Musing on Krugman's column today makes me feel like Cassandra: doomed to never be believed. When you look around even a little bit, it's astonishing how good things are right now. I mean, take a look at this:
The poorest group of Americans has an average household income of $56,000. The middle class is at $99,000. Those numbers are nuts.
Even most of the things we're afraid of probably aren't that bad. I'll bet that the social media panic will eventually join the McMartin Preschool panic in the annals of misplaced fear. Democracy is going to be fine. The fentanyl epidemic will fade just like the heroin, crack, and meth epidemics before it. Medical costs are rising, but not by a lot—and few families spend more than 10% of their income on out-of-pocket health expenses.
At the same time incomes are high and we have the best standard of living on the planet. Crime is low. Teen pregnancies are down. Poverty is declining. Economic growth is spectacular. Technology is amazing. Divorce rates are down. Teen drug use is low. Racism is declining. Gay acceptance is rising. We're not fighting any wars. The federal government is not going bankrupt. Driverless cars are just around the corner. Medical care is on the cusp of a golden age. The war against abortion has largely failed. Our educational system does a top notch job for everyone except Black students. Bullying is down.
Now, it's also true that mass shootings aren't going away. Global warming isn't going away. Crazy politicians aren't going away. The black-white education gap isn't going away. The world is never 100% peaches and cream.
But overall, life in America is the best of any country in any era of history and looks set to stay that way for a while. Our lives are almost miraculous in their prosperity.
So it's remarkable that this obvious fact is widely denied thanks to the combination of ordinary daily frustrations and a single TV station with a moderate reach that picks on those scabs relentlessly. How the hell did we let that happen?
Well, that income chart might be a clue. The vast disparity between the "have mores" (thanks, Dubya!) and those who work. Sure, the "averages" look pretty darn good. But the average sits in a pretty high percentile.
Are those "averages" means or medians?
Very good question. I am guessing medians, or the far right bar would be higher. BUT that raises another point: The horizontal axis labels are meaningless. Purely subjective. If they aren't in percentiles, then the chart just is not meaningful
Dubya? The rise of mid to lower incomes got unhooked from overall productivity increase when Reagan was President, with all that created wealth going entirely to upper incomes ever since.
I think Dubya called "have-mores" his kind of people.
Yeah. It was a reference to when George W (the Lesser) addressed a crowd, calling them "My kind of people: the haves and the have mores."
I’m not saying this is the whole problem, but maybe just illustrative. I had lunch yesterday at a well known chain restaurant in my mid size Michigan town. The lunch time crowd was not terribly interesting. One or two professional types like me. Lots of older folks with mobility issues. One crank proceeded to berate the hungover waitress because he didn’t like the sea salt grinder. He had no obvious teeth left. Maybe a couple…
When you get out of the upper middle class bubble you encounter trash. Despicable angry trash. And they despise you. They even despise each other.
This pathetic excuse for a person is not worth your pity. He was just nasty evil.
The graph would be interesting if each bar was multiplied by the number of folks in each. I guess Fred would have that graph.
Didn’t 2021 have a lot of Covid transfers to to bottom half and did those transfers dry up?
I don't think Krugman would disagree with you Kevin. But that doesn't change his point that people are less optimistic about the future and that all of these positive things are at stake if authoritarian Republicans manage to permanently damage our democracy.
A graph that starts with the working poor would seem to omit a hell of a lot of Americans completely.
Driverless cars are just around the corner? They were just around the corner 8 years ago also.
Along with fusion power.
Fully driverless cars have been operating since 2020 in multiple U.S. cities.
Fully "driverless" cars with unknown numbers of people monitoring and intervening from data centers.
Goalposts, meet movers.
It’s just around the corner where it’s gone over the curb and run into a dumpster.
The numbers are bad. Conversation from the weekend:
- my SIL and her husband make $90k per year, so middle class according to this
- they have a baby on the way, so they need a bigger house
- but even tho we live in one of the cheaper real estate markets, they can’t afford even the cheapest starter homes, because house payments would be triple their current rent
- so they feel like complete failures, because at 36 and 40 they still can’t afford a house
- why are they having a baby then? because my SIL is 36 so it’s now or never
Are they “richer” than their parents at this age? Technically. But their parents were able to afford three kids and buy houses in their 20s. So who was better off?
And this is why Trump won, because he has a (bad) answer to this, while the Democrats keep telling us it’s a great economy.
One of the more plausible reasons I've heard as to why we lost
Sure looks like the super rich could pay 50% in taxes -- as they did when things were great under Reagan -- and still be pretty rich. Worth keeping in mind as Trump and Co. start to cut stuff.
+1
good luck getting THAT bill past Tubby & K-St
imo one of the Dems major flaws. Campaign promises to raise taxes on the rich except the bill never gets past K-St who owns both side of the aisle. That leaves the 1% tax free again, the middle class footing the bill again, and Dems trying to explain why taxes went up again on the middle class but not on the 1% . . . again.
Look, after the last generation got to have one spouse with a high school education buy a house and support a wife and three kids, and in the case of this generation a household with $50k of income is NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO BUY A HOUSE anywhere they would want to live.
If we don't see the risk in the other side "blaming" somebody (liberals) for that we are fools. In this case, the blog entry is indeed foolish.
The irony, so thick it needs a chain saw to cut, is its conservative capitalist positions which led to this housing situation.
Earlier this year, KD posted a graph of home ownership among persons aged 20 - 29, since 1982; 2022’s rate is slightly higher than 40 years previously, and several percentage points lower than the height of the scam-mortgage bubble: https://jabberwocking.com/are-millennials-really-as-well-off-as-baby-boomers/
That doesn’t mean there won’t be a lot of anecdotes about people unable to afford housing where they would like to purchase. And foreclosures are up slightly: https://www.attomdata.com/news/most-recent/u-s-foreclosure-activity-increases-quarterly-in-q1-2024/
It would be nice to have more up-to-date data, but at least up to a year or two ago, we didn’t seem to be heading into catastrophe.
It’s not the overall rate. I would love to see high school graduates one income 1970 20-29 vs high school grads one income age 20-29 2024. Not asking for research but that is the potential young MAGA group. There are plenty of highly educated 28 year olds to affect the overall stats. The US is becoming more and more like I used to describe a trip to NYC “so much fun IF you have dough to spend.”
👍👍👍👍👍
The US upper middle class has average household income that puts them in the top 1 percent in regards to all humans on the planet. Also, the US overall middle class has average household income that puts them in the top 2 percent in regards to all humans on the planet.
Many or most commenters here are likely among the top 0.1% of earners worldwide, the income threshold being somewhere between $80,000 and $100,000 per year.
Yup. And let's not forget that just because you're rich on a global scale, it doesn't mean that you're not poor as fuck in your own country if your country is rich as fuck.
$56K/yr AFTER TRANSFERS (so maybe $30K/yr in actual pay? I wish Kevin hadn't obfuscated the numbers like this/used obfuscated numbers, because as Eminem famously rapped, food stamps don't buy diapers)... yeah, if you had that in, say, Brazil (not exactly a shithole country, but not extremely rich either) - you'd be doing great! If you even had $30K after taxes, you'd be doing pretty alright.
In the US of A, where those transfers don't pay your fucking rent, you're not doing great at all. You're getting squeezed and squeezed for ever drops of juice so that the Martin Shkrelis and Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses and Warren Buffets and Tim Cooks and every other criminally rich person can just have ever more wealth. Because number must go up.
It's fucked. And yeah, a lot of the comments here are blinkered and tone deaf.
because as Eminem famously rapped, food stamps don't buy diapers
Food stamps buy food, which frees up money previously allocated for sustenance to be spent on other things. Like rent. Or diapers. Or Netflix. Money is fungible.
Kevin is correct to cite post tax-transfer income. Not doing so gives a misleading picture. And of course most transfer income in the US is Social Security.
You missed the point.
If your pre-transfer income is 30K but it costs more than that to not live in poverty - you can't buy your way out of poverty with the "transfer value" of your Medicaid coverage.
This isn't hard to understand, especially if you've ever been in situations where you're tight on money. And I don't mean "I might have to transfer from my savings account to pay rent this month" tight on money. I mean "I might not have enough money to eat and pay rent this month" tight on money.
So what do you propose to do about it? Faux News has convinced half the country that they are paying exorbitant taxes when in fact all the vast majority (of the rubes) pay are employment taxes, so they will destroy any political candidate who advocates raising them, even if it's only the 3.3 million "1%-ers" who will actually pay it. The talentless rubes think that Trump is going to make them all hedge fund managers.
I don't think it's true that half the country thinks they're paying exorbitant taxes.
I think it's true that 2/3 of the country thinks rich people and corporations aren't paying their fair share, are getting away with milking regular people for all they've got, and that the "what do I get from it" side of the equation for them is lacking.
Tax the fuckers more and raise the "what do I get from it" side of the ledger.
Yes! Somehow the quality and lack of services in the USA is missing from this equation. 50,000 USD is not the same as the equivalent number of Euros.
"The fentanyl epidemic will fade just like the heroin, crack, and meth epidemics before it."
Drug overdoses have killed about 500K Americans since 2018. These deaths reflect a broader epidemic of hopelessness and devastate the communities in which they occur.
That's a myth. Most of the crisis flows from America's really bad practices with respect to handling opioids. Europe has vast swaths of Rust-belt like areas, and a fraction of US levels of opioid deaths:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-deaths-of-despair-narrative-is
Yglesias is a contemptible sack of shit. It's time to be a little ruder about this.
He wants to compare US and European mortality trends. As if the only difference between the US and the various european countries -- socially, economically, culturally -- is how certain opioids are dispensed.
The contemptible little shit is a walking example of isolated demands for rigor.
W.r.t. Gelman -- as I recall he tried peddling his re-assessment of Case and Daton but couldn't get it published because he only corrected for things that supported his case (e.g., he didn't correct for increasing tobacco use in women when looking at death rates). But that might have been another researcher -- many researchers took offense at notion that white rural men could be experiencing any distress. Disproofs were in high demand.
This took literally 5 min to find. It addresses Ygs main contentions.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2016094pap.pdf
Ha! I tried to make this exact point lat night at dinner with some fellow lefties and damn! Did I get the lecture!
The negativity epidemic is really something. You’re morally suspect to point out that we’ve got it better than our great grandparents.
These are good points:
"The world is never 100% peaches and cream. But overall, life in America is the best of any country in any era of history and looks to stay that way for a while. Our lives are almost miraculous in their prosperity."
And yet, based on my own experience, I have to say I understand people in America who simply lack a sufficient perspective on how astonishingly, almost unbelievably, fortunate we are.
The reason I can relate perfectly well to that mindset is that I shared it for, maybe, the first half of my life. But then I traveled a bit. And holy sh*t. There just isn't anywhere else like America. At least not in my own experience: nothing else is even close.
This discovery was perhaps not so surprising in certain parts of Asia such as India. I am delighted every time that I read about India's economic situation improving, but nevertheless I simply did not know what destitution was until I saw that country in person. Imagine American cities where the number of the normal citizens and the number of the homeless people are switched. The normies become the ones who are few and far between. And that's what some places in India looked like. And it's impossible not to return from a trip like that and look upon an average old shack in American suburbia as if it's a palace.
But the differences are apparent elsewhere as well. Perhaps most surprisingly in Europe. I am not at all surprised to read that the poorest states in America have higher average incomes than some European countries (or something like that). That was my own anecdotal impression.
One such anecdote: I remember once staying one night in the home of a European acquaintance (in some small village in the Netherlands), and frankly feeling shocked at how I was treated. I behaved as politely as possible. But I had to remind myself that I was in a different world with different values and a different economy.
My acquaintance was a successful man with a job, house, and family, but the food we ate for dinner was rationed out as if Europe was still in WWII. I froze overnight because they either didn't have, or wouldn't use, any sort of central heating. And if Europe has discovered the space heater, that family hadn't heard of it (or couldn't afford it). I was given a floor corner to sleep on because of their lack of furniture, and I had to wander around in the middle of the night looking for extra blankets (without finding any) because they apparently had so few to spare for me (their guest). I emerged from that night sick, starved, and startled. But everyone else in the home seemed utterly resigned to their fate (which is another big difference with the USA).
I could go on. But I'll just say that Kevin's charts and graphs really do match up with my own experience. Most Americans I encounter (in person or online) simply have not a clue how unbelievably prosperous we are. The extent to which we largely take it for granted is mind-boggling.
Not my experience AT ALL staying with friends and relatives in the Netherlands and Germany. This includes staying with two different relatives in a small town in SW Germany at different times, and visiting a bunch of other relatives at their homes there. None of these were particularly posh people. But like with your account, these were anecdotes not data.
Also not my experience AT ALL with everything else in those and other northern European countries. Not so much anecdotal.
@emjayay:
OMG I have so many other anecdotes, but I leave 99% of them out to avoid posting a novel in response to Kevin's blog post. There was the time that I attended an event in Germany where the organizers in charge of our accommodation gave me and several other Americans a (busy) hallway to sleep in; the time a friend and I simply wandered around a small German village in search of an actual shower after discovering that our accommodations offered nothing but bathroom sinks (we eventually found a group shower in a public gym); the time I stayed at an old castle in Italy and had to wait in line half the night to use its one internet connection (which they charged an exorbitant fee for); and the list goes on and on. But I'll stop. Cuz, yeah, Europe is not the USA. OMG. Just no.
I live in Europe (Germany), and I can say that this is 100% bullshit. Unless you really, really, tried hard to find the worst situations that you could.
Bad food and cold houses during the winter are common in the US.
Having lived in Europe for many years, the middle and lower class in western and central Europe at least, tend to live better than Americans in the middle and lower class. Anecdata abounds...
@jdubs:
The Middle class of the USA are objectively among some of the richest people in the world as well as being some of the wealthiest people in the history of the world by far. So what are you trying to accomplish with your statement other than to push a gloomy narrative about America?
We can promote our well being without resorting to Bernie-Sander-style nonsense of utterly mythical socialist paradises in faraway European nirvanas.
I realize there are some Lefty Americans who just will not stop hating their country, will not accept that anything might be positive here, and certainly won’t accept an assertion that America compares quite favorably to their projected hallucinations of a liberal Europe where everyone is equal, prosperous, and utterly thrilled with their completely perfect lives.
But all I can say to that nonsense is that such self-destructive negativity offers nothing constructive. Ultimately, that kind of Lefty nihilism (regarding our amazing country) may simply do so much to help elect Republicans that you might as well just go volunteer for Vance’s 2032 reelection campaign. So have fun with that!
With the absolutely worst health care system in the developed world. Averages hide a lot. But what really depresses people in the US is the lack of economic security. Everybody below the upper middle class is one serious illness aware from penury.
I wonder if your internalized value of the dollar is stuck in a lower value of the value (i.e., maybe 2010 or earlier).
Same with regards to housing cost.
If things are so great, then how come record proportions of people are housing cost burdened?
But I guess we shouldn't believe our lying eyes and our lying personal finance experiences - things are actually great! Don't believe your experiences, or those of others. Just look at the numbers, man! They're great!
Sorry, I'm not buying it.
I agree with most of this, which is why I voted for Harris, who would have continued the policies that have lead to our current state, and improved on some of them (eg aid for nursing home care). The coming administration, however is going to loot the Treasury on an unprecedented level (Teapot Dome was an amateur operation), and we’ll be lucky if it doesn’t mismanage another major crisis (climate related, another pandemic, international, take your pick). Not to mention taking a wrecking ball to what’s left of the rule of law. The US may not be recognizable by the time this is over, and it certainly will be a lot less prosperous.
And what are the average household expenses of the poorest group of Americans?
About half the value of these transfers is social security and medicare, so most people, even within the income groups broken out, aren't getting that value. About half the value of these "transfers" is in health insurance. Of course, health insurance in the US delivers terrible value for money.
Source: https://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Great-Transfermation.pdf
This is a good point. Any stat that includes health costs as income must include a qualifier and be used carefully for any conclusions.
Humans need drama. Sometimes we overdose on it, get exhausted, and need a nice boring decade to recover; but after a decade of dull we get antsy to make things exciting again. Hence why the 1950s and the 1990s were succeeded by far more interesting times.
I’m an Australian who has spent a fair bit of time in the US and I have to question a few of these conclusions.
The US has a lot going for it (there are job opportunities and activities that just don’t exist in Australia (eg the entertainment industry and Disneyland etc)) but in the scheme of things I wouldn’t pick it over Australia - mostly given the quality of life and safety.
I went to California for a month last year and couldn’t get over how intense the experience was. Everyday I saw widespread homelessness and multiple people having mental health crisis. I would be lucky to see either of these once a yea run Melbourne but it was a multiple time a day event almost everyday I was there.
I had a great time but it was intense and noticeably worse than the 5 other times i’ve been over the last 25 years. A case in point I first went to a restaurant in downtown San Diego called Polez in 2000, 2009 and 2023 and I don’t remember any homeless in the area let alone the encampments that I saw this time (this was confirmed by the restaurant owner and local friends so it wasn’t just my faulty memory). I enjoyed my time but it was also an intense experience and was relieved when I got home.
Also the change in vibes between wealthy and nearby poor areas was incredibly noticeable and not something you get anywhere near as much here.
So I can understand that Americans feel unhappier with how things have headed even as they can buy more and have nicer cars etc
@xmabx:
You seem to cite widespread homelessness as the main thing negatively impacting your impressions of California in general and San Diego in particular. Fair enough. But I don't think that's a commentary on America as a whole; rather, what you experienced was largely due to the failed Leftist dogmatism of judicial activists (and I say that as a Liberal Democrat).
This issue really, really should be much better understood, but one of (if not THE) main reason why homelessness has been so out of control in some western states (in the USA) is because the 9th circuit court of appeals made it so difficult for those states to effectively deal with their own problems. Fortunately, the Supreme Court finally intervened (with the support of California's Democratic governor and San Francisco's Democratic mayor) to stop that 9th circuit court from ruining half the country. As described in The City Journal:
"For almost six years, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has conducted an experiment in homeless policy. Circuit judges have used a singular reading of the Constitution to overturn local laws against street sleeping and camping. The results were disastrous and led to more homelessness and chaos in the Western states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction. On Friday, Justice Neil Gorsuch, with five other Supreme Court justices, put an end to that experiment."
Again, I say this as a Democrat: thank God for Neil Gorsuch (a Trump appointee)!
So, yes, there are areas in the USA that undergo periods of distress, and these unfortunate episodes are often caused in part by extremists of the Right or Left variety; but, as you say, the overall picture (especially in an epically prosperous place like CA) is more often than not one of " job opportunities and activities that just don’t exist in Australia." Indeed, and come back any time!
"We can promote our well being without resorting to Bernie-Sander-style nonsense of utterly mythical socialist paradises in faraway European nirvanas."
"But I don't think that's a commentary on America as a whole; rather, what you experienced was largely due to the failed Leftist dogmatism of judicial activists (and I say that as a Liberal Democrat)."
I cheered when humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I'm glad the commies were thrown out
Of the a.f.l. c.i.o. board
I love puerto ricans and negros
As long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me, love me, i'm a liberal
How has the war against abortion mostly failed? While people are still getting abortions, people are having to travel long distances or worry that their medication abortion will result in a lawsuit. Women are dead who would not have been dead if they had miscarried 3 years ago instead of this last year.
Reproductive rights really have gone backwards, and are likely to go even further backwards over the next 4 years.
Kevin believes that overturning Roe had no effect on the availability of abortion because he saw a graph put out by an advocacy group that showed abortion increasing after Roe was overturned.
Transfers are a one dimensional illusion of wellbeing for minimum and median wage earners. These participants who add significant value to goods and services sold for revenue would have much higher incomes if their wages had grown at the same rate as the economy's growth over the past forty years. The largest transfers in the US economy are made to the top 1% of income earners.
Honestly I think we humans are just easily bored.
We can pick the numbers apart and yes there is always someone suffering.
But Kevin’s right. Life is way better for most people!
But Housewives of MAGA land makes good tv, if you like that sorry of thing.
One of the biggest reasons that so many not rich but not poor people are so miserable and angry is that they live under a burden of excessive debt which they take on to live beyond their means. I learned so much about this while doing divorces and helping my clients find bankruptcy attorneys.
"Medical costs are rising, but not by a lot"
Of course not. We're not in a recession. Medical cost increases always spike through the roof in recessions as insurance companies use their customers to make good on the stock investments that are going south.
Driverless cars are just around the corner -- and will be for come years to come.
If you consider premiums and deductibles out of pocket, and I don't know why you wouldn't, in 2020, the most recent year for which I can find data, they averaged 11.6% of income. That means more than half of families spend more than 10% on out of pocket expenses. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/631987/percent-of-income-spent-on-health-plan-by-us-employees/)
I don't know what country you are living in but racism and gay hatred have exploded. That is Trump's entire base, which we now know is half the country.
Also, in this mythical country, the war against abortion has failed? It is protected in 21 states and banned in 26. The Republican party is deeply in hock to evangelicals and I put the odds at 50-50 that they'll pas a national ban. And the other shoe hasn't dropped yet on mifepristone, but it is under serious threat and some states, like Texas, are trying to extend their criminalization outside the borders of the state.
And frankly, if you can say "things are great" while climate change is ignored, you must really hate your children and grandchildren. The data I've seen strongly suggest that keeping temperature increase below 1.5C requires net zero emissions by 2035. If you think that is going to happen I've got some property on Mars that might be of interest to you. So far, the most notable fact about climate change is that it is running well ahead of the models, so if anything, disaster will arrive sooner than predicted. The AMOC is showing signs of weakening. If it continues to do so, that is a disaster the like of which we have never seen. Climate change is the ONLY problem that matters right now. It is not a "well there's this but look at all the other stuff that is great" kind of problem. Everything else will not survive a climate catastrophe. James Hansen, who knows more about this than I ever will, believes the most likely scenario is 3C. That is potentially a civilization ending event. How the economy does, or technology, or my income are all bullshit problems compared to climate change. They just don't matter if we hit 3C.
Frankly, I think sunshiny views like this are part of the problem. "Everything is great right now. If that even happens, we can deal with it later." Well we can't. The atmosphere and oceans are gigantic ships. They take a long time to turn. If you wait until the need to turn slaps you in the face, it is too late to do anything about it.
I think that is the most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox. Technological civilizations kill themselves by continually shitting in their own bath tubs.
+10
That only includes people who are working and after transfers. The % of working-age Americans not in the workforce is a different, contrarian signal, as is the % homeless.
And it's only after transfers that the working poor receive 1/500th of what the "super rich" make, after taxes. Ooh, yeah, that'll work out fine for a society.
Sorry, I do think democracy is under threat when Trump is about to pardon the invaders of the Capitol, and is making agreement with his 2020 election fantasy a condition of high office in his Administration. Not to mention that the incoming FCC chairman plans to harass CBS for its political coverage.
The sequence is:
Trump gains a following by exploiting racism, religiosity and sexism, as Republicans have done for decades;
This reinforces fear of loss of tribal supremacy, to the point that facts are disregarded;
The people involved believe what Trump and right-wing media say about the economy and other things because that is what membership in the tribe demands. Thinking they follow Trump because of these beliefs is getting it backwards.
This does not mean that things are really ideal - they should be much better for those at the lower end. The US is the richest country ever - why do we still have poverty? But the picture that Republicans paint, and that the media have basically accepted, that Biden and Democrats have destroyed the country, is totally false.
It seems like both things are true: life is really good here and lots of people are mad and frustrated.
I spent years living in Japan and traveled around Asia a fair bit, also some in Europe. People here have no idea how good they have it. China is now much better off than when I visited. Just finding a decent meal was hard and forget about a cup of coffee and a danish.
A difference here is that goods and services in the US seem really skewed towards servicing the well off. That makes sense, as they have the money to buy things so you could make a good profit. My anecdotal experience in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and some others is that there were more decent restaurants, cars, mass transit and such geared at those with smaller incomes. Not luxury but serviceable. In the US if you are not well off they kind of rub your nose in it. Maybe it’s because in other places there are fewer really well off people.
Also, other countries take better care of their common spaces, especially in Japan.
We don’t have much in the way of simple and shared entertainment anymore. Growing up we used to have block parties where all the neighbors got together and boiled and big barrel of corn and the men drank beer and the kids played together. Now we connect electronically to friends across the country but I don’t know the people I live next to.
Homelessness is a problem. In California we spend a huge amount of money on this but it doesn’t change much.
Like everyone else I come here because this is the best forum I've found for sane, informed discussion of social, economic, and political issues in this country. I appreciate trying to find measurably good things to acknowledge in times of darkness. It's important. But numbers don't tell the whole story and in fact can be highly distorting, and whether or not some Americans on some kinds of averages are richer than any society in history doesn't mean we can't at the same time be facing existential crises. It's not too hard to see how Americans’ level of comfort, privilege, and inescapable entitlement can distort our perspectives, beliefs, and expectations even and especially on the most quotidian level, as evidenced by some of the comments here. I would even say that the argument for economic largesse, and its concomitant effects, as the best measures of our success as a society is a form of just so storying, caught in, delimited, and constrained by the myths and norms of a hyper-capitalist culture that has shed all other measures of ‘success’ or goodness.
American levels of wealth and consumption - not just the rich, but for all strata except the destitute - are not just unsustainable; they’re catastrophic for every biotic and abiotic system on Earth. Of course things are good for us - we’ve scraped the planet bare in order to live like kings. This is not an exaggeration but an objective reality, and in the most fundamental ways it has warped our ideas of what life is and should be so thoroughly, so completely, that any deviation from this degree of comfort, privilege, indulgence, and entitlement is seen as an intolerable affront, again as evidenced by some of the comments here. It is precisely this, our success at distributing the (unsustainable) spoils of empire to the many, that is locking us into decline and decay, in our case the decline and decay of not just the degradative effects of endemic societal entitlement (particularly evidenced by TrumpCo and fifty years of modern American ‘conservatism’) but the destruction of every biotic and abiotic system on Earth.
Biodiversity, ecosystems, and planetary systems are failing globally. This is what the “American Way” does. We didn’t make it up, but we’re the best in human history at it. It’s what humans do, and always will do until we are forced to create systems of self constraint, until we all live at a fraction of the level of comfort, convenience, and indulgence we do now. We’ll fix things, sure. We’ll problem solve. Until the next problem comes up, and the next, and the next… The problem is, we’re running out of planet, and the problem is, and has always been, that we cannot escape ourselves enough to stop this, not at scale. But yeah, things are good. I’m fed and warm. And watching as winter dies, and the world we know goes with it.
I think y'all should google the phrase "hedonic treadmill". It will provide some insight. And don't just take Google's AI answer, but dig into it a bit. Some forms of happiness (other than material things) don't lose their punch. They are all the things that are diminishing in our lives.