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A significant percentage of the data presented in my posts tells a story that is taboo in the Village of Happy People : everyday life is much harder now, and getting harder. Life was much easier, less overwhelming, more stable and more prosperous in decades past. Wages went farther--a lot farther. I have documented this in dozens of posts.
My Social Security wage records go back 54 years, to 1970 , the summer in high school I picked pineapple for Dole. Being a data hound, I laboriously entered the inflation rate as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which many see as grossly understating actual inflation) to state each year's earnings in current dollars.
Of my top eight annual earnings, two were from the 1970s, two were from the 1980s, three from the 1990s and only one in the 21st century. Please note that the nominal value of my labor has increased with time / inflation; what we're measuring here is the purchasing power / value of my wages over time.
That the purchasing power of my wages in the 1970s as an apprentice carpenter exceeded almost all the rest of my decades of labor should ring alarm bells. But this too is taboo in the Village of Happy People : of course life is better now because "progress is unstoppable." But is it "progress" if our wages have lost value for 45 years? If precarity on multiple levels is now the norm? If the burdens of shadow work are pushing us over the tipping point?
This is systemic, it's not unique to me. Everyone working in the 70s earned more when measured in purchasing power rather than nominal dollars, and the prosperity of the 80s and 90s was widespread. In the 21st century, not so much: it's a winner-take-most scramble that most of us lose, while the winners get to pull the levers of the narrative control machinery to gush how everything's great, and it's going to get better.
My Social Security wage records go back 54 years, to 1970 , the summer in high school I picked pineapple for Dole. Being a data hound, I laboriously entered the inflation rate as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which many see as grossly understating actual inflation) to state each year's earnings in current dollars.
Of my top eight annual earnings, two were from the 1970s, two were from the 1980s, three from the 1990s and only one in the 21st century. Please note that the nominal value of my labor has increased with time / inflation; what we're measuring here is the purchasing power / value of my wages over time.
That the purchasing power of my wages in the 1970s as an apprentice carpenter exceeded almost all the rest of my decades of labor should ring alarm bells. But this too is taboo in the Village of Happy People : of course life is better now because "progress is unstoppable." But is it "progress" if our wages have lost value for 45 years? If precarity on multiple levels is now the norm? If the burdens of shadow work are pushing us over the tipping point?
This is systemic, it's not unique to me. Everyone working in the 70s earned more when measured in purchasing power rather than nominal dollars, and the prosperity of the 80s and 90s was widespread. In the 21st century, not so much: it's a winner-take-most scramble that most of us lose, while the winners get to pull the levers of the narrative control machinery to gush how everything's great, and it's going to get better.
