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Notes -
I'll offer my pet theory (if you can call it that) as an explanation.
For decades the social life of Western nations was broadly based on four basic assumptions.
#1 - If you bust your ass, study hard, live a dull and normie life and finish college, you'll find a job in the field you majored in reasonably fast
#2 - Credit is reasonably cheap; even if your earnings are crap and you have no accumulated wealth, you'll still be able to get a house/flat and a car
#3 - There's pretty much no inflation; even if your earnings are sort of crap and you're working a crummy dead-end job, at least your money isn't depreciating and you can plan and buy accordingly
#4 - Consumer goods will become cheaper and cheaper as globalization spreads and the entire world becomes ever more interconnected and tariffs gradually disappear; maybe you're not earning much but the electronics and whatnot that you want are reasonably cheap
Number 1 and 2 crumbled into dust after 2008. Number 3 and 4 did so as a result of COVID restrictions and the Ukrainian War. Now the precariat of the West is staring into the abyss bereft of any illusions, with the threat of a new great war on the horizon to boot.
But two big factors here seem to describe only a portion of the economy for a portion period of time. College? It was only since the mid teens that the US got over 1/3rd college degree attainment. Now it's pushing toward 40%, but college as a social norm is relatively new. Truly cheap credit is a post-2008 phenomena; a lot of the politics of the 90s were about how the cost of credit was quite high and was a push behind the Clinton deficit reduction - the average mortgage interest rate was in the 8s as recent as 2000, hanging out in the 5s and 6s during the 2000s before 08. Inflation and rapidly improving consumer goods I will definitely grant have been good since the early 90s, but half of this western social life package being suggested is really about the post-Great Recession period, so I'm not really convinced this is the core of economic sentiment for people in their 40s and 50s.
In the last century there were fairly high paying manufacturing jobs that could give you a middle class lifestyle. So in the United States from about WWII to 2008, you could be middle class if you worked hard. The route gradually changed but the rule mostly held.
How does $26.50 an hour in 2024 dollars sound? And that was after the first big drop in manufacturing employment (circa 2000)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1OtQZ
Where? In NYC or Silicon Valley, that's just barely acceptable. In Dothan Alabama, that's a comfortable living.
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