Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to That's all skewed up

re: That's all skewed up
TB — (archived)

As you said, we're talking mostly about the United States here. I'm highly suspicious of any worldwide wealth distribution analysis without the nation-by-nation breakdown you would like. Wouldn't take too many "Sultan of Brunai" types to tilt that quite a bit.

I'm also constantly hearing things like "1 percent of Americans control X percent of the wealth," with "X" varying. I have, in many years, never seen anyone explain how this was figured out.

The people at the top of the heap in the U.S. are getting paid a lot more than the people at the top of the heap used to, but there still aren't that many of them, so the overall curve is still probably pretty good.

We do face a real problem of a fading "blue collar" middle class in the U.S. This is less due to particular U.S. policies than it is to the rise of a large blue-collar labor force in other nations. The other nations are doing better in that department. We're not doing as well as we could be.

Much of this, IMO, is due to a post-WWII environment where much of the Western industrial world was coming out of rubble, and the Third World was still mostly subsistence farmers.

We had the luxury of paying high wages to someone to turn a bolt on an assembly line back then. Who else was going to do it under those circumstances? Eventually, the rest of the world caught up, and there are way too many people who can turn a bolt a lot cheaper.

This keeps prices down, but I will readily admit that there was much to envy about a period of time where someone with little education could still support a non-working wife and a family, and maybe even get his kids to college. When I was in high school, the career fork between college and trade schools was still a major one, and people going both directions could still be fairly sure they'd make a decent middle-class living. Not so much, today.

I wish I had a pat solution for this, but the market is the market, and you can't pretend it isn't there. If we slap protection on our industries, the rest of the world will just buy the cheaper stuff from somewhere else.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (83 posts)