Ajax -
To come back to some of your other questions for discussion purposes:
ajax18 wrote: It's estimated the rate of increase over the entirety of the middle ages was around 2% total.
Didn't the plague killing off 1/3 of Europe help increase wages?
There isn't really a way to do a one-for-one comparison between how we measure wealth today compared to the past. If you were a peasant working the land of a lord who allowed you to work his land in exchange for sending him the product of your labors which was his property, too, then the concept of wages doesn't make much sense. Odds were, generations of people lived and died in conditions that more or less closely resembled those of their parents and grandparents. You didn't have a great-grandma back then saying, "I remember back when we rode horses if we had to travel and milked cows by hand" to give their great-grandkids perspective because their great-grandkids were living in the exact same conditions they had grown up in. Well, that and life expectancy made it unlike great-grandparents were part of many people's family circles.
I raised this point because our modern era is such an anomaly in human history where our assumption that the progress is inevitable and economic growth is going to lift each generation above the one that came before it aren't what most humans experienced.
ajax wrote:It was an incentive to sign up for an incredibly dangerous job on the off chance one could end up with a share of the profits brought back if one survived.
Isn't that how it was for the Vikings and Romans before them?
Are you asking more broadly if risk to life and limb for the possibility of reward was accepted by many people across time? If so, I guess you could say that of just about any era. Our volunteer military is largely made up of people excluded from easy access to a university education and associated jobs who take on the risks of defending us for a chance at a better life afterward. So I guess so. If you meant something more specific, then I don't think so. The Vikings invaders, Romans Legionnaires, and Colonial European discoverers and traders from the 1400s to the 1700s weren't very similar and don't have many cultural traits in common.
[quote=ajax"]
We stopped being able to sustain a household with just one income, and households increasingly needed both parents to work just to get by.
A lot of that is due to our sacred cow that everyone should get a doctorate and accrue the debt that goes along with it whether you planned on actually working for the next thirty years or not. But I do believe it's true that people in the 50s had higher incomes than we do but products and appliances were mostly American made and much more expensive than they are today. [/quote]
I agree that much of that is true. I don't agree that these things being facts is why we are compelled to have both parents work where a generation ago the single income family was the norm. As I mentioned and have provided stats on multiple times on the board, the average American household simply has not been included in the economic growth of the country since the 70s. As the cost of living has increased while wages have remained about the same adjusted for inflation, a single income family can't keep up. So both parents end up in the work place. This is also why savings have trended down and household debt has increased over the last forty+ years.
ajax wrote:And this is where globalization comes in. As noted above the middle class of America is being drained by an unseen, unrecognized vampire in the global uber-wealthy. They're even more vampiric when it comes to sucking the wealth out of developing countries susceptible to corruption and instability. It's estimated Russian oligarchs control more than 50% of Russia's wealth. This wasn't due to Putin. It was due to the West encouraging Yeltsin to sell Russian resources that would picked up by wealthy, corrupt individuals and exploited.
I still think working age Russians are doing better since the communism ended.
You should check this out:
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/06/59126688 ... -communismajax wrote:This brings up another point. The United States was protectionist during our period of industrial expansion. Land was portioned out in ways that allowed individuals with no means but a willingness to work and take risks to become landed rather than simply put up on the market to be bought by whomever commanded the best price.
Land that we are ever reminded was conquered from the Indians. How was this different than how the Romans managed the lands they conquered? Fight for the emperor and if your side wins you get to be a landowner.
If this tangent to the discussion is on how capitalism compares to socialism, how does this fit in? I don't follow.
ajax wrote:But life isn't an even playing field. Again, as in biological evolution, once an organism has control of a niche it's not easy to displace it. Human beings would never have evolved from early primates, because there would never have been early primates, had an asteroid not killed off the dinosaurs and created conditions for mammals to move into the niche left behind. Similarly, people with wealth and advantage use that wealth and advantage to keep it and ensure their offspring benefit from it. That's not about capitalism or socialism or any other -ism. It's human nature. And it usually results in class structure forming and becoming rigidly entrenched as class mobility is reduced or even eliminated in the process.
This is a brilliant analogy. But I tend to see people seeking to make life better for their offspring as a virtue rather than a sin of racism or nepotism. Maybe people who aren't concerned for their children really shouldn't be reproducing. Maybe this is a trait that we need to let die out rather than perpetuate itself through intervention? As human beings we fix things only to lose the benefits of natural selection.
I don't think we've even started to sort out how inheritance could be fair and attractive to risk takers while not becoming the mechanism used to create a new aristocracy of sorts. In the US, our government is becoming less and less accessible to low class people where it takes millions of dollars to reach national office. Fortunately or not, being in politics takes work so there isn't an incentive for most trust fund beneficiaries to seek it out but other than in means of governance we've rebuilt a form of the monarchies of Europe on American soil and reformed the classes in the name of Capitalism. So, it isn't just about natural selection or a desire to ensure one's kids have a better life. The reality is, a kid raised in a wealthy household is getting advantages in life that go beyond any inheritance. Personally, I am for taxing estates at an incredibly high rate.
