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In the 29th Year of the Second [Gilded Age]
joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
So It Goes wrote: »I swear upon the gods and demons of the mod pantheon, a mighty wrath will descend on any 2020 talk that happens in here
TAKE HEED, NO 2020 TALK
Beginning roughly in 1870 and lasting until around 1900, according to most historians*, America was in what is commonly referred to as the Gilded Age.
This thread operates on the thesis that we are currently repeating history and are now in a 2nd Gilded Age.
In order to back this up, please tell me whether the following occurred between 1870-1900 or sometime during or after the late 1980s:
- A booming economy belies incredible wealth disparity between the richest Americans and the so-called "middle class", not to mention the poorest Americans
- Corporate heads belonging to an opulent super-wealthy class are household names
- Periodic recessions require continuous course correction to avert full-scale depression
- Capitalism is largely unfettered, corporate management hoards wealth and gets away with unscrupulous business practices that hurt all but the very richest
- Politics is ridden with scandals; the people begin to care less and less about them as they desperately seek relief while simultaneously exhibiting ironic enthusiasm (it was the best of times; it was the worst of times)
- Income growth is unable to keep pace with inflation
- "Wage slavery" is commonplace as workers require their jobs just to keep afloat, but have little bargaining power to improve their conditions or gain career mobility
- Partisanship reaches an all-time high
I can go on, but honestly? If anything, I think that what we are dealing with now is only marginally tolerable because of advancements in science that keep our standard of living higher than it would be otherwise.
The good news, if there is any, is that after the Gilded Age, historically speaking, came the Progressive Era. So if history is repeating itself, we are the generation that will not just break out of this shit-heap we inherited; we will make the world a much better place in the end.
The fundamental question this thread poses is this: "How do we break this idiotic repeat of Gilded Age fuckery and make things better for the generations that come after than they were for us?"
To some extent, demographics are going to play a part; as Boomers who enabled the conditions that today make Millennials work harder for less die, it'll get easier to implement policy changes that lead to better conditions. Yeah, some Millennials are shitty people too, but for the most part they are far more liberal as a whole.
But that doesn't really answer the question; it is just one avenue for allowing the attempt.
I don't think there's one panacea for it. I think it's going to take a combination of re-implementing strong antitrust laws, putting labor power back in the hands of the workers instead of corporations, getting big money out of politics, and forcefully redistributing wealth back to people who will actually spend it. That all sounds nice to say, and we've probably gone around and around about those things in various threads (while getting yelled at for being off-topic) but:
- What do these efforts look like?
- How do we get them implemented?
- Am I missing something? I don't have all the answers!
It's time for the proletariat to start coming up with the answers! Seeing the problem is easy; fixing it? Not so much.
*My dates are general and subjective, and not meant to be taken as gospel!
joshofalltrades on
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Being unable to quit your job in order to escape poor working conditions/wages is very common, I feel.
"I can't quit my job because then I would lose health insurance."
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Do you disagree with the premise, or just a couple of the identifying similarities between what we went through then and what we are going through now?
Maybe bleach isn’t being put in milk anymore but Nestle happily lies about breast milk with no governmental consequences.
Flint has lead in the water. I think the most egregious negative effects of this repeat are being isolated to areas with few to no ultra-wealthy citizens.
It just so happens that those same places are also where many people of color live (he said sarcastically).
Even in poor white communities the opioid crisis hit hard and the government response is... mostly to acknowledge it exists.
I think it's a weaker premise as a result. Things are infinitely better for everyone now vs the '20s. The phrase "poor working conditions" means something entirely different! That we don't have a robust UBI that lets hourly workers just walk off the job with no consequence is no evidence we're in a new gilded age.
I could write a book about how wrong this is. The response is probably quite wrong, but to say it's nonexistent is completely off-base.
While that’s true I don’t think second gilded age implies the conditions/symptoms are exactly the same. Seconds of something are often quite different from firsts, but there may be similarities that make a comparison worthy enough to be made. That said you’d know more about working conditions et all since I’m not from around these parts.
Of course there are differences. World War 2 was not exactly the same as the first. But I think technology advances are keeping things from getting quite to where they were, with other things like wealth disparity and real income being comparable.
Feel free to disagree. I don’t really want to get too far into the weeds on how we are 10-20% better off than the first time around; I would rather discuss what action we could take to reverse our course.
I didn't say it's nonexistent.
Instead people won't walk off the job because otherwise they'll die of preventable disease.
Hoorayyyyyyyyyy
Americans still have fairly cheap material prosperity as long as they don't get hit with any sudden big expenses like healthcare and they avoid having children. We'll see how long that lasts.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
That sounds pretty on point to what we see in a lot of employment in the US today.
There are places where it’s worse than it is here, but that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere approaching okay.
A lot of people posting on these forums have fulfilling jobs (otherwise they would not have time to post on the forums), but I bet if you asked the average person on the street whether they would like to stay where they are until they retire, most would admit to being unhappy with their jobs and are only staying there because they feel they don’t have the option of finding something better.
We live in a country where wages are stagnant and not keeping up with inflation, benefits are minimal except for a few, and mobility is practically nonexistent.
Employers have seen steadily increasing power over labour and the result is a lack of real wage growth.
Decent link from last year here: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/6/17204808/wages-employers-workers-monopsony-growth-stagnation-inequality
It's probably also worth revisiting The Two-Income Trap (especially with Warren running for president) and it's description of the ways in which the changing nature of employment has left families extremely brittle and thus unable to exercise much power in labour negotiations.
I think if you asked the average person on the street, they would laugh bitterly or spit in your face when you asked them about retirement, because that's an unobtainable dream for them.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Political scientists have coined the term precariat
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Absolutely. It’s a dream beyond a dream for me. Financial literacy has little to do with it. When you have cut down on expenditures to the point you have barely any leisure spending and you still have no investment options, being aware those options exist is beside the point.
I would like to see more politicians talking about this issue, as a matter of fact. We’ve been robbed of a future in our old age and almost nobody is talking about it.
Added it to the OP
Do you disagree with the bolded points above? Because it's silly to think that a 2nd gilded age will be a mirror of the first in the same way that it's silly to think that modern fascism will be the same as WW2 era Nazi or Italian fascism.
Also remember this was written back in 2004 when wage stagnation was far from accepted ("But household incomes are rising!") and the context at the time was changes in bankruptcy law that Warren (as a law prof and specialist in bankruptcy law) was real cheesed off about and it's primary focus is the middle-class and how it's going real badly for them and specifically started about rises in bankruptcy rates. It's useful though, imo, because it's analysis of what is wrong with how households are structured in the modern economy remains true and is relevant to the issue of depressed wages, worker power and the way the not-upper-classes are being put in a bad spot.
The basic premise is that the growth in household incomes we've seen is because of women joining the workforce. But this has created other problems because two-income households are brittle in ways single-income two-parent households are not. (we've also seen a rise in single-parent households which suffer most of the same issues) Two-income households take on a ton of additional fixed expenses (another car, daycare, etc, etc) while also losing the second non-income-earning parent who functions as a real and tangible sort of "insurance policy" for when things go tits up in one way or another. This leaves them much more vulnerable to random shocks. Like someone losing a job. Or kids being sick. Or relatives needing care. Or a Great Recession. And on and on and on. And the primary way all that new income the second earner brings in has been spent is on covering for a lack of growth in real wages and on bidding up the price of housing (the main store of a family's wealth) competing against other two-income households to get into good school districts in order to secure one's children a good education and thus keep the next generation middle class as well. (and we all remember how that whole housing thing went for a lot of people in the end)
I think it's a good thing to keep in mind in the discussion of the ways in which working households have become extremely strained and why so much of the build-up to where we are now seems to have gone unnoticed. Real wages have been stagnant for decades after all and yet it's only become a real big thing people talk about recently. Because a lot of these issue have been papered over by other forces and then the Great Recession came along and ripped the mask off it all.
apparently the two-income trap is hell especially if you or your partner both are on disability, because our laws are structured currently to assume "Oh, you're married now, therefore it must mean that you have enough money to no longer need social security disability or anything of the sort."
So you end up having disabled folks who can't get married because they will literally not have the financial resources needed to, well, live their lives.
Fun Fact, that seems relevant: "Pie in the Sky," now used in general as a derisive term for any far fetched idea was originally a critique of ignoring the material needs of people suffering in the present for the promises of the afterlife, during, well, the first Gilded Age. It was utilized in the song The Preacher and the Slave as a riff on the Salvation Army Hymn "In the Sweet By-and-By"
While the religious component has lessened in the modern day, the original sense of "pie in the sky" still seems alive and well in today when dealing with wealth inequality.
I highly doubt we're going to hang on long enough to see a third gilded age.
Not to even get into the whole “women can do whatever they want with their bodies, assholes” thing.
There's also the commonplace alternative these days which "I can't quit my job because of my student loans".
And many younger folks frequently face both issues!
Such as the case of my sister where she had to leave one job she hated for another job she hates (but pays better), but she can't leave the field she's in without taking a pay cut so large that she would end up giving all of her available income over to loans.
1:
These are all very vague things that mostly could apply to several different periods of American life.
-It can hardly be said that the economy is “booming” given current rates of growth. Wealth disparity between rich and poor has always been “incredible” but you could just as easily argue that even the poor have access to information and opportunities vastly superior to those available in the late 19th century.
-Corporate heads have always been super wealthy and there were many famous ones throughout the 20th century (Sam Walton, Walt Disney, Milton Hershey, Heinz, Gerber, Wrigley, Ted Turner, etc).
-Periodic recessions are the natural state of the economy. For example there were recessions in 1945, ‘49, ‘53, ‘57, ‘60...
-Capitalism is significantly fettered compared to the Gilded Age; we still have weekends, child labor laws, OSHA, the ADA, and the occasional antitrust case. We may have slipped back a little in some areas but the comparison between the two eras only works in the broadest possible sense that regulation is neither perfect nor complete despite being far closer today to both than it was back then.
-Politics has always been ridden with scandals (Hamilton, anyone?). People obviously care about them a great deal (a majority of the population is in favor of the Mueller investigation, and on the other side, albeit insane, cared a great deal about Obama et al’s made-up scandals). I’m not sure what “ironic enthusiasm” is supposed to mean but it sounds like human nature and not something specific to 1980-2019.
-Math isn’t my strong suit but I believe income growth has kept up with inflation but not exceeded it over the past few decades, resulting in no increase in real wages, as opposed to what you said, which I believe would result in a fall in real wages if inflation was outpacing income. Cite from Pew
-I’m not sure I understand what a non-wage slavery system of employment would look like. If it means a situation where people are not tied to one job, well, people change jobs all the time, in fact more often than they used to (likewise the rise in contract work, temp work, and freelance work would seem to point to the opposite problem). If it means a situation where people are not required to have any job, then 1980-2019 is not really any different in that regard than 1900-1980.
-Is partisanship a meaningful comparison between these two periods? Was partisanship not higher during the Civil War or antebellum? Is high partisanship an important quality of the Gilded Age?
2:
Comparing present day to the Gilded Age is a fairly useless rhetorical strategy, because it relies on people knowing what the Gilded Age was and most Americans are not that up on their history. By the time you’re having to explain it, as you have here, you’ve lost your audience, except for nitpicking assholes like me. And at least in terms of the evidence given here, you might as easily come up with vague comparisons to other eras (we’re like the antebellum period because regional animosity over racial issues threatens to divide states while politicians alternatively ignore or hasten division, we’re like the late 30s because Nazis are resurgent as nationalist sentiments arise globally on the back of economic downturn while politicians support or appease authoritarians, etc).
3:
If you want to say “shit is fucked up and bullshit, economically speaking” then just say that. I agree that inequality is a problem, that businesses need more regulation, that political scandals are going unpunished, that the wealthy are too highly revered, that people are hurting and desperate, and I’m happy to discuss potential solutions. But the idea that history repeats itself in some kind of grand automatic cycle is a fallacious one that belies the seriousness of our problems and implies that it is up to the wheel of history and the arc of justice to bend toward the right direction again. There is no grand design and any similarities are mostly coincidence. We must confront the challenges of our day ourselves, and look to the past for at most inspiration, not instruction.
This is pretty much exactly the case for my life.
income isn't keeping up with productivity.
And that is: Financialization.
The good spin is that this is how you create new markets and find investors who are willing to take a risk on your widget. The frankly more honest spin is that this is the means by which the wealth created by profit is taken from those who created and marketed a product and transferred to the investors. In addition to the realization of the investment itself. If you follow that link to the wikipedia entry, scroll down a ways, you'll come across a set of pie charts which lay out the various changes, the additional markets that have been added to futures trading since 1970. The thing I'd like for those reading to understand is that every new market added to the chart existed before they were traded. And that in most cases these markets were not looking to expand, or to become traded, or to become an investment vehicle.
- Living Paycheck to Paycheck
- Health Insurance tied to Employment
- Student Loans as non-removable debt that can take extreme time frames to pay off
Even if it isn’t outright slavery or as bad as things were previously, all of that creates a situation that is severely restrictive for a person’s ability to change jobs and creates a feedback loop of putting up with increasingly bad work situations because as bad as it might be there, sudden unemployment would be catastrophic.
Now take that all and I dare say that for the vast majority of individuals and families this is true. Hell, my wife and I are absolutely better off than a large amount of America. That said we had as it turns out, the ability to absorb two catastrophic short term financial situations, one with our son’s health conditions and eventual death, and then Hurricane Michael which we leveraged basically every financial asset we had to stabilize. Anything else hits us short term, we are screwed.
The point is that even in situations that might seem otherwise stable, even those are extremely precarious and tied to work in which you hope to God something doesn’t interfere with you’re ability to do your job and keep afloat.
To end this without just laying out nothing but a depressive framework the things I’d identify to address those elements would be:
- Wages improving from current flat rates to actually reflect the increases in productivity and ensure that the minimum mandated wage is actually a livable wage, then combine that all with UBI
- Extricating health insurance from being an employment benefit and get some kind of universal health insurance guaranteed as a right for people rather than a privilege or option. At the bare minimum here to get started, a Medicare For All situation, the hardly acceptable in the long term
- Student loan forgiveness, control of college costs, and ultimately funding for people to go to college without it financially ruining them for decades of their lives, personally I’d like to see a better higher education network that brings in trade/vocational schools as a part of it rather than be looked down upon to provide a balance of education options for those who are necessarily good with college or for that matter, are particularly gifted or wired for a trade
At any rate, that’s how I see it all, but of course it all begins with actual funding the efforts so as it is now, and ever shall be, eat the rich. It all starts with wealth redistribution at least in to federal coffers to start being used for good, rather than ivory towers, gulf streams or just piles to be sat upon or stared at.
The main thrust of this thread wasn’t meant to be “shit’s exactly the same”, it was a starting point for the conversation. I feel like it’s similar enough that splitting hairs over the exact differences is missing the larger point.
1836, 1839, 1845, 1847, 1853, 1857, 1860, 1865, 1869, 1873, 1882, 1887, 1890, 1893, 1896, 1899, 1902, 1907, 1910, 1913, 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2007
3 recessions in 30 years is fantastic by historical standards. There are also a few full on depressions in that list
If this were true and not just a reaction to very recent events I'm sure you can find examples of people wallowing in existential despair on these boards from 2008-2016?
This isn't true. Median household income has grown at slightly under inflation + 1% on net over the last 30 years - with peaks and valleys due to recessions but on net an upward trend. You can certainly argue that it should be higher, but it's not negative
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
I think people were still pretty partisan before, there just was a convenient external boogeyman to unify people more
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
i think youre thinking of mean
fat-tailed distributions like wealth/income have distorted arithmetic means but median is telling you what the lad in the middle of the distribution is making
Except that while median income has remained relatively flat over the last 30 years, GDP per capita has increased by 60 to 70% in the same time period. In fact, if you look at 1995 to 2019, there has been zero growth in median income. And, in fact, this article was linked in the very one you linked.
For those not wanting to click through, look at the chart below. Since 2000, GDP per capita has increased by 50% while median wage has only increased by 1.8%, and median wage has only recently arrived at a point at which it exceeds cost adjusted median wage for 2000.
Think of it this way. In 2000, it would have taken a team of 3 people to complete a task. Now it only takes two, but those two still receive the same wages as if they were on the three person team. What happened to that third persons wage? It's going to the rich. For everyone else, buying power has stagnated.