We Never Had It So Good

Rather than dissecting Robert Samuelson’s Washington Post column which could be summarized “we never had it so good”, let me just make a few observations.

  1. If you ignore enough factors, you can prove anything.
  2. If you deal only in aggregates, things do look pretty darned good.
  3. Heavy concentration of wealth in relatively few hands tells us that dealing only in aggregates does not jibe with ordinary people’s life experience nearly as well as it used to.
  4. Yes, we have better smartphones.
  5. What value do you place on confidence that you won’t be a victim of violent crime? Violent crime used to be unheard of in my affluent neighborhood on the Northwest Side of Chicago. Now it’s a block and a half away.
  6. What value do you place on the confidence that your children will lead happier, more prosperous, longer lives than you did? That is no longer the case.
  7. What value do you place on young people not being so burdened with educational debt that they may never dig their way out? That is no longer the case, either.
  8. What value do you place on every news broadcast not devolving into a shouting match?

I don’t think the widespread dissatisfaction, not just here in the U. S. but, rather obviously, in Europe as well, is just petulance or because the people are ingrates. When people is behaving as though something were wrong, there probably is.

Update

In a related vein, Charles Duhigg’s article at Atlantic might be summarized

  1. Americans are a bunch of angry ingrates.
  2. There’s good money to be made in anger.
  3. My anger is better than your anger.
10 comments… add one
  • Ben Wolf Link

    Given the outpouring of unified élite angst we’ve seen in the last two weeks, over the innate badness of the young, the sycophantic whitewashing of George H.W. Bush and the ill-founded certainty Russians are behind every social movement, I’m reminded of this by Noam Chomsky:

    You don’t have any other society where the educated classes are so effectively indoctrinated and controlled by a subtle propaganda system—a private system including media, intellectual opinion forming magazines and the participation of the most highly educated sections of the population. Such people ought to be referred to as ‘Commissars’; – for that is what their essential function is—to set up and maintain a system of doctrines and beliefs which will undermine independent thought and prevent a proper understanding and analysis of national and global institutions, issues, and policies

    .

  • Andy Link

    I’ve never been a fan of Chomsky, but here he seems pretty accurate to me.

  • Gray Shambler Link

    Regarding this, I just found a startling (to me) stat. In the last Pres. election Trump won the Electoral, Clinton the total popular vote, as you know. But on a county by county tally, Trump won 2,584 to 472. Rural counties left behind in just about every category you can mention.
    Clearly a protest vote by people Trump connected with when he said, speaking to Black voters, “what do you have to lose?
    You’re not working in D.C. New York, Seattle, Or San Francisco and you’re not going anywhere unless you are.

  • Andy Link

    Ran across this and thought I’d share. I can certainly see the parallels he’s making:

    https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidote-to-civilisational-collapse

  • Guarneri Link

    Well, as I tend to do. Down the list.

    Yes, aggregates fail, though not in an intellectual sense. They are just numbers. But rather in the hope that they inform us about the general population. I have yet to see what I consider a workable policy solution in this statistical aberration. That is, as I commented a couple weeks ago, in the case of income inequality it is an issue that tears at the fabric of society. So it is important. But the usual proposal, steal from one and give to another, results in brain drains, capital flight, government policy capture etc. it’s a dumb man’s solution.

    “Yes, we have better smart phones.”

    And TVs and food, and cars, and and and….. only Kings, and loss of liberty, can regulate what we desire. This is also the fatal flaw in pleas to take from the rich and give to the middle class, er, poor, who need medicine, food etc. But leave them to their cell phones, restaurant meals and flat screen TVs etc as an inalienable right. Right? Life requires a certain minimum self responsibility.

    Crime. I’m sorry to hear that. I used to live on the so called Gold Coast. But you could hear the shots coming from Cabrini Green. I did not realize Sauganash had developed such tight quarters.

    The kids. Well, I’m only aware of the Democrats advocating Big Education with its outlandish costs due to administration and buildings. But that appears to be the price of the indoctrination strategy of progressives. Somehow I don’t think they give a damn about the kids.

    News shouting matches?

    I’m not familiar with those. The faux news people deliver their propaganda in solemn tones. But don’t fool yourself. Walter Cronkite came clean in his later years. Today, the more dominant opinionists, although also masquerading at times as news people, foster the shouting matches. It sells.

    As for Europe. They fell into this insanity before us. They are experiencing the result before us. They have woken up before us. They are revolting before us. Europe, and the Ocasio-Cortez’s of the world are the canaries in the mine.

  • PD Shaw Link

    “Anger is an energy.” — Johnny Rotten

  • Roy Lofquist Link

    Resources Are Almost 5 Times as Abundant as They Were in 1980

    http://reason.com/blog/2018/12/04/resources-have-become-nearly-5-times-mor

  • steve Link

    Liked Andy’s article, but too long. I am not really sure how much worse things are now since the think tanks and talk radio people and cable TV folks do a good job of keeping everyone angry, but I think it is pretty clear that most of our growth and benefits are going to the top 0.1% of our population. Making them very, very rich has not done much for the rest of us. They now have so much money and power it will be hard to change things. They also find it really easy to obscure the truth. For example, Scott Sumner has a nice piece on Chinese theft of IP. How bad is it really? A recent report came out saying it was between $200 billion and $600 billion, and everyone just accepted those numbers because we now all “know” that China is our big problem. Scott questions those numbers and shows us why. Not saying that China is not an issue for us, but maybe we are putting too much focus there?

    http://www.themoneyillusion.com/how-costly-is-china-ip-theft/

    Steve

  • I went through the exercise of estimating theft of U. S. IP by China nearly 15 years ago. At the time it was clear to me it amounted to well over $100 billion per year. The stats are obviously obsolete now but the basic point remains that it’s a high dollar amount.

    My conclusion at the time was that defending IP was futile and we had a decision to make. Either we thought intellectual property was property or we didn’t. As I’ve said before, the solution is reciprocity. We should protect Chinese physical property only to the extent that the Chinese authorities protect American intellectual property.

  • PD Shaw Link

    For background on the Sumner-Cowen dispute:

    Cowen on Sumner: “You can put aside trade practices altogether, and simply look at the extreme and still under-reported degree of espionage and spying conducted by China, aimed at major U.S. corporations. It’s not quite an act of war, but it is not the classical model of trade either (“Mercantilism is bad…what’s wrong if they send us goods and we just send them back paper dollars?”). China is violating U.S. laws on a massive scale, and yes, I am sorry to say, trade is our main way of ‘reaching’ them and sending a message.

    Some kind of push back is needed, and I find it striking how much Westerners — and this includes free market types — who have lived in China full-time tend to agree with this conclusion. It is also striking how many market-oriented economists, usually from the outside, don’t talk much about this issue at all.”

    https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/scott-sumner-china.html

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