Can You Be in Poverty With Two Televisions?

[bluefrog]

LINK

Behind the most important technology stories of our time, there is a clear theme: The triumph of software. Consider the rise of Netflix over Blockbuster, music sharing over albums, Flickr over Kodak, Amazon over Borders, wireless Verizon over wired Verizon, webpages over printed pages. Everything getting cheaper feels the touch of innovation -- especially online innovation, IT, and computer software.

But there's a dark side behind the advance of productivity: Cheaper goods need cheaper workers.

The theory of this essay is not that productivity is bad, but that a great divergence between the productivity of different industries is making our work cheaper while it makes our necessities more expensive. As Tyler Cowen, the author of The Great Stagnation, put it: "In most typical household budgets, housing, education, and health care are very important. Higher prices in those areas, above what productivity gains can justify, are driving much of the progress slowdown." That's the productivity divergence. That's why you feel squeezed.

If you're looking for somebody to blame, blame everybody. Blame the corporations who turned jobs over to machines and foreigners. Blame investors who reinforced the culture of productivity by rewarding companies for good quarterly earnings. Blame consumers who bought more of the cheaper stuff. Blame the culture of productivity.

But also, blame the culture of un-productivity. Blame doctors for too many treatments, and university presidents for too many new buildings, and city planners for strict zoning laws, and government for subsidizing industries and obscuring incentives to be more efficient.

An excellent read on the fall of the middle class in America.

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

hood rich!

 

[maxiep]

In my lifetime, we moved from an industrial economy to a service economy. We stopped briefly at a service economy and are now becoming a knowledge economy. Each step requires further education of the populace. Times change. We can't always have factory workers making a middle class salary enough to support a family, buy a house, have a couple of cars and send their kids to college.

Our advantage over the rest of the world is our focus on the free market and the celebrating of the individual, which encourages innovation. We'll always lose jobs to cheaper labor abroad. The key is that we're focused on what's next. The reason we're stagnating is our current administration isn't focused on what's next, but on trying to save what existed in the past. And where they are focused on what's next, they're trying to dictate it. Let the market decide what's next and we'll thrive.

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

Walmart just announced they are bringing back the layaway program. Woot!

X

 

[barfo]

In my lifetime, we moved from an industrial economy to a service economy. We stopped briefly at a service economy and are now becoming a knowledge economy. Each step requires further education of the populace. Times change. We can't always have factory workers making a middle class salary enough to support a family, buy a house, have a couple of cars and send their kids to college.

Our advantage over the rest of the world is our focus on the free market and the celebrating of the individual, which encourages innovation. We'll always lose jobs to cheaper labor abroad. The key is that we're focused on what's next. The reason we're stagnating is our current administration isn't focused on what's next, but on trying to save what existed in the past. And where they are focused on what's next, they're trying to dictate it. Let the market decide what's next and we'll thrive.

So, they should focus on what's next, but not actually do anything about it? Just sit and think about it?

barfo

 

[bluefrog]

The reason we're stagnating is our current administration isn't focused on what's next, but on trying to save what existed in the past. And where they are focused on what's next, they're trying to dictate it. Let the market decide what's next and we'll thrive.

If you look at the Hamilton Project report the decline in middle class has been occurring over a several decades.

.It means that wages have been falling since before the credit crisis, the housing bubble, the Bush tax cuts, the Clinton boom, the wave of deregulation, the Reagan recovery, and the Nixon years. Something older and bigger than all of these things is at work. Before the Great Recession, there was a greater recession for the American worker.

 

[BLAZER PROPHET]

So, they should focus on what's next, but not actually do anything about it? Just sit and think about it?

barfo

I was sort of thinking the same thing. What good does it do to be simply the innovator and not the producer? That's where we have failed- and continue to do so.

 

[bluefrog]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/13/national/main20105376.shtml

The number of people in the U.S. living in poverty in 2010 rose for the fourth year in a row, representing the largest number of Americans in poverty in the 52 years since such estimates have been published by the U.S. Census Bureau....

The nation's official poverty rate increased for the third year in a row - 15.1 percent in 2010, up from 14.3 percent in 2009. In the last three years, the poverty rate has risen faster than any other three-year period since the early 1980s.

Real median household income in the United States also fell in 2010, to $49,445 (a 2.3 percent drop from 2009).

The number of people without health insurance coverage rose to 16.3 percent, or 49.9 million, from 16.1 percent a year ago. The jump was mostly due to decreases in employe-provided insurance.