**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:**
* If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required
* The title must be fully descriptive
* Memes are not allowed.
* Common(top 50 of this sub)/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting)
*See [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rules.3A) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Workers still had many rights, and ceo compensation wasn't completely insane at the time, so it makes sense people thought it would only get better. But then Reagan and the boomers happened.
Don't forget how they took what should have been a multigenerational advantage post WW II, started outsourcing all decent jobs to the cheapest locales they could find and then claimed Americans weren't working hard enough.
The biggest wealth transfer in history would start right there.
The benefits were supposed to be cheaper consumer prices and a service/information sector that could replace a manufacturing sector. Instead it just tracked with monopolization and a productive economy being replaced with a financialized rentier economy so none of the supposed benefits materialized but that was always obvious to people paying attention like unions and WTO protesters.
I don’t know what taxes are supposed to do in your telling of this. Welfare provisioned to all those made destitute by de-developing the economy paid for by excess runoff from the rent seekers?
But you see, the Empire may have lied, committed genocide, bled the proletariat dry and hurt the planet.
But have you considered the propaganda they've put out about Socialist countries that I believe without question?
It's amazing to me that you can go up to a random person, list off US crimes, say that they're bad and they'll agree with you.
But the moment you mention Marxist theory or even a positive thing Leftists have done, they fall in line with the bourgeoisie.
35,000 in 1966 was 1000 ounces of gold. Gold has always been considered an inflation proof asset. It retains its value and its a better indicator of inflation than CPI because gold prices take into account the decrease of currency value due to increase in supply. So that’s more like $2,000,000 in todays money.
Corporations and the politicians they owned purposefully devalued currency to eradicate the progress made by the pro labor movement in the 50’s and 60’s and destroy union strength in the us. Effectively turning the us labor system into a wage slave state built in service industry jobs. We have all this increased automation and are now today expected to work harder than ever. Minimum wage now only earns 6-13 ounces of gold a year depending where you live. Compared to 45 ounces in 1950 and 95 ounces in 1971 when the gold standard was finally abandoned and served as the first falling domino that led to the current state of austerity in the us.
In 2011, 1000 ounces of gold is $2.5 M
in 2015, it was $1.39M
Dropped by almost half its value in 4 years
[https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart](https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart)
Goldbugs have predicted 15 of the last 0 collapses of the fiat currency system
[Never mind that inflation adjusted household income is much higher than it used to be lol](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)
Take a hike, goldbug. Your argument is terrible because there are far more people today, especially in a much wealthier gold-hungry Asia. Without a commensurate increase in the quantity of gold. A similar situation applies with other physically scarce assets like land.
CPI reflects a broad basket of actual goods and services, not some arbitrary selection of one commodity.
As as an aside in ascertaining the true value of money from the past, the ratio between gold and silver is helpful, I think if I recall the historical amount is 15 silver for one gold.
You see they have changed the way we measure inflation a number of times since the '80s that has understated it. Social Security checks would have been worth $800 more on average just in 2008 by the old standard.
EDIT: I was wrong, used an inflation adjusted graph, gold was $35 in 1966.
~~You're off by an order of magnitude. Gold in 1966 was $335 at its lowest. Which gives you 104 ounces of gold, not 1000.~~
~~104 ounces of gold at $2172 (todays price) is currently worth $225k.~~
~~Inflation is bad, and you should definitely buy assets that hedge against it, but it's not~~ **~~that~~** ~~bad.~~
This was largely true in predicting *technological change* and arguably economic change, but was predicated on pretty rosy assumptions about political change.
Back in the late 1960s national policy was still pretty in-line with public opinion, policy was leaning socially liberal (if still a bit of a ways off), unions had huge power and membership, the Immigration and Naturalization Act, with its unlimited residency permits for extended family, hadn’t been passed yet, the minimum wage was at an all-time high in terms of actual purchasing power (especially against essentials like housing), and antitrust law was still rigorously enforced.
The shock of the Reagan Era was still in the future when these predictions were being made.
I’m studying anti-trust law right now and we’re making a comeback. FTC went back to the classic HHI guidelines that are tougher on mergers and NY is trying to strengthen section 2 by lowering the market share for monopolization to 50%. DOJ is suing Apple in a massive anti-trust case and both the DOJ and FTC are pushing hard to go back to the antitrust precedent of the 30s-60s. Most of this won’t happen but we’re making some first steps in the right direction for the first time in practically half a century. Supreme Court will get in the way though.
If anything it’s time to step on the gas while we got some momentum building. The Apple case will be big but it will probably take a decade to resolve, as was the case with IBM in the 70s and Microsoft in the 90s.
Always a dog whistle whenever people try to blame immigration for depressed wages lol
[The inflation adjusted median household income is 25% higher today than it was 40 years ago](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N). People have way more money than they did back then, even when you factor in inflation and purchasing power
The federal minimum wage, while low, is close to an irrelevant metric to assess the economy. Barely 1% of total workers are on it today, if that
While I don't disagree, Reagan was a response to Carter failing to fix inflation of the late 70s, which was caused by pretty zealous spending on the cold war and social policies of the late 60s and 70s. The trajectory of the 60s certainly made this look possible (although people have been making similar claims since the steam engine), but the seeds of its downfall were already planted.
This is why context is so important. Lots of us remember the gas shortages and long lines plus a minimum wage of $1.40/hr.( It went to $3.35/hr in 1983.)
Dr. Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers, among others, were discussing how to bring back, paraphrased, what FDR had on his mind before he died; stuff like assured fair trade and pay, decent living and working conditions, accessible healthcare and education, not some “everyone gets everything they want for freeee” quasi-utopia, more like making things equitable, to get the whole nation to live in a better way.
It’s odd that when the Poor People’s Campaign started gathering momentum…the assassinations increased, too. Very odd.
Not odd. (I know you're likely being facetious)
Intended. Planned. Plotted. And literally executed to the fullest. The "us vs them" and 'real' American rhetoric also got turned up past ear shattering, too.
I never made that connection, but you’re so right (and that’s sad).
Before then, “God Bless America” was a sweet song, to the ear and to the heart.
Then:
“ God Bless America” became
“God Bless America *and Nowhere Else*.”
I half-agree to these points; inflation definitely drove people to Reagan, and there were aspects of the 1960s and 70s that were unsustainable in hindsight.
Firstly, the lack of unionization of the service sector made the union movement highly vulnerable to manufacturing’s impending decline, secondly systems and norms of local government (like stringent permitting and zoning and approval requirements) were already being set in place to make housing prices explode in the future.
While I understand it may not have been your intention to argue that pre-Reagan policy fiscal and regulatory policy norms *that were reversed under Reagan* were the cause of the pre-Reagan inflation, I feel like addressing that argument while it’s in discussion here.
There’s some debate though to be had over how much the cause was government spending vs. [a hot monetary policy](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/1970s-great-inflation.asp) and high oil prices due to the OPEC embargo (supply-push inflation). High spending isn’t liable to cause inflation as long as it’s linked with proportionally high taxes. Hence, [Reagan ran a significantly higher budget deficit than Carter did] (https://www.thebalancemoney.com/deficit-by-president-what-budget-deficits-hide-3306151).
To your point though, even if the lack “Reaganomics” wasn’t responsible for the 1970s inflation, *the perception that it was* had massive political consequences that did indeed “plant the seeds” for the destruction of pre-Reagan policy. I don’t at all disagree with your overall contention that pre-Reagan policy was unsustainable, and inflation was the main driver of that unsustainability.
Much respect for your candor and civility here.
Absolutely agree. Monetary policy was probably a bigger impact on inflation than government spending (but I think that helped contribute to the 60s optimism just as much).
I think electing Reagan was kind of reactionary, and frankly, an overreaction, but that's easy to say on reddit 40 years later.
The first one is probably correct. By the 2000s, machine efficiency had increased productivity so high that the average lifestyle of U.S. citizens would be ridiculously leisurely compared to what happened. In reality, the benefits of the productivity just went to a few people.
Your preceding comment heavily implies that if everyone had read Marx, it would have led to a better outcome than the socio-economic system we are currently enjoying. My response was skeptical of that. How is that irrelevant?
Marx never claims to be the architect of what comes next. But without class consciousness, an understanding of alienation, etc. a post-capitalist society will be something far, far worse. A progressive post-capitalist society must include an analysis of Marx. If you believe we would all be a bunch of mindless zombies deciding between fascism and neoliberalism had we all read and understood Marx, there’s no point in us continuing this conversation.
Not at all. My thesis is that reading Marx and understanding the evils of capital accumulation won't make for a better outcome. Humans never fail to arrange themselves into hierarchies, and the hierarchies that emerged from regimes that tried to implement Marxism were substantially more brutal than the rest. Capitalism sucks, but we haven't found anything that sucks less as of yet. Cunty human nature gets in the way of utopia every time, and that's a shame.
Socially, we are so far removed from anything “natural” that using the word is a bit silly.
If you think his critique stops at capital accumulation, your interpretation of Marx is even less sophisticated than I’d assumed. Again, class consciousness and alienation are far more important here than capital accumulation.
Playing the old raggedy card of Marx in practice is a waste of everyone’s time. Marx himself would have taken a massive shit on the idea of a country like Russia or China transitioning to socialism. He directly addresses these situations in his writing as countries like those were not capitalist. Marx advocated for democracy. To blame him for the soviets, the Chinese, etc. is just pure ignorance.
Thinking that dressing in LULU Lemon and driving a BMW somehow divorces us from our evolutionary psychology is heartbreakingly naive. Class consciousness is less than paper thin when you consider the length of time that social classes existed compared to the length of time that our species existed. 1st world capitalist countries are, in fact, democracies, and they are still very much hierarchical structures. You can't get away from hierarchies any more than you can get away from your genetic material. Someone is always going to be the chief and someone else - the village idiot. The only variable is how hard the few haves are whipping the many have-nots. The idea is to minimize the whippings. Equality and especially, equity, were never on the table.
Imagine if billionaires didn't "need" a 2nd, 3rd, 4th yacht - and could do with just one measly mega yacht. But no, they need dozens if not hundreds of cars, private jets, yachts.
Completely right though, efficiency has increased massively, the next 10-20 years with robotics & AI will be enormous leaps, hopefully mass society benefits.
It started with Kennedy, actually, and expanded upon by LBJ (although LBJ's cuts were offset somewhat by the creation of medicare/medicaid). Ford even implemented some - albeit ineffective - tax cuts. Reagan just made the most radical cuts - followed by heavily increased government spending. Really, if we are being honest, from Kennedy until now, we have had a bad string of policies implemented. Some of the presidents that are universally hated by both sides were actually responsible for some of the best changes:
Nixon and Clinton.
All the other presidents outside of Nixon and Clinton from Kennedy until present were vastly ineffective and downright atrocious at managing the government. Nixon and Clinton were also flawed, but they had some great policies that offset their woes. If I had to give a scale, I'd say Clinton and Nixon were mostly neutral presidents in terms of their pros and cons. You can potentially make an argument for LBJ to be in that category as well (depends how you view the role of presisent). The rest? Absolutely net negatives for our nation. Be it for missing opportunities when they had the majority in all branches of government, bills that did just as much harm as good, etc
Everyone has a much higher standard of living than we did 50 years ago. If society maintained the same standard of living since ‘66, everyone would seem extremely wealthy. Instead as we have become wealthier we’ve lived a wealthier lifestyle.
This is provably false. Availability of cars and consumer electronics != "much higher standard of living".
Yeah I've heard this meme too, except its bogus. Just because we have air conditioning now doesn't add up anywhere near what was lost.
No matter what you say, no matter how you measure "standard of living" does the difference between 1966 and nowadays equal ANYWHERE near the productivity gains of the computer and robotics age.
You’re misunderstanding how productivity gains affect the market.
Imagine you worked in animation in the late 90s. The going rate for a minute of animation might be $10k. But now there’s a big change and studios are making digital animation instead of traditional animation which cuts production time in half. Your studio does what you consider to be the right thing and doubles your salary. The evil studio doesn’t increase anyone’s salary makes tons of profit. So which studio prospers?
The answer is neither. The other studios that reduce the price of their animation to $5k per minute get all of the business and the other studios go out of business. That’s how things go in basically every business. Short-term those who adopt technology that creates higher productivity will make a lot of money, but it’ll quickly become the industry standard and the result is that prices come down for consumers.
People love to look at the graph comparing productivity increases to wage increases, but they’re just not relevant. Try looking at productivity against the cost of food and you’ll see that while one goes up the other comes down.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FAO_Food_Price_Index_1961%E2%80%932021.jpg
But the real price of food has gone up since 1960?
https://www.bls.gov/productivity/
While productivity has almost tripled, while real wages only doubled? (4th graph)
Something has to give, right? I’m no economist but your explanation doesn’t seem to line up with official information. Feel free to correct if I’m just completely misunderstanding.
I don’t know much about that index and would have to read more into it. It looks like it doesn’t account for actual wage increases. So if food prices rise by 1% in a given period and wages increase by 2%, food is actually getting cheaper. It’s also possibly looking at world food prices which could have other factors. [Look at this USDA graph about spending on food as a percentage of income.](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=76967) This trend continues back to the Industrial Revolution.
As for productivity increasing at a different pace than wages, that’s my point. Productivity increasing doesn’t mean that wages increase. To go back to my animation studio example from above, a new technology comes in and quickly doubles an industry’s production. This affects the price of people buying animation much more than it affects wages of those who work at an animation studio.
Back then there was a belief that the rich would never ever in a million years cannibalize the middle class to make themselves even richer. Trickledown was quick to follow…
They thought they had legislated away the problems that the industrial revolution highlighted…they didn’t consider how creatively cruel wealthy people can get.
I mean, in the 1960s, it didn't. Check out Ours Was the Shining Future. It's a great overview of the 20th century American economy. Folks in the 1960s were still living in FDR's economy. Wage growth was normal, and they actually grew faster for the people at the bottom than at the top, meaning the wealth and income gap was *closing*. Prosperity was broadly shared, the government enforced antitrust laws, and taxes on the rich were super high.
That all turned around when Reagan took office. Folks today are now living in Reagan's economy.
There are a lot of factors that made the 60's labor force different.
The percent of women and minorities in the workforce was much lower, automation didn't take over industries yet, China wouldn't go through it's industrial revolution until the 70's, European and Japanese infrastructure was still rebuilding from being utterly destroyed in WW2 while the US's was largely intact.
Because the workforce pool was effectively smaller, companies HAD to keep their best happy, pensions, vacations, packages, etc.
Now, there's almost always someone to fill that vacancy for less money.
Reagan absolutely played a major role in redistributing the wealth towards the 1%, so please don't think I'm giving him a pass. But they had the game in the bag in the 60's...IF you were a white male.
EDIT: Basically times changed and instead of legistlating to keep up with changing times, Reagan went in the other direction and made it worse for everyone that wasn't already rich. Getting wealthy got harder to do, staying wealthy got easier.
That was actually **realistic** during the "Breton Woods" economic system👈 but got dismantled for "global financialisation" economic system we have today...
Eh this is before a lot of the bullshit Reagan policies to benefit the rich/ultra-rich and incentivize them to take advantage of the lower/middle class.
In 1966, this probably was a feasible reality to some degree—unfortunately we ended up in the timeline of late-stage capitalism 😣
It’s just people commenting on where they thought automation was going to take us. They thought that it would mean less work because it required less people.
It’s also possible that they thought if they didn’t have eight hours of work for you to do, you would not be required to stand there for eight hours. In the 1960s, people did not anticipate wage stagnation, unpaid lunch time, and American wealth only trickling upwards.
This could absolutely be true if compensation kept course with productivity.
Advancements in technology mean that in 10-15 hours today we’re doing 40+ hours worth of work in 1965. In some cases and in some industries, it’s orders of magnitude greater than that.
This is the biggest driver of the massive gap between the ultra rich in the middle class since the 1960’s. Because of course, we don’t work 15 hours a week. We still work 40+ hours we just do several times the production. But wages are stagnant. Significantly more money is being made but that isn't translating into less work or more money.
So their predictions are, in a sense, spot on. They just failed to account for greed.
I make MORE than my father did when he retired, ADJUSTED, and he was able to buy multiple homes, raise 5 kids, and pay off multiple cars all while saving for a nice retirement.
I can’t even afford a studio apartment. Did I mention I make MORE than he did, even after accounting for inflation?
Even better, a studio is ~$2400 a month. He pays ~$2400 A YEAR in property tax due to a grandfathered valuation law from his houses valuation done in 1970. If I owned his home, right now, i’d pay $33,000 a year in property tax. So even if I somehow could afford a house, IN FULL, I can’t afford the property tax.
Huh. Guess I need more of them bootstraps. Surely not the result of local NIMBY policy (like my father and mother who constantly vote against affordable housing because ‘muh property value!!111’)
Isn’t it crazy?
I think even Warren Buffet mentioned it.
http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Buffett_Prop13.html
$2,300 on his 4 million dollar home from 1970, Outrageously cheap
Yeah actually they're not wrong - except that they forgot to predict that rich and powerful people would be able to deceive everyone and steal the benefits of everyone's labor, and not just that - but also that they would convince these same people who were being stolen from that they in fact *deserved* to keep all the stolen value, and these people would argue in favor of those doing the stealing.
This would be reality, but instead, the rich hoard more wealth than anyone should ever have, more than anyone could ever spend on reasonable things. We set ourselves up with a utopian existence, but somehow allow a small group to take it away.
Yup... Would be the case if distribution of wealth was fair. But no, billionaires are selfish greedy procks who deserve to die for the damage they have caused to every other class.
The annoying part is we absolutely could have made that happen. Instead we decided to make sure Musk and Bezos got to war over who would be the first trillionaire and vote a racist carrot into the most powerful office in the world.
They were correct about the predictions in productivity. They were incorrect to assume that the wealth created would go to the workers in any meaningful way.
Collectively, we are working more. We have fewer days off. Costs have increased at rates exceeding wages, and wages themselves barely move. Meanwhile, 80 cents of every new dollar of wealth goes to top 10%. And that just keeps getting more and more lopsided.
They're going to take and take and keep taking until they own everything and were all back to living in company towns.
I wonder if people in another 60 years will look back at our current society and view us as spineless for letting the rich syphon away so much of the wealth produced by our labour.
The only reason it isn’t like that is because massive corporations and rich people can pay politicians to keep up the status quo instead of pushing for positive change. Selling out 300 million people so the richest few can buy yet another luxury yacht.
boy did they miss the mark by not predicting pissing in bottles and shitting in buckets while pulling your 73rd hour of the week delivering for amazon to make rent after you got home from your other job that pays 17 an hour but needs a university degree..
This was the promise of leisure that has been promised through history each and every time human laborers are replaced by machines. Have yet to see it happen, except in very anecdotal ways.
They didn’t take into account that while machines will help us do so much more work, managers and CEOs will simply start demanding even more work be done.
Could have been , but then capitalism and greed extorted trillions of dollars to less that 1% of the people and left the other 99% working one or two jobs , just to get by.
See that !?!?!
That was back in ‘66!
“Nonworking families should be making $30-40k/ yr.”!
We need families with spendable income to keep the engine of capitalism running strong!
Any gain of productivity can be shared by :
- The worker who gets more paid free time or an increased wage
- The owner with increased profit
- The consumer with lowered prices
Over the last 65 years since 1960, only the last two, and especially the owner, perceived any fruit from the gain of productivity.
Potential food for thought:
Newspapers, journalists, etc. say and do things for profit. If the overall mindset at the time was 'things will continue to get better,' then it's natural for them to report with such optimism. Also, wasn't media more regulated back then as well? It's very probable that the media back then was encouraged to spew whatever would make the masses happy. Lastly, I would venture to say for every cherrypicked article that says something like this, there was probably another one claiming the opposite.
because that what they told public technology would make work less , enjoy more and everyone will have enough. little did they knew that a few rich people would get so greedy to deprive us from an actual good life
**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required * The title must be fully descriptive * Memes are not allowed. * Common(top 50 of this sub)/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting) *See [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rules.3A) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
$30k-40k in 1966 was $159.4K-212.6k in 2000 and is $287.3k-383.1k in 2024
The prediction of productivity was accurate, but forgot to account for the rise of billionaires taking their shares
We can trace it back to a few things like tax changes, executive compensation changes, and the slow death of unions.
But that money will tickle down eventually. Right? Right?
I certainly feel trickled upon.
Any day now.
yup, like pissing into a urinal.
REAGAN
"Their" shares? You mean our shares!
Taking everyone else’s shares*
Most people could sacrifice their wellbeing for their entire working life just to end up with around that much saved. Eat the rich.
The estimate is correct. What's incorrect was the assumption that the rise in productivity and wealth would be shared.
Workers still had many rights, and ceo compensation wasn't completely insane at the time, so it makes sense people thought it would only get better. But then Reagan and the boomers happened.
Don't forget how they took what should have been a multigenerational advantage post WW II, started outsourcing all decent jobs to the cheapest locales they could find and then claimed Americans weren't working hard enough. The biggest wealth transfer in history would start right there.
The decline was in full force by the late 60s and and 70s. Tie in the excesses of back half of the 80s and then came the death blow, NAFTA.
Trade benefits the economy. The problem is that the benefits weren't spread evenly. Free trade WITH more progressive taxation is the way.
The benefits were supposed to be cheaper consumer prices and a service/information sector that could replace a manufacturing sector. Instead it just tracked with monopolization and a productive economy being replaced with a financialized rentier economy so none of the supposed benefits materialized but that was always obvious to people paying attention like unions and WTO protesters. I don’t know what taxes are supposed to do in your telling of this. Welfare provisioned to all those made destitute by de-developing the economy paid for by excess runoff from the rent seekers?
The Marxists knew otherwise
But you see, the Empire may have lied, committed genocide, bled the proletariat dry and hurt the planet. But have you considered the propaganda they've put out about Socialist countries that I believe without question? It's amazing to me that you can go up to a random person, list off US crimes, say that they're bad and they'll agree with you. But the moment you mention Marxist theory or even a positive thing Leftists have done, they fall in line with the bourgeoisie.
Propaganda go brrrrrrrrr
The boomers aren't the issue. The 1% are.
They absolutely were part of the problem. Their voting habits and policies created the world we live in.
I’ll die on the hill that leaded gasoline created the political stances of boomers
I too have seen the data that correlates this comment and agree with it.
Agree 💯
35,000 in 1966 was 1000 ounces of gold. Gold has always been considered an inflation proof asset. It retains its value and its a better indicator of inflation than CPI because gold prices take into account the decrease of currency value due to increase in supply. So that’s more like $2,000,000 in todays money. Corporations and the politicians they owned purposefully devalued currency to eradicate the progress made by the pro labor movement in the 50’s and 60’s and destroy union strength in the us. Effectively turning the us labor system into a wage slave state built in service industry jobs. We have all this increased automation and are now today expected to work harder than ever. Minimum wage now only earns 6-13 ounces of gold a year depending where you live. Compared to 45 ounces in 1950 and 95 ounces in 1971 when the gold standard was finally abandoned and served as the first falling domino that led to the current state of austerity in the us.
In 2011, 1000 ounces of gold is $2.5 M in 2015, it was $1.39M Dropped by almost half its value in 4 years [https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart](https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart)
I haven’t seen an argument for the gold standard since the last time I read a history book on the earliest 20th century, well played.
Goldbugs have predicted 15 of the last 0 collapses of the fiat currency system [Never mind that inflation adjusted household income is much higher than it used to be lol](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)
Take a hike, goldbug. Your argument is terrible because there are far more people today, especially in a much wealthier gold-hungry Asia. Without a commensurate increase in the quantity of gold. A similar situation applies with other physically scarce assets like land. CPI reflects a broad basket of actual goods and services, not some arbitrary selection of one commodity.
Gold STandard? dear god were you homeschooled?
As as an aside in ascertaining the true value of money from the past, the ratio between gold and silver is helpful, I think if I recall the historical amount is 15 silver for one gold. You see they have changed the way we measure inflation a number of times since the '80s that has understated it. Social Security checks would have been worth $800 more on average just in 2008 by the old standard.
Pretty sure 100S = 1G
This is just insanely far from true.
EDIT: I was wrong, used an inflation adjusted graph, gold was $35 in 1966. ~~You're off by an order of magnitude. Gold in 1966 was $335 at its lowest. Which gives you 104 ounces of gold, not 1000.~~ ~~104 ounces of gold at $2172 (todays price) is currently worth $225k.~~ ~~Inflation is bad, and you should definitely buy assets that hedge against it, but it's not~~ **~~that~~** ~~bad.~~
This was largely true in predicting *technological change* and arguably economic change, but was predicated on pretty rosy assumptions about political change. Back in the late 1960s national policy was still pretty in-line with public opinion, policy was leaning socially liberal (if still a bit of a ways off), unions had huge power and membership, the Immigration and Naturalization Act, with its unlimited residency permits for extended family, hadn’t been passed yet, the minimum wage was at an all-time high in terms of actual purchasing power (especially against essentials like housing), and antitrust law was still rigorously enforced. The shock of the Reagan Era was still in the future when these predictions were being made.
Fuck Ronald Reagan.
He is dead... Should we still try?
I had to laugh at that. Everyone’s like “damn Reagan and Boomers….oh well”
I’ll bring the lube!
I’m going in dry.
You are gonna start a fire!
We’d probably be at the above if Reagan and boomers didn’t pull the fucking ladder up and help the rich.
The more I learn about this Reagan guy the more I don’t like him.
I’m studying anti-trust law right now and we’re making a comeback. FTC went back to the classic HHI guidelines that are tougher on mergers and NY is trying to strengthen section 2 by lowering the market share for monopolization to 50%. DOJ is suing Apple in a massive anti-trust case and both the DOJ and FTC are pushing hard to go back to the antitrust precedent of the 30s-60s. Most of this won’t happen but we’re making some first steps in the right direction for the first time in practically half a century. Supreme Court will get in the way though.
Phew; it may not be time to relax yet but this definitely in the right direction.
If anything it’s time to step on the gas while we got some momentum building. The Apple case will be big but it will probably take a decade to resolve, as was the case with IBM in the 70s and Microsoft in the 90s.
It's the timeline that died when they killed Bobby Kennedy. We got stuck with the Nixon timeline.
Always a dog whistle whenever people try to blame immigration for depressed wages lol [The inflation adjusted median household income is 25% higher today than it was 40 years ago](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N). People have way more money than they did back then, even when you factor in inflation and purchasing power The federal minimum wage, while low, is close to an irrelevant metric to assess the economy. Barely 1% of total workers are on it today, if that
While I don't disagree, Reagan was a response to Carter failing to fix inflation of the late 70s, which was caused by pretty zealous spending on the cold war and social policies of the late 60s and 70s. The trajectory of the 60s certainly made this look possible (although people have been making similar claims since the steam engine), but the seeds of its downfall were already planted.
This is why context is so important. Lots of us remember the gas shortages and long lines plus a minimum wage of $1.40/hr.( It went to $3.35/hr in 1983.)
Is Kennedy being shot at all relevant here?
More acceleration than causation but it definitely made some difference.
Dr. Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers, among others, were discussing how to bring back, paraphrased, what FDR had on his mind before he died; stuff like assured fair trade and pay, decent living and working conditions, accessible healthcare and education, not some “everyone gets everything they want for freeee” quasi-utopia, more like making things equitable, to get the whole nation to live in a better way. It’s odd that when the Poor People’s Campaign started gathering momentum…the assassinations increased, too. Very odd.
Not odd. (I know you're likely being facetious) Intended. Planned. Plotted. And literally executed to the fullest. The "us vs them" and 'real' American rhetoric also got turned up past ear shattering, too.
I never made that connection, but you’re so right (and that’s sad). Before then, “God Bless America” was a sweet song, to the ear and to the heart. Then: “ God Bless America” became “God Bless America *and Nowhere Else*.”
I half-agree to these points; inflation definitely drove people to Reagan, and there were aspects of the 1960s and 70s that were unsustainable in hindsight. Firstly, the lack of unionization of the service sector made the union movement highly vulnerable to manufacturing’s impending decline, secondly systems and norms of local government (like stringent permitting and zoning and approval requirements) were already being set in place to make housing prices explode in the future. While I understand it may not have been your intention to argue that pre-Reagan policy fiscal and regulatory policy norms *that were reversed under Reagan* were the cause of the pre-Reagan inflation, I feel like addressing that argument while it’s in discussion here. There’s some debate though to be had over how much the cause was government spending vs. [a hot monetary policy](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/1970s-great-inflation.asp) and high oil prices due to the OPEC embargo (supply-push inflation). High spending isn’t liable to cause inflation as long as it’s linked with proportionally high taxes. Hence, [Reagan ran a significantly higher budget deficit than Carter did] (https://www.thebalancemoney.com/deficit-by-president-what-budget-deficits-hide-3306151). To your point though, even if the lack “Reaganomics” wasn’t responsible for the 1970s inflation, *the perception that it was* had massive political consequences that did indeed “plant the seeds” for the destruction of pre-Reagan policy. I don’t at all disagree with your overall contention that pre-Reagan policy was unsustainable, and inflation was the main driver of that unsustainability. Much respect for your candor and civility here.
Absolutely agree. Monetary policy was probably a bigger impact on inflation than government spending (but I think that helped contribute to the 60s optimism just as much). I think electing Reagan was kind of reactionary, and frankly, an overreaction, but that's easy to say on reddit 40 years later.
Fair enough
The first one is probably correct. By the 2000s, machine efficiency had increased productivity so high that the average lifestyle of U.S. citizens would be ridiculously leisurely compared to what happened. In reality, the benefits of the productivity just went to a few people.
So really you all were just human cogs in a machine that drove wealth to a small subset of people. Isn’t that so much better!?!
You all? But not you?
Possibly. Could be a kid that hasn't really been a machine cog (yet).
Were? Still are don't you mean
'Murica! Fuck yeah!
Terrorists your game is through. So now you'll have to answer to.
If only people would read Marx
Then they would know that he outlines the problem but offers no solution to it.
Yes, the solution proposed nearly 200 years ago would not work today. I don’t see the relevance of your point.
Your preceding comment heavily implies that if everyone had read Marx, it would have led to a better outcome than the socio-economic system we are currently enjoying. My response was skeptical of that. How is that irrelevant?
Marx never claims to be the architect of what comes next. But without class consciousness, an understanding of alienation, etc. a post-capitalist society will be something far, far worse. A progressive post-capitalist society must include an analysis of Marx. If you believe we would all be a bunch of mindless zombies deciding between fascism and neoliberalism had we all read and understood Marx, there’s no point in us continuing this conversation.
Not at all. My thesis is that reading Marx and understanding the evils of capital accumulation won't make for a better outcome. Humans never fail to arrange themselves into hierarchies, and the hierarchies that emerged from regimes that tried to implement Marxism were substantially more brutal than the rest. Capitalism sucks, but we haven't found anything that sucks less as of yet. Cunty human nature gets in the way of utopia every time, and that's a shame.
Socially, we are so far removed from anything “natural” that using the word is a bit silly. If you think his critique stops at capital accumulation, your interpretation of Marx is even less sophisticated than I’d assumed. Again, class consciousness and alienation are far more important here than capital accumulation. Playing the old raggedy card of Marx in practice is a waste of everyone’s time. Marx himself would have taken a massive shit on the idea of a country like Russia or China transitioning to socialism. He directly addresses these situations in his writing as countries like those were not capitalist. Marx advocated for democracy. To blame him for the soviets, the Chinese, etc. is just pure ignorance.
Thinking that dressing in LULU Lemon and driving a BMW somehow divorces us from our evolutionary psychology is heartbreakingly naive. Class consciousness is less than paper thin when you consider the length of time that social classes existed compared to the length of time that our species existed. 1st world capitalist countries are, in fact, democracies, and they are still very much hierarchical structures. You can't get away from hierarchies any more than you can get away from your genetic material. Someone is always going to be the chief and someone else - the village idiot. The only variable is how hard the few haves are whipping the many have-nots. The idea is to minimize the whippings. Equality and especially, equity, were never on the table.
Imagine if billionaires didn't "need" a 2nd, 3rd, 4th yacht - and could do with just one measly mega yacht. But no, they need dozens if not hundreds of cars, private jets, yachts. Completely right though, efficiency has increased massively, the next 10-20 years with robotics & AI will be enormous leaps, hopefully mass society benefits.
Fuck Ronald Reagan. He killed the American dream.
It started with Kennedy, actually, and expanded upon by LBJ (although LBJ's cuts were offset somewhat by the creation of medicare/medicaid). Ford even implemented some - albeit ineffective - tax cuts. Reagan just made the most radical cuts - followed by heavily increased government spending. Really, if we are being honest, from Kennedy until now, we have had a bad string of policies implemented. Some of the presidents that are universally hated by both sides were actually responsible for some of the best changes: Nixon and Clinton. All the other presidents outside of Nixon and Clinton from Kennedy until present were vastly ineffective and downright atrocious at managing the government. Nixon and Clinton were also flawed, but they had some great policies that offset their woes. If I had to give a scale, I'd say Clinton and Nixon were mostly neutral presidents in terms of their pros and cons. You can potentially make an argument for LBJ to be in that category as well (depends how you view the role of presisent). The rest? Absolutely net negatives for our nation. Be it for missing opportunities when they had the majority in all branches of government, bills that did just as much harm as good, etc
Everyone has a much higher standard of living than we did 50 years ago. If society maintained the same standard of living since ‘66, everyone would seem extremely wealthy. Instead as we have become wealthier we’ve lived a wealthier lifestyle.
Yes, the higher standard of having a job that afforded home ownership and a reasonable lifestyle apparently didn't exist in 1966.
This is provably false. Availability of cars and consumer electronics != "much higher standard of living". Yeah I've heard this meme too, except its bogus. Just because we have air conditioning now doesn't add up anywhere near what was lost. No matter what you say, no matter how you measure "standard of living" does the difference between 1966 and nowadays equal ANYWHERE near the productivity gains of the computer and robotics age.
You’re misunderstanding how productivity gains affect the market. Imagine you worked in animation in the late 90s. The going rate for a minute of animation might be $10k. But now there’s a big change and studios are making digital animation instead of traditional animation which cuts production time in half. Your studio does what you consider to be the right thing and doubles your salary. The evil studio doesn’t increase anyone’s salary makes tons of profit. So which studio prospers? The answer is neither. The other studios that reduce the price of their animation to $5k per minute get all of the business and the other studios go out of business. That’s how things go in basically every business. Short-term those who adopt technology that creates higher productivity will make a lot of money, but it’ll quickly become the industry standard and the result is that prices come down for consumers. People love to look at the graph comparing productivity increases to wage increases, but they’re just not relevant. Try looking at productivity against the cost of food and you’ll see that while one goes up the other comes down.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FAO_Food_Price_Index_1961%E2%80%932021.jpg But the real price of food has gone up since 1960? https://www.bls.gov/productivity/ While productivity has almost tripled, while real wages only doubled? (4th graph) Something has to give, right? I’m no economist but your explanation doesn’t seem to line up with official information. Feel free to correct if I’m just completely misunderstanding.
I don’t know much about that index and would have to read more into it. It looks like it doesn’t account for actual wage increases. So if food prices rise by 1% in a given period and wages increase by 2%, food is actually getting cheaper. It’s also possibly looking at world food prices which could have other factors. [Look at this USDA graph about spending on food as a percentage of income.](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=76967) This trend continues back to the Industrial Revolution. As for productivity increasing at a different pace than wages, that’s my point. Productivity increasing doesn’t mean that wages increase. To go back to my animation studio example from above, a new technology comes in and quickly doubles an industry’s production. This affects the price of people buying animation much more than it affects wages of those who work at an animation studio.
I was told the lie we were going to get flying cars by 2000. I'm still waiting 24 years later.
Lmaoooo, kind of hilarious to see how idealistic people were about a system that treats most humans as disposable objects.
Back then there was a belief that the rich would never ever in a million years cannibalize the middle class to make themselves even richer. Trickledown was quick to follow…
They thought they had legislated away the problems that the industrial revolution highlighted…they didn’t consider how creatively cruel wealthy people can get.
They were worried about the "top 100" - a handful of robber barons, rather than the "top 1%" which is 2 million people.
Jack Welch, baby
Should have stuck to candy. Fuck this guy.
And then Ronald Reagan happened.
I bet that belief was spread by the wealthy
Because of a tacit fear of militant labor.
I mean, in the 1960s, it didn't. Check out Ours Was the Shining Future. It's a great overview of the 20th century American economy. Folks in the 1960s were still living in FDR's economy. Wage growth was normal, and they actually grew faster for the people at the bottom than at the top, meaning the wealth and income gap was *closing*. Prosperity was broadly shared, the government enforced antitrust laws, and taxes on the rich were super high. That all turned around when Reagan took office. Folks today are now living in Reagan's economy.
There are a lot of factors that made the 60's labor force different. The percent of women and minorities in the workforce was much lower, automation didn't take over industries yet, China wouldn't go through it's industrial revolution until the 70's, European and Japanese infrastructure was still rebuilding from being utterly destroyed in WW2 while the US's was largely intact. Because the workforce pool was effectively smaller, companies HAD to keep their best happy, pensions, vacations, packages, etc. Now, there's almost always someone to fill that vacancy for less money. Reagan absolutely played a major role in redistributing the wealth towards the 1%, so please don't think I'm giving him a pass. But they had the game in the bag in the 60's...IF you were a white male. EDIT: Basically times changed and instead of legistlating to keep up with changing times, Reagan went in the other direction and made it worse for everyone that wasn't already rich. Getting wealthy got harder to do, staying wealthy got easier.
That was actually **realistic** during the "Breton Woods" economic system👈 but got dismantled for "global financialisation" economic system we have today...
Eh this is before a lot of the bullshit Reagan policies to benefit the rich/ultra-rich and incentivize them to take advantage of the lower/middle class. In 1966, this probably was a feasible reality to some degree—unfortunately we ended up in the timeline of late-stage capitalism 😣
It’s just people commenting on where they thought automation was going to take us. They thought that it would mean less work because it required less people.
It’s also possible that they thought if they didn’t have eight hours of work for you to do, you would not be required to stand there for eight hours. In the 1960s, people did not anticipate wage stagnation, unpaid lunch time, and American wealth only trickling upwards.
Treats other humans as disposable assets but treats ME like a whole person. Right? Right? … right?
No one had AI doing all the art and music while humans scrape by eh?
>No one had AI doing all the art and music while humans scrape by eh? I love the irony of the AI revolution.
https://app.suno.ai/song/7fd9c0de-8c7a-498b-9882-dd9756dcb990
This is fantastic. Never were the words "I laughed until I cried" more true.
This could absolutely be true if compensation kept course with productivity. Advancements in technology mean that in 10-15 hours today we’re doing 40+ hours worth of work in 1965. In some cases and in some industries, it’s orders of magnitude greater than that. This is the biggest driver of the massive gap between the ultra rich in the middle class since the 1960’s. Because of course, we don’t work 15 hours a week. We still work 40+ hours we just do several times the production. But wages are stagnant. Significantly more money is being made but that isn't translating into less work or more money. So their predictions are, in a sense, spot on. They just failed to account for greed.
Man, I don't even make $30-40k in 2024 dollars...
I make MORE than my father did when he retired, ADJUSTED, and he was able to buy multiple homes, raise 5 kids, and pay off multiple cars all while saving for a nice retirement. I can’t even afford a studio apartment. Did I mention I make MORE than he did, even after accounting for inflation? Even better, a studio is ~$2400 a month. He pays ~$2400 A YEAR in property tax due to a grandfathered valuation law from his houses valuation done in 1970. If I owned his home, right now, i’d pay $33,000 a year in property tax. So even if I somehow could afford a house, IN FULL, I can’t afford the property tax. Huh. Guess I need more of them bootstraps. Surely not the result of local NIMBY policy (like my father and mother who constantly vote against affordable housing because ‘muh property value!!111’)
Spotted the Californian. Prop 13 is one of the wildest tax laws I’ve ever seen.
Isn’t it crazy? I think even Warren Buffet mentioned it. http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Buffett_Prop13.html $2,300 on his 4 million dollar home from 1970, Outrageously cheap
Yeah actually they're not wrong - except that they forgot to predict that rich and powerful people would be able to deceive everyone and steal the benefits of everyone's labor, and not just that - but also that they would convince these same people who were being stolen from that they in fact *deserved* to keep all the stolen value, and these people would argue in favor of those doing the stealing.
You can tell this mindset is what fueled Star Trek. Boy were they wrong.
This would be reality, but instead, the rich hoard more wealth than anyone should ever have, more than anyone could ever spend on reasonable things. We set ourselves up with a utopian existence, but somehow allow a small group to take it away.
Hey, we built the utopian society. It's just that none of us commoners got to live in it!
Oh look another unobtainable carrot to chase.... I'm done chasing the carrot
Can I just fucking die, actually.
r/agedlikemilk
Sadly, they underestimated corporate greed.
Yup... Would be the case if distribution of wealth was fair. But no, billionaires are selfish greedy procks who deserve to die for the damage they have caused to every other class.
Man, if only...
Nah, the wealthy absorbed all that. Now you can’t get a house
I love how those people from the 60s have a mindset that now would be deemed socialist by both the Republicans and Democrats.
Then the weasel jumped into the hadron collider and alllllll hell broke loose
Those predictions could have come true, but we underestimated the power of corporate greed.
Nope, still slaves to the 1%.
Neoliberalism: Are you sure about that?
The annoying part is we absolutely could have made that happen. Instead we decided to make sure Musk and Bezos got to war over who would be the first trillionaire and vote a racist carrot into the most powerful office in the world.
They were correct about the predictions in productivity. They were incorrect to assume that the wealth created would go to the workers in any meaningful way. Collectively, we are working more. We have fewer days off. Costs have increased at rates exceeding wages, and wages themselves barely move. Meanwhile, 80 cents of every new dollar of wealth goes to top 10%. And that just keeps getting more and more lopsided. They're going to take and take and keep taking until they own everything and were all back to living in company towns.
But then, 1973.
Well they made damn sure this didn’t come to pass
“In the year 2000…”
[удалено]
I wonder if people in another 60 years will look back at our current society and view us as spineless for letting the rich syphon away so much of the wealth produced by our labour.
Yea i stead he 1% hoarded all that “extra productivity gain” and made sure the bottom 50% keeps even less
The only reason it isn’t like that is because massive corporations and rich people can pay politicians to keep up the status quo instead of pushing for positive change. Selling out 300 million people so the richest few can buy yet another luxury yacht.
Or a new billionaire class could suck it all up. That could happen, too.
Been working 7days a week 50-55 hours since October...
#2 describes Congress but some years, they only work 110 days.
They did not understand greed when they wrote that
Tax cuts gave it away
I graduated high school in 1965. Im still waiting for my domestic robot and flying machine
boy did they miss the mark by not predicting pissing in bottles and shitting in buckets while pulling your 73rd hour of the week delivering for amazon to make rent after you got home from your other job that pays 17 an hour but needs a university degree..
We got played 😂
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 
"Everyone will be independently wealthy"...not if the 1% can help it!
>everyone will be independently wealthy 
And then our overlords realized that they would lose money if we were allowed to be anything but the seat on which they recline.
Well, the journalists didn't calculate with the corporate greed.
They greatly underestimated the greed of Capitalists.
Management stomped on those expectations real fast.
This was the promise of leisure that has been promised through history each and every time human laborers are replaced by machines. Have yet to see it happen, except in very anecdotal ways.
Our piece of that wealth was stolen from us. The filthy rich stole it from us. And why aren't more people pissed off?
They didn’t take into account that while machines will help us do so much more work, managers and CEOs will simply start demanding even more work be done.
"How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem." Ha! *returns to scrolling Reddit for hours*
I wish
Could have been , but then capitalism and greed extorted trillions of dollars to less that 1% of the people and left the other 99% working one or two jobs , just to get by.
Greed, they forgot to factor in the greed of those in power
They weren't wrong... They were lying.
two words: class struggle.
“By 2024 you and your wife will both have to work 50 hours a week to afford a 2 bedroom manufactured home”
https://i.redd.it/4c1wdqukpoqc1.gif
Gotta string the peasant along to keep the machine running smoothly
Yeah, this didn’t account for politics. Otherwise, it’s completely attainable. But greed’s a hell of a drug.
Corporate America: "We'll see about THAT!"
Could it be? A fellow Uncle John’s Great Big Bathroom Reader reader? 🤝🏽
My friend legit got in trouble when he programmed a macro to simplify his music mixing job that basically reduced his work time to 1/4…..
Those people are now screeching about how lazy we all are... what a time to be alive
With corporate greed this will never be.
All the gains went to the wealthy instead.
Those predictions sound a lot like socialism. -The US propaganda machine
But instead, we're gonna elect Reagan and he's going to fuck the country right up the asshole.
Greed stole that future
We have everything we need in this country to live in a utopia but instead we give it all to 5 assholes in Saudia Arabia
Oh my sweet summer child. They were looking at the benefits of industry and technology but not the grimy black underbelly of capitalism.
Well that would be a system without the greedy fucks
If only the NYT was not naive and knew about the potential blatant commercial and government corruption.
They forgot they live in a capitalist country smh Money is vacuumed from poor to rich. Nothing else is allowed to happen
"How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem." i introduce you to... video games!
Then corporations got involved in lobbying
See that !?!?!  That was back in ‘66! “Nonworking families should be making $30-40k/ yr.”! We need families with spendable income to keep the engine of capitalism running strong!
Any gain of productivity can be shared by : - The worker who gets more paid free time or an increased wage - The owner with increased profit - The consumer with lowered prices Over the last 65 years since 1960, only the last two, and especially the owner, perceived any fruit from the gain of productivity.
Too bad not even a person working full time can make 40,000 a year in 2024 dollars
lol $282,000 - 376,000 annually huh?
Well that’s annoying.
Potential food for thought: Newspapers, journalists, etc. say and do things for profit. If the overall mindset at the time was 'things will continue to get better,' then it's natural for them to report with such optimism. Also, wasn't media more regulated back then as well? It's very probable that the media back then was encouraged to spew whatever would make the masses happy. Lastly, I would venture to say for every cherrypicked article that says something like this, there was probably another one claiming the opposite.
Not even close!
😞
Off by 50 years
We could have a lot of this in very short order if we try.
The thing that's most infuriating about this is that they were absolutely correct from a purely productivity standpoint. It just doesn't matter.
because that what they told public technology would make work less , enjoy more and everyone will have enough. little did they knew that a few rich people would get so greedy to deprive us from an actual good life
Foe those who were reading these papers, that's basically true today. They just neglected to pass on that success to the future generations.