuel. Those resources could be used on apartments.
It's not like there's a fixed number of naturally occurring megayachts around and the $500m price is a fiction that isn't fungible to be used on other things
It doesn't seem related to the "you have a trillion dollars on paper but that's mostly fiction" topic. The $500m yacht has been materialized to "atoms" and isn't on paper anymore.
Yep but if you take all that paper wealth and distribute it you aint getting much physical shit out of it. The yacht example is relevant for ratio of how even physically manifested rich people toys convert to real world things people care about. 250M NYC apartment only consumed physical resources enough to build 15 regular size homes and so on.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. What does it matter the actual physical atoms? A mole of gold costs more than a mole of carbon. How much you can “deploy” with 500m differs.
Maybe you’re trying to say if they actually liquidated their wealth to spend any sufficient fraction their paper wealth would disappear but that’s the point of pulling out the value without liquidating.
I am saying people imaging that significant portion of paper wealth could be converted into tangible things for regular people like housing, infra etc.
Yea, wealth seems invisible because we peasants aren't even let into the places where these wealthy people roam. They live in an entirely different world than us, and they invest heavily in that world's function.
I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actually use at this income level. Or maybe their whole life is delivered to their door by this point.
The personal automobile is the cause for most of these problems. The US gutted many of its cities by widening streets and removing public transport, and newer cities are simply not built to any comparable density because they are built with the car as the primary mode of transportation.
Is that a new thing, though? Or could it go back decades to a time when Americans didn’t feel their country was decaying? Already in the 1960s Los Angeles was depicted as immense sprawl where people drove long distances for everything.
This goes to where our wealthiest people no longer invest in our society.
We used to use a progressive tax system as the means of helping this process along, but I dont think anyone can argue that this has since been subverted.
The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one.
I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was.
Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.
I think Thiel's right, though I despise the man immensly for unrelated reasons.
I grew up wildly excited about the capitalist world of promise and meritocracy in which I was going to grow to be a man. I never had grand ambitions of becoming wealthy, but wanted to work hard so that I coulod have a nice life and build a family.
Now that im an adult, I cant think of a single reason to be proud of the current system. Ive worked incredibly hard for a life of 'getting by'. Im incredibly privileged where my friends and family are not, and cannot imagine the struggle and hardship of those with less prospects than me.
I cannot in good conscience witness the world in which I am now an adult and say that this capitalism is a good thing. The people around me are suffering and I firmly believe that it is every man's duty to fight for their family and community. Nothing about fighting for community here involves supporting capitalism as it stands today.
(pedantic nit-pick, sorry) Killkenny is only a city by charter, it has a population as of the last census of 27,184 – it is in no sense of the word an actual city.
I wonder if it’s even a transfer of wealth or just all an illusion.
It’s easier to downplay inflation so people think they’re doing better.
In 12 years, my salary is up about 50%, most of the change since Covid. Sure, sounds amazing… However, home prices doubled. Consequently auto, home, and flood insurance has at least doubled. Prices on even raw food has gotten crazy, restaurants are also 50-100% increase in prices. Health insurance is about 4x what it used to be for me. Tax bracket is higher.
So aside from the huge luck of low interest loan at a smaller principal, it doesn’t feel like anything amazing has happened.
On the flip side, I feel the plight of those looking at a 30yr loan at 5-6% on $500k. I can’t stomach it today and certainly not 12 years ago either.
By normal inflation rates, feels like I’ve seen maybe a 15% “raise” for over a decade extra of specialized experience —- before considering increased costs. Of course that was from changing jobs twice…
And quite frankly, property ownership is somewhat a poor investment, just better than renting. The S&P 500 has nearly tripled over the same time period. Of course, taking a 15 or 30 year loan for stock market investment would be insane (aside from impossible).
People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x.
People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked.
The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well.
The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths.
And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.
The last time this happened in America it gave rise to Progressivism.
Mandani is the first in a long line of corrective actions that American society needs to make in order to correct itself and not deteriorate into neo-feudalism.
That’s exactly and inherently what capitalism is. Rate of return on capital is higher than rate of return on labor. The people with capital continue to pull ahead. And in America, we now decided to compound this by not taxing and undertaking capital. Which then allows those with capital to transfer some of their capital to political power that then accrues even more advantage to capital owners
When capital is vastly more valued than labor then its an asset bubble that will pop. Labor is the actual economy, capital is a make believe economy, when corrections happens its that capital loses all their bubble money not that labor catches up to that imaginary world.
When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail.
I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question.
We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.
This weird 'hero narrative' that the CEO class build all the things needs to die. Those billionaires would be nothing without standing on the shoulders of the workers.
You are right, which is why the workers get so much more than the CEO. Basically no CEO makes more money than his workers combined, he adds a small percentage of the value so he gets a small percentage of the revenue. In a typical company most revenue goes to workers, then a smaller part to leaders for organizing the workers and payback to investors who invested in the equipment for the workers.
If you don't pay leaders to organize or investors for equipment then workers wont have organization or equipment and will be much less productive, it is better this way. This makes workers richer under capitalism than any other economic system tried.
Wait, your operating system was coded by one single individual? Holy shit that must have taken him 10 life times, if not more!
Wow, you know a person who can mine, smelt, and forge steel into a computer case... While still having time to mine, process, purify, reprocess, and design the whole die process not just for a CPU but GPU's and all matter of electronic components!?!!??!
Holy shit, you know someone who can design, assemble, and launch not one comm sat...but dozen?!?! And he builds the rockets all by himself as well?!?!? And he built the ground stations and infrastructure required to power and connect to them?!!?!
Oh you know a guy who can write a forum.... Yeah that's kind of neat I guess...
But let's be real here. These single individuals did not produce Thousands upon thousands of life times worth of value by their lonesomes. It required standing upon the shoulders of countless individuals, not even taking into account the organizational structures of governments, their utilities, and people long dead who built the world they used to make their billions.
We have more companies that can be classified as monopolies in existence than ever before.
In principal our market is not a zero sum game, but in practice we see it quickly collapsing to become one.
How many of the billionaires you mention are themselves the proginy of previously wealthy parents?
At least in the US, it wasn't better in the past. Railroads were often private monopolies on certain routes. The Interstate highway system is much more open in comparison (lots of competition in trucking), and so is the Internet.
> built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire
Billionaires did not build any operating systems or computers or launch any satellites or write any web pages you are using. Workers built those things while billionaires watched.
Linux is a testament to how much we don't need billionaires to organize ourselves to create these things.
When I went to university, my minimum wage summer job could pay for tuition and dorm fees for the entire year. The price is up over 20x since then, and in some colleges it's even higher. It's because of the predatory student loans allowed universities to charge whatever prices they wanted and they knew that students would get the loans to pay for them. It's sickening.
First we must stipulate that the price you pay is not the tuition price. I went to a school that was #1 in tuition when I attended and I paid less than state school -- not because of loans but because of grants the school gave me.
Look at the history: in the 20th century, there was a general understanding that public education was a good thing. My grandmother born in the 20s only graduated middle school. My parents born in the 50s graduated high school and went to a little community college. By the time I was in school in the 90s, it was expected that pretty much everyone who could, should go to college. All of my peers went to college. None of my parents' peers did.
What happened due to this was there were too many students and not enough schools. This caused tuitions to rise. So they built more schools, but that doesn't really solve the problem because as the schools become more popular, the land they are built on and housing around them starts to increase in cost. Schools can't do much about this, but they do have to raise their tuition in response. Schools are in nice areas and attract a lot of high-net-worth professionals. You build a school somewhere and soon you need a hospital, some high tech jobs, a sports team, music venues, public transportation, lawyers, patent attorneys, day cares, and then eventually even more schools. So there's a pretty normal supply/demand issue going on that causes tuition to rise naturally before we even talk about student loans. See: Merced CA over the last 10 years after UC Merced was built there. It went from a Central Valley backwater to a really nice place to live and raise a family. So schools aren't really even schools anymore, they are more like small cities.
What about those sky high sticker prices? Are they that high because schools are confident the government will foot the bill? At the middle tier, yes. These are the schools that are not getting the best students, or the richest students, but they still have to pay competitive salaries for teachers, they still have to pay market rate for land, they have to pay for all the site licenses to Google and Microsoft and Mathworks and Elsevier and Jstor etc... and they still have to deal with the economic reality of being a non profit entity with a public service mission. But not for student loans, those schools would not exist, which would mean higher tuition at the remaining schools.
But, loans to mid tier schools are not the reason Stanford can charge $60k a year. Elite school can charge that, because plenty of rich people are willing to pay full sticker price to send their little bundle of joy to those brand name schools. So that's what elite schools do, they set their price at the level those rich people are willing to pay, and that sticker price keeps going up and up because that elite population keeps getting richer and richer.
The elite institutions set the ceiling, the community colleges set the floor, and then all the in-between state schools, private SLACS, off-ivies, price themselves in the middle. If student loans went away tomorrow, the lower tier schools would suffer most, but the upper tier schools would just admit more rich families and charge them more. Maybe there's not enough to spread between them, maybe they have to close some departments and hire fewer professors, but you wouldn't see tuition fall unless the rich couldn't pay it anymore.
Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City.
So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis".
Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.
But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".
It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative.
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
having 50 different flavours of ice cream and a big TV available is a fifteen year olds idea of paradise, but what people actually care about is infrastructure, public health, safety, childcare and progress in the material world.
The US has the problem that the commons and the physical world have been run into the ground, the country has effectively become the Wall-E future.
I don't know what you're talking about. All of the things you mentioned have significantly improved over my life. I can bike around my city without it being a suicide mission, pre-Obamacare health care was way worse, crime and accidental deaths are down, and we got stuff like Headstart and free Pre-K. I don't know what progress in the material world you think are missing.
This is what I mean by unrelentingly negative. The world today is way better than the world I was born into.
I'm sorry to say you're very out of touch. This rosy picture is objectively wrong when it comes to housing.
Start with the fundamentals - construction has gotten more expensive. Unlike virtually every other industry in the US, it actually costs more to build residential housing per square foot (inflation adjusted) than it did in 1960. Construction workers in 2025 are *less efficient* than they were 50 years ago, despite all of our technological advancements.
This translates to housing construction that has not kept pace with the growth of the population. The average first time homebuyer is now over 40 years old, and the median homebuyer is 55 years old.
Everyone needs housing. If you bought your house 20 years ago, you likely did not notice that housing has become unaffordably expensive for most young people. Sure, you're having fun biking around the city, but people aren't going to enjoy life in the city if they cannot afford housing.
> I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits.
None of these have anything to do with the prosperity - or lack of it - of the average American.
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhoused and the impoverished. And I'm know there are people who are doing things that are their passion unrelated to that.
But I have to say, your list for is remarkable for being about things, not people. You amazed by the cool stuff available for some people for a lot of money and some things that are pretty cheap. But X percent of the population can't pay their rent with their income, cool stuff for sale is hardly going to help them. And indeed that statement itself is a strong illustration of how self-insulating people are from the conditions people live with.
I feel like it's such a cultural thing here in the US. There is a pervasive culture of individualism and operating wholly within ones own means. Need help? Don't ask your neighbor for help, ask Our LLM (tm) for only $9.99 a month! I'm being hyperbolic of course.
This is leaking out of the us, too. The cultural gap between people who have money, access to the internet, and who can speak english, and those people living within a mile away who have none of these things, has never been wider.
I like the idea of visible vs invisible here. It approaches what I think is one of the biggest issues of the day which is "Why do so many people think that the economy sucks when the official statistics don't look too bad?"
Ignoring how easy it is for statistics to be misleading, let alone outright lies, the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution. It doesn't matter how well an economy is doing, if the majority of wealth is accruing to a small minority.
> the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution
They actually aren't. Median income is measured as a median for a reason. Poverty line statistics are taken at the low end. Local CPI and price data is taken and reported. And all of those numbers are, indeed, getting better and not worse.
I repeat this everywhere this subject comes up, but the real reason things look like they're getting worse is unsavory. More than two generations back, people were on balance poorer but they were black, so they didn't matter. Or they were immigrant, or single mothers, or institutionalized, or otherwise invisible to the white-picket-fence set who were all buying their family homes on one income.
Well, all those other demographics have done super well in the last half century, reaching parity with white men at the low end of the spectrum.
And those white men are the pissed off groypers detailed in the article. Not "Americans" in the abstract.
I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part.
> I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part.
So you favor a race to the bottom, but you want a single race to go to the bottom faster than the others in order to become more like minorities in the sixties.
That kind of morbid attitudes is why Pareto developed his notion of optimality and efficiency.
To be clear: I don't "favor" anything. I was making a point about the demographic that is upset, and a connection as to why. Social policy is hard, but things don't get better by perpetuating inequality. Surely you agree with that part?
Groypers (to continue to wave the label as a broad brush) aren't actually poorer than their compatriots. They're not even poorer than their ancestors, really. They're mad because everyone else is doing so much better than their ancestors.
Again, when you see someone cite a statistic that "You used to be able to afford a home with one working class income", you're being fed a line. That wasn't ever possible (until the last two or three decades) unless that income was being paid to a white man.
[flagged]
"Moot" wouldn't be correct here. It is applied to a question, one whose assumptions do not apply. There are definitely moot questions involved here, but the usage above isn't about that. It is about statistics, which are not themselves questions. So they can be mute but not moot.
no, mute is the right word here, in the sense of "silent".
Trump has literally shut down many of the agencies responbible for making the reports.
We live in a banana republic.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
https://www.science.org/content/article/republican-push-make...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/federal...
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-disbands-2-ex...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-government-data-pu...
This US is a big place, I don’t think it’s accurate to start an article with “traveling accross America” when you only drove around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of South FL.
… and then compare to two cities in different European countries and think THEY are representative. There are many cities in Europe I can name that feel terribly dilapidated.
I think the article has the nugget of some good ideas and would love to hear them explored a little more rigorously and with more critical thinking.
It also seems to focus on those with student loans and degrees they'll never use, when we've never had much more than half of HS graduates enroll in a 4-year college the following year and over 60% of the population over 25 lack any college degree.
US didn’t have many large prosperous cities in the west or most of the south until very recently. Railroads and AC really changed where people lived in America.
https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg vs zoom in a little here: https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html
LA and New Orleans should have made the list, after that it’s more questionable.
What is "very recently"? Atlanta for example is a central rail hub and was founded 188 years ago as Terminus.
I was going back to 1940 as recent history, back in say 1840 the largest southern city was New Orleans followed by Charleston, SC at 29k people and Louisville, KY at 21k.
To wonder where the wealth went you need to look at places that where at some point wealthy. Wealth however takes time to accumulate because waves of immigrants or kids from population booms don’t tend to have a lot of wealth.
Depends on your definition of large and of prosperous.
Two words: “subscription fees”
It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
No. It's not the subscriptions or lattes. Those are markets that have real competition.
It's the sectors of the economy that have become consolidated. Food, insurance, banking, healthcare. There is very little competition in those markets and prices are artificially high because huge conglomerates manage to siphon off a larger and larger stake, while preventing small players from offering an alternative either through market power or regulation.
Unlike subscriptions, it does not show up on your credit or debit card statement because the price of everything just goes up by a little percentage here and there.
Health Insurance is the ultimate subscription…
All of these things are true.
I call it Rent-seeking, of which, subscription fees are just a part. The biggest issue here is that the "meta" of capitalism has turned to toll booths and rent collection. This is why people say that American capitalism is turning into neo-feudalism, the people making the money are not the people producing things of value, its the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies that can continuously tax the peasantry.
> the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies
Largest household expense after housing is usually (sometimes indirect) health insurance premiums. For a family of 4, this is running on the order of $30k annually now. That's creeping up on half the median household income (which often requires two workers).
Hiding this very real expense in tax deductions for employers obscures the fact of just how large it is.
Not the lattes! The horror!
Are you counting rent as a subscription fee?
If yes, then conceptually we're on the same page, if no, then I think this is wildly off base.
If rent is not a subscription fee, then you're probably talking about virtual goods like entertainment and games. I think consumers get a ton of value from digital entertainment and media, the problem is that literally everything else in the physical world feels like it's getting more expensive and falling apart.
Young people have virtually limitless virtual entertainment and media options. But they have almost no options when it comes to affordable housing or transportation.
The cost of housing has outpaced inflation every year for 2 decades (basically the entire lifetime of Gen-Z) and owning a home feels more and more out of reach every year. The average age of first time homebuyers is now over 40 years old, and the average age of all homebuyers is over 50.
The average cost of a new car in the US is now over $50,000. Public transit projects if they're being built at all are years behind schedule and billions over budget, and existing infrastructure is falling apart. This is in a time where wage growth has stagnated.
It's completely understandable why young people feel they're getting a raw deal, and wealthier and older people seem more out of touch every year. Actual physical needs : housing, transportation, healthcare and food feel viscerally more expensive every year.
Capitalism seems to only want to address these needs by pushing more and more substitution of virtual entertainment: Have more games, more apps, more stuff on social media, more cat videos, AI generated content in endless quantity.
It's almost like the internet is the Heroin of our age, a drug that keeps both the stock market and individual consumers high so they're less conscious of how much everything in the physical world sucks more every day.
TLDR; if you're founding a company do a hardware startup. We're maxxed out in how much our digital services can improve our lives.
Rent is a subscription. A mortgage is not. We’re on the same page.
"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula."
In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
Are you sure paper wealth truly translates into world of atoms. The fact that market values some hypothetical future profits of TSLA at 270x current profits vs Ford 7x is cool but can you actually deploy a significant fraction of that into real physical world?
No, but I dont think it matters if wealth truly translates as a 1:1 relationship. What matters is that the wealthy specifically invest in the mobility of wealth itself. They will absolutely pay a premium to make the wealth move more easily from one place to another. Many will gladly pay $10 to make $5 more mobile, so to speak.
A prime example of this being many cryptocurrencies which can be argued are a means of making large sums of wealth more portable.
https://www.dcfpi.org/all/how-wealthy-households-use-a-buy-b...
Yes they can get at that wealth, tax free at that!
Again to do what? at scale there are many physical constraints. You can't take physical resources used to create a 500M yacht and build 100 apartment buildings. Those crazy valuations exist in part because none really tries to convert any significant portion of that paper wealth into physical things.
I'm not sure if I'm following this example. A 500M Yacht concretely uses a large amount of materials/engineers/building expertise, right? It's not the exact same skills as building apartments but it is concrete "atoms" in terms of materials, engineering, sweat labor, fuel. Those resources could be used on apartments.
It's not like there's a fixed number of naturally occurring megayachts around and the $500m price is a fiction that isn't fungible to be used on other things
It doesn't seem related to the "you have a trillion dollars on paper but that's mostly fiction" topic. The $500m yacht has been materialized to "atoms" and isn't on paper anymore.
Yep but if you take all that paper wealth and distribute it you aint getting much physical shit out of it. The yacht example is relevant for ratio of how even physically manifested rich people toys convert to real world things people care about. 250M NYC apartment only consumed physical resources enough to build 15 regular size homes and so on.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. What does it matter the actual physical atoms? A mole of gold costs more than a mole of carbon. How much you can “deploy” with 500m differs.
Maybe you’re trying to say if they actually liquidated their wealth to spend any sufficient fraction their paper wealth would disappear but that’s the point of pulling out the value without liquidating.
I am saying people imaging that significant portion of paper wealth could be converted into tangible things for regular people like housing, infra etc.
Yea, wealth seems invisible because we peasants aren't even let into the places where these wealthy people roam. They live in an entirely different world than us, and they invest heavily in that world's function.
I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actually use at this income level. Or maybe their whole life is delivered to their door by this point.
The personal automobile is the cause for most of these problems. The US gutted many of its cities by widening streets and removing public transport, and newer cities are simply not built to any comparable density because they are built with the car as the primary mode of transportation.
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Is that a new thing, though? Or could it go back decades to a time when Americans didn’t feel their country was decaying? Already in the 1960s Los Angeles was depicted as immense sprawl where people drove long distances for everything.
This is exactly what I felt the last two times I was in the US.
At least Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had a rivalry to see who had better public works.
This goes to where our wealthiest people no longer invest in our society. We used to use a progressive tax system as the means of helping this process along, but I dont think anyone can argue that this has since been subverted.
The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one.
I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was.
Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.
We were on the right side of the debt cycle, that's all there is.
If the rate of TOTAL debt was accumulating at the same rate now as it was then, there would be jobs aplenty.
Debts are still rising, but at slower rates.
I think Thiel's right, though I despise the man immensly for unrelated reasons.
I grew up wildly excited about the capitalist world of promise and meritocracy in which I was going to grow to be a man. I never had grand ambitions of becoming wealthy, but wanted to work hard so that I coulod have a nice life and build a family. Now that im an adult, I cant think of a single reason to be proud of the current system. Ive worked incredibly hard for a life of 'getting by'. Im incredibly privileged where my friends and family are not, and cannot imagine the struggle and hardship of those with less prospects than me.
I cannot in good conscience witness the world in which I am now an adult and say that this capitalism is a good thing. The people around me are suffering and I firmly believe that it is every man's duty to fight for their family and community. Nothing about fighting for community here involves supporting capitalism as it stands today.
(pedantic nit-pick, sorry) Killkenny is only a city by charter, it has a population as of the last census of 27,184 – it is in no sense of the word an actual city.
http://kilkennycity.ie/Your_Council/The_History_of_Kilkenny_...
I think it's pretty obvious where American prosperity went.
https://joshworth.com/dev/wealthgap/
The bottom 90% of Americans only have 32% of the wealth.
It's inflation. The hidden tax that's perpetually underreported by governments and acts as a massive transfer of wealth to the property class.
I wonder if it’s even a transfer of wealth or just all an illusion.
It’s easier to downplay inflation so people think they’re doing better.
In 12 years, my salary is up about 50%, most of the change since Covid. Sure, sounds amazing… However, home prices doubled. Consequently auto, home, and flood insurance has at least doubled. Prices on even raw food has gotten crazy, restaurants are also 50-100% increase in prices. Health insurance is about 4x what it used to be for me. Tax bracket is higher.
So aside from the huge luck of low interest loan at a smaller principal, it doesn’t feel like anything amazing has happened.
On the flip side, I feel the plight of those looking at a 30yr loan at 5-6% on $500k. I can’t stomach it today and certainly not 12 years ago either.
By normal inflation rates, feels like I’ve seen maybe a 15% “raise” for over a decade extra of specialized experience —- before considering increased costs. Of course that was from changing jobs twice…
And quite frankly, property ownership is somewhat a poor investment, just better than renting. The S&P 500 has nearly tripled over the same time period. Of course, taking a 15 or 30 year loan for stock market investment would be insane (aside from impossible).
You can summarize it like this:
People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x.
People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked.
The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well.
The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths.
And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.
The last time this happened in America it gave rise to Progressivism. Mandani is the first in a long line of corrective actions that American society needs to make in order to correct itself and not deteriorate into neo-feudalism.
That’s exactly and inherently what capitalism is. Rate of return on capital is higher than rate of return on labor. The people with capital continue to pull ahead. And in America, we now decided to compound this by not taxing and undertaking capital. Which then allows those with capital to transfer some of their capital to political power that then accrues even more advantage to capital owners
When capital is vastly more valued than labor then its an asset bubble that will pop. Labor is the actual economy, capital is a make believe economy, when corrections happens its that capital loses all their bubble money not that labor catches up to that imaginary world.
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To the billionairs via income inequality.
When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail.
I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question.
We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.
This weird 'hero narrative' that the CEO class build all the things needs to die. Those billionaires would be nothing without standing on the shoulders of the workers.
You are right, which is why the workers get so much more than the CEO. Basically no CEO makes more money than his workers combined, he adds a small percentage of the value so he gets a small percentage of the revenue. In a typical company most revenue goes to workers, then a smaller part to leaders for organizing the workers and payback to investors who invested in the equipment for the workers.
If you don't pay leaders to organize or investors for equipment then workers wont have organization or equipment and will be much less productive, it is better this way. This makes workers richer under capitalism than any other economic system tried.
Wait, your operating system was coded by one single individual? Holy shit that must have taken him 10 life times, if not more!
Wow, you know a person who can mine, smelt, and forge steel into a computer case... While still having time to mine, process, purify, reprocess, and design the whole die process not just for a CPU but GPU's and all matter of electronic components!?!!??!
Holy shit, you know someone who can design, assemble, and launch not one comm sat...but dozen?!?! And he builds the rockets all by himself as well?!?!? And he built the ground stations and infrastructure required to power and connect to them?!!?!
Oh you know a guy who can write a forum.... Yeah that's kind of neat I guess...
But let's be real here. These single individuals did not produce Thousands upon thousands of life times worth of value by their lonesomes. It required standing upon the shoulders of countless individuals, not even taking into account the organizational structures of governments, their utilities, and people long dead who built the world they used to make their billions.
We have more companies that can be classified as monopolies in existence than ever before. In principal our market is not a zero sum game, but in practice we see it quickly collapsing to become one.
How many of the billionaires you mention are themselves the proginy of previously wealthy parents?
At least in the US, it wasn't better in the past. Railroads were often private monopolies on certain routes. The Interstate highway system is much more open in comparison (lots of competition in trucking), and so is the Internet.
you're conflating technological progress with prosperity
> built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire
Billionaires did not build any operating systems or computers or launch any satellites or write any web pages you are using. Workers built those things while billionaires watched.
Linux is a testament to how much we don't need billionaires to organize ourselves to create these things.
When I went to university, my minimum wage summer job could pay for tuition and dorm fees for the entire year. The price is up over 20x since then, and in some colleges it's even higher. It's because of the predatory student loans allowed universities to charge whatever prices they wanted and they knew that students would get the loans to pay for them. It's sickening.
It's much more nuanced than that.
First we must stipulate that the price you pay is not the tuition price. I went to a school that was #1 in tuition when I attended and I paid less than state school -- not because of loans but because of grants the school gave me.
Look at the history: in the 20th century, there was a general understanding that public education was a good thing. My grandmother born in the 20s only graduated middle school. My parents born in the 50s graduated high school and went to a little community college. By the time I was in school in the 90s, it was expected that pretty much everyone who could, should go to college. All of my peers went to college. None of my parents' peers did.
What happened due to this was there were too many students and not enough schools. This caused tuitions to rise. So they built more schools, but that doesn't really solve the problem because as the schools become more popular, the land they are built on and housing around them starts to increase in cost. Schools can't do much about this, but they do have to raise their tuition in response. Schools are in nice areas and attract a lot of high-net-worth professionals. You build a school somewhere and soon you need a hospital, some high tech jobs, a sports team, music venues, public transportation, lawyers, patent attorneys, day cares, and then eventually even more schools. So there's a pretty normal supply/demand issue going on that causes tuition to rise naturally before we even talk about student loans. See: Merced CA over the last 10 years after UC Merced was built there. It went from a Central Valley backwater to a really nice place to live and raise a family. So schools aren't really even schools anymore, they are more like small cities.
What about those sky high sticker prices? Are they that high because schools are confident the government will foot the bill? At the middle tier, yes. These are the schools that are not getting the best students, or the richest students, but they still have to pay competitive salaries for teachers, they still have to pay market rate for land, they have to pay for all the site licenses to Google and Microsoft and Mathworks and Elsevier and Jstor etc... and they still have to deal with the economic reality of being a non profit entity with a public service mission. But not for student loans, those schools would not exist, which would mean higher tuition at the remaining schools.
But, loans to mid tier schools are not the reason Stanford can charge $60k a year. Elite school can charge that, because plenty of rich people are willing to pay full sticker price to send their little bundle of joy to those brand name schools. So that's what elite schools do, they set their price at the level those rich people are willing to pay, and that sticker price keeps going up and up because that elite population keeps getting richer and richer.
The elite institutions set the ceiling, the community colleges set the floor, and then all the in-between state schools, private SLACS, off-ivies, price themselves in the middle. If student loans went away tomorrow, the lower tier schools would suffer most, but the upper tier schools would just admit more rich families and charge them more. Maybe there's not enough to spread between them, maybe they have to close some departments and hire fewer professors, but you wouldn't see tuition fall unless the rich couldn't pay it anymore.
To vampire squids.
Well, your resident anti-urbanist is here.
Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City.
So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis".
Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.
But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".
It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative.
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
I think you’ve demonstrated the idea of “problems don’t exist if I don’t have them personally”.
You might start to understand the negativity some people have if you could understand the economic struggles they have.
My point was that people are thriving and the progress she wants is happening.
>My TV is the tits
having 50 different flavours of ice cream and a big TV available is a fifteen year olds idea of paradise, but what people actually care about is infrastructure, public health, safety, childcare and progress in the material world.
The US has the problem that the commons and the physical world have been run into the ground, the country has effectively become the Wall-E future.
I don't know what you're talking about. All of the things you mentioned have significantly improved over my life. I can bike around my city without it being a suicide mission, pre-Obamacare health care was way worse, crime and accidental deaths are down, and we got stuff like Headstart and free Pre-K. I don't know what progress in the material world you think are missing.
This is what I mean by unrelentingly negative. The world today is way better than the world I was born into.
I'm sorry to say you're very out of touch. This rosy picture is objectively wrong when it comes to housing.
Start with the fundamentals - construction has gotten more expensive. Unlike virtually every other industry in the US, it actually costs more to build residential housing per square foot (inflation adjusted) than it did in 1960. Construction workers in 2025 are *less efficient* than they were 50 years ago, despite all of our technological advancements.
This translates to housing construction that has not kept pace with the growth of the population. The average first time homebuyer is now over 40 years old, and the median homebuyer is 55 years old.
Everyone needs housing. If you bought your house 20 years ago, you likely did not notice that housing has become unaffordably expensive for most young people. Sure, you're having fun biking around the city, but people aren't going to enjoy life in the city if they cannot afford housing.
> I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits.
None of these have anything to do with the prosperity - or lack of it - of the average American.
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhoused and the impoverished. And I'm know there are people who are doing things that are their passion unrelated to that.
But I have to say, your list for is remarkable for being about things, not people. You amazed by the cool stuff available for some people for a lot of money and some things that are pretty cheap. But X percent of the population can't pay their rent with their income, cool stuff for sale is hardly going to help them. And indeed that statement itself is a strong illustration of how self-insulating people are from the conditions people live with.
> illustration of how self-insulating people are
I feel like it's such a cultural thing here in the US. There is a pervasive culture of individualism and operating wholly within ones own means. Need help? Don't ask your neighbor for help, ask Our LLM (tm) for only $9.99 a month! I'm being hyperbolic of course.
This is leaking out of the us, too. The cultural gap between people who have money, access to the internet, and who can speak english, and those people living within a mile away who have none of these things, has never been wider.
Unrelentingly negative