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Most of the Economic Gains of this Expansion went to 1%

dystopian said:
I think most people are well aware of this shit happening. I think most of them are also upset about it to varying degrees. Unfortunately, the public at large won't do anything about it until things get *really* bad. The Occupy movement tried and fizzled out. It's hard to protest when you can't afford a day off work. It's even harder to protest to the point of civil disobedience when you still have food on the table and something left to lose.

In a way, the economic growth of the past (the kind which we all benefited from) has been our undoing and the victory of the elites; used to be that when the rich got too rich, the poor started starving to death en masse and rose up. Now, the poor are squeezed dry for as much as they're worth, but not quite to the point where they rise up in armed revolt because they no longer have bread. And so the poor grumble but otherwise stay complacent; hoping tomorrow will be different than today, because they can't afford to risk losing what they still have left.
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Might also have something to do with the fact that only 7.3% of individuals who worked at least one week in 2013 (in the US) were in poverty, and only 2.7% of those who worked full time (35+ hours/week) year round (at least 50 weeks) were in poverty. Not exactly a large fraction of people to have huge sway in a democracy.
 
Axulus said:
Might also have something to do with the fact that only 7.3% of individuals who worked at least one week in 2013 (in the US) were in poverty, and only 2.7% of those who worked full time (35+ hours/week) year round (at least 50 weeks) were in poverty. Not exactly a large fraction of people to have huge sway in a democracy.
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Why do you persist in undermining a good gripe with facts?
 
People on this very board confuse stock market performance with economy.
And the rest of the people are not smarter on average.
There were no economic expansion. Economists and media use incorrect metric.
 
barbos said:
People on this very board confuse stock market performance with economy.
And the rest of the people are not smarter on average.
There were no economic expansion. Economists and media use incorrect metric.
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There have been record corporate profits.

The game is rigged. It is a game run by a bunch of economic dictators. And in games run by dictators we always see the dictators take ALL GAINS for themselves.
 
SLD said:
dystopian said:
I think most people are well aware of this shit happening. I think most of them are also upset about it to varying degrees.
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And after reading all these replies you still hold that?
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Yes. The only dissenting replies here are from people who'se biases are well known on the forum. And it seems similarly so on the link you provided. When people's opposition to the central argument appears the product of cognitive dissonance; I can't help but maintain the claim that they are in fact aware of the problem and upset about it.
 
untermensche said:
barbos said:
People on this very board confuse stock market performance with economy.
And the rest of the people are not smarter on average.
There were no economic expansion. Economists and media use incorrect metric.
Click to expand...

There have been record corporate profits.

The game is rigged. It is a game run by a bunch of economic dictators. And in games run by dictators we always see the dictators take ALL GAINS for themselves.
Click to expand...
Records profits according to whom and where?
Just because some WallStreet monkey says there were record profits does not mean they actually were.
Record profit in banksting industry does not mean a shit, other than the opposite of good, because it's a zero sum game which means their profits means ordinary people losses.
And even if there were actual increase in actual economy, you do realize that to have profit you need to sell it? And who is buying it if according to you 99% are paid less and less. Yes, game is rigged, but not quite the way you think. You are being fed shit which has nothing to do with reality, any kind of reality.
 
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barbos said:
untermensche said:
There have been record corporate profits.

The game is rigged. It is a game run by a bunch of economic dictators. And in games run by dictators we always see the dictators take ALL GAINS for themselves.
Click to expand...
Records profits according to whom and where?
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According to the same figures used to determine whether there is money left over for pay rises. If people are declaring profits for the purposes of extracting money from companies that don't have the economic basis to sustain it, that's a bigger problem, one that's potentially disastrous for the economy, and one that could be partly solved by increasing the minimum wage.
 
barbos said:
I would like to point out that people who talking about 1% taking all the money forget that the very same 1% took most of the losses during 2008 crash. So they merely took back what they lost.
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There's a painful difference between getting a couple zeros knocked off the end of your net worth and having your family homeless.

Axulus said:
Might also have something to do with the fact that only 7.3% of individuals who worked at least one week in 2013 (in the US) were in poverty, and only 2.7% of those who worked full time (35+ hours/week) year round (at least 50 weeks) were in poverty. Not exactly a large fraction of people to have huge sway in a democracy.
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It's no wonder. There's not a lot of room to crawl under what is defined as the poverty level in the US. As someone who has gotten to experiment with near poverty in the form of living off a net income of just less than $2200 a month for four years, I'm grateful not to have had an outstanding loan on my home or vehicle during that time. There's no way I would have made it otherwise.
Our established poverty rates are bullshit.

But don't worry. This will all go away. They will kick the minimum wage up just enough to blow a little steam off and continue the game. They cannot have any significant portion of the population band together in defiance against our owners.
 
dystopian said:
SLD said:
And after reading all these replies you still hold that?
Click to expand...

Yes. The only dissenting replies here are from people who'se biases are well known on the forum. And it seems similarly so on the link you provided. When people's opposition to the central argument appears the product of cognitive dissonance; I can't help but maintain the claim that they are in fact aware of the problem and upset about it.
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If by "upset about it" you mean "worried that the jig might be up" then I agree with you.
 
It is a problem and people are pissed off about it.

Say people were pissed off because bridges kept collapsing or crops kept failing. Societies that sort shit out look at what the science says. They get engineers, biologists etc on the case and put competing theories to the reality test. So we look to economists. And there we encounter a bizarre ideological cult dressed up in the accoutrements of science. One that denies the problem on principle and cannot predict, acknowledge or fix the economic equivalent of collapsing bridges and failing crops. Barbos is not wrong. Ask them to account for human welbeing and we get "social welfare function" a la Samuelson or Arrow (supply side writ large) and "Pareto optimality" (supply side writ large rationalising even worse outcomes). Ask them to drop the silly assumptions and we get DGSE ("Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium") models rationalising the silly assumptions.

A biologist and an economist are commissioned to study Borneo apes. The biologist goes out and buys notebooks, sample jars, video cameras and a ticket to Borneo. The economist puts his feet on his desk and thinks 'Now.. what would I do if I were a rational, self-interested, marginal utility maximising Borneo ape?'
 
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