Researchers Ask: Are People Better Off Than 50 Years Ago? (marketwatch.com) 357
Long-time Slashdot reader gollum123 quotes MarketWatch:
Are you doing better than the previous generation? The Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., asked nearly 43,000 people in 38 countries around the globe that question this past spring. Residents in 20 countries said people like them were better off than they were 50 years ago. In Vietnam, 88% felt better off, followed by India (69%), South Korea (68%), Japan (65%), Germany (65%), Turkey (65%), the Netherlands (64%), Sweden (64%), Poland (62%) and Spain (60%)...
The U.S. was among the other 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. In Senegal, 45% felt this way, followed by Nigeria (54%), Kenya (53%), the U.S. (41%), Ghana (47%), Brazil (49%), France (46%), Hungary (39%), Lebanon (54%) and Peru (46%).
55% of Canadians feel they're better off, while just 45% of people in the U.K. feel the same way, according to the article.
"Venezuela, which has suffered from political unrest and economic turbulence in recent years, was last on the list. Some 72% people there said they felt worse off than 50 years ago."
The U.S. was among the other 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. In Senegal, 45% felt this way, followed by Nigeria (54%), Kenya (53%), the U.S. (41%), Ghana (47%), Brazil (49%), France (46%), Hungary (39%), Lebanon (54%) and Peru (46%).
55% of Canadians feel they're better off, while just 45% of people in the U.K. feel the same way, according to the article.
"Venezuela, which has suffered from political unrest and economic turbulence in recent years, was last on the list. Some 72% people there said they felt worse off than 50 years ago."
opportunity and wealth versus happiness (Score:5, Insightful)
Are people happier? Unlikely. But they may have greater opportunity and their impacts can be broader. But in the stories my grandfather told me I sense a great deal of exciting things. To go to town they had to marshal their team of horses and brush them out afterwards, in the cold (you could see the horse's breath). But that sort of chore and ritual can be deeply grounding, satisfying, and slower paced. Not worse. Maybe you don't accomplish as much on average? is that important?
Re:opportunity and wealth versus happiness (Score:5, Insightful)
is that important?
Given that people, except for the Amish, universally abandoned that way of life as soon as they had an alternative, no, it is not important.
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But in the stories my grandfather told me I sense a great deal of exciting things. To go to town they had to marshal their team of horses and brush them out afterwards, in the cold (you could see the horse's breath).
In 1967? Was your grandfather Amish?
Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:5, Interesting)
73% among those 50 and older say life is better now compared with 59% who say this among 18- to 29-year-olds
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I'm among that older demographic. I also have a nearly identical job as my father did (faculty at a big, well-known academic institution), and I live in the same city in which I grew up.
The economic structure 50 years ago was such that my father could support his family without any additional income (read: he had only one job, and my mother did not work). He could afford to buy a big house in a nice suburb. He could send his kids to private school. Now, both my wife and I must work, I pick up consulting
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I'm guessing you're a white man. Ask a woman or African-American whether they're better off than 50 years ago.
50 years ago the classified ads were divided into "Men Wanted" (engineers, lawyers, truck drivers, carpenters, etc.) and "Women Wanted" (secretaries, nurses, receptionists, etc.). If you were a woman you couldn't get just any job, no matter how qualified you might be. You could only get the jobs that people thought women were suited for. A woman's first job was to raise her family.
50 years ago A
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Re: Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:4, Insightful)
This! My boomer grandpa while working as a welder making 30 grand a year with three kids was somehow able to afford a house with not one but two garages, multiple motorcycles, always performing home additions and remodeling, as well as owning a camper with a permanent spot at the campground right on the water, as well as other trailers and jet skis. At one point he bought another house across the street to repair for fun then he sold it.
I made 178000, I have one kid and I've been dreaming about doing even a fraction of the things my grandfather did. The taxes I pay on the money are ridiculous and by the time my 1200 square foot house is paid and my car payments are paid I have about diddly-squat. I drive a 50 mpg diesel stick shift from 2003 with nearly 300k miles. What did my generation do differently? I'm supposed to be far more successful than him, he was a freaking factory worker.
Re: Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:5, Insightful)
What did my generation do differently?
Get really shit at managing money?
I don't make even half of what you do, but I have a larger house which is almost paid off, and a 2 year old car which I bought last year just because I was getting tired of the old one. Whatever your problem is, it does not appear to be related to your paycheque, except tangentially. If you were making $400,000 a year I suspect you would somehow still manage to be broke.
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This is actually not a new problem. Read Dickens, he wonders at the way that people also in his time mismanaged money.
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You are delusional if you think the mean of a distribution is more inherently meaningful than the median.
Mathematically, the mean is far more tractable, not having the step behaviour of the median, so it certainly gets used more in equations (while spawning a small statistical cottage industry concerning the best way to handle distributional outliers).
The median is inherently immune to outliers, which is especially handy in making normativ
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If you look for a home outside of these desirable-but-already-saturated areas, the prices are more in line with what your grandparents pai
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You make 178k with 1 kid and a 1200 sqft house and a beater car and you have no savings? You've got a problem. I make about half of that, have 3 kids and a house twice that size and I still am capable of doing additions to my house, have 2 cars and plenty of "stuff", eat high-quality food, go on vacation once or twice and spend ~$2500 on Christmas this year.
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Netflix, hulu, amazon prime, spotify, smartphone with monthly 100$+ bill, high speed internet, kickstarter, patreon, youtube red, pay-to-win videogames, microtransactions, and a plethora of other 'subscription model' services our generation cant seem to avoid/do without. The fact we have easy access to travel makes spending a couple hundred flying across counrty a few times abyear seem ok instead of limiting travel and saving that money. Ou
Re: Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:2)
I make half of what you make and am single with 3 kids. I live in a 6000sqft house on 4 acres and have more money than I can spend. If you are barely making it on 178k/year then you are doing something wrong.
If you look at things like square footage of homes, access to electricity, indoor plumbing, number of outfits, number of luxuries, amount of disposable income, etc.. then almost everyone I know is doing better than their parents were 50 years ago. Most people blow a ton money on stuff today that eith
Re: Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:4, Insightful)
30 grand fifty years ago would be over $200k today. Inflation is an amazing thing.
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30 grand fifty years ago would be over $200k today. Inflation is an amazing thing.
And this proves the thesis of TFA.
Re:Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:4, Interesting)
Median home prices [pinimg.com] are about the same today as they were in 1967 after you adjust for inflation.
Mortgage interest rates [mortgage-x.com] are lower today than in 1967.
Median income [advisorperspectives.com] is up for all quintiles since 1967 after adjusting for inflation, even the bottom two. Meaning the home price to income ratio has fallen since 1967 (you need to use a smaller percentage of your income to afford a home).
I'm sorry for your situation, but you are an outlier. Not representative of the norm. Home ownership is easier today than in 1967.
If you want to know why you Millenials are having a hard time buying a home, the answer is really simple. The savings rate [ycharts.com] has fallen from 12% in 1967 to about 6% today. Basically, you spent all your money instead of saving it. Contrast this to, say, the UK [pieria.co.uk] - where the savings rate has actually gone up since the 1970s. It's not all bad news though. Young people began saving more [washingtonpost.com] beginning about a decade ago. Unfortunately, you actually had a negative savings rate from about 1995-2007 (you were spending more than you made). So combine your higher savings rate with paying off your accumulated debt, and you can't afford to rent an apartment so you end up living in your parents' basement.
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Re:Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:5, Interesting)
In the UK housing is really unaffordable. We don't build enough houses, and older people see them as an asset which means they want to keep prices high.
In top of that, rents are very high too.
Many young people's only chance of owning a home is to wait for a relative to die and leave them some money. This creates a feedback loop where older people want their homes to remain expensive so they have more to pass on to their kids now that house prices are so high.
In top of that, university went from being free about 20 years ago to about 40-50k today. Student loans today are creating a huge black hole of bad debt for the next generation. Many, maybe the majority of students are never going to pay it all back.
So yeah, I wouldn't cite the UK as an example of a good system.
Re:Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:5, Interesting)
You're using an old trick - averaging across multiple populations to hide the divergence.
Home ownership is up. Except below the age of 40 it's down. So really those over 50 have it better, those under 50 much much worse.
Median home prices are about the same. But there are lots of homes in areas that are useless if you want to get a job. Home prices in areas with jobs are up over 500% on their 1967 number.
Mortgage rates are lower. But credit scores for the under 40s are worse, their income is lower.
Income is up. But only for the older generation. Median income for those below 40 is down across the stats.
Take your disingenuous nonsense elsewhere.
Re:Those who were there vs those who were not (Score:4, Interesting)
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Leaving the house? Are you joking? You don't find work by pounding the pavement anymore. You can try it but everyone will tell you to apply online. My full time unpaid job is to find a job and I'm on the internet all day every day searching for work and applying for jobs. There's nothing out there except fake job postings. Companies simply use the internet to abuse the job market and run outsourcing scams.
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Most people will agree that life was better when they were a child
Not me. When I was a kid, my mom would take me to the diner, and order me a coke and a burger. I drank the coke while I was waiting for the burger, and then had nothing to drink with my meal. My mom would always say "You should have planned ahead and saved your coke."
But once I grew up, I was earning my own money, and when my burger came, I could just ORDER ANOTHER COKE. When the waitress brought me that second coke, I felt liberated, and for the first time I knew what it was like to be an adult in cont
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A real adult would find a restaurant that refilled soft drinks for free.
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Also: diabetes & obesity.
How can they compare? (Score:5, Insightful)
Majority of world population (and pretty much everyone of the adult working age) either wasn't around 50 years ago or, if they were, were too young to really understand. Combine that with various confirmation biases, tendency to forget the negative and overstate how good things were back in the old days - and this question is, essentially, meaningless as a true gauge of change in life quality.
At most all it does is measure how whiny a given group of people is. And US residents are some of the whiniest in the world (but, unsurprisingly, France beats us on this one, if only just a bit)
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For much of the world, things were measurably worse 50 years ago. Vietnam seems to lead the list, 50 years ago there was war there. India, more people starving then now, Europe was still recovering from the war and it seems most of them think things have improved. Corrupt nations such as Venezuela have seen things get much worse.
Re:How can they compare? (Score:4, Informative)
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Answer: "No." (Score:2)
Boy the way Glenn Miller Played
Songs that made the Hit Parade
Guys like us we had it made
Those were the days.
And you knew who you were then
Girls were girl and men were men
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
Didn't need no Welfare state
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee our old Lasalle Ran great
Those were the days!
Sure beats having poleo (Score:2)
Complain all you want, but in the late 50s and early 60s the cure for Poleo was discovered and administered....
In 1967 (Score:3)
First, you should check what's back in 1967:
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In 1967, the Republican Health Care plan was essentially the affordable care act, as passed by the democrats less than 10 years ago. Seems like we've been moving away from that.
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Fifty Years Ago, America was Fighting in Vietnam. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fifty years ago, Americans were being drafted to fight in the Vietnam war — a war so bloody and so largely useless that people were marching in the streets against it and fleeing the country to avoid it. In that same year, nationwide race riots led to over 100 deaths, and just three years later, the Kent State massacre happened, completely devastating Americans' trust in its government, followed shortly thereafter by Nixon's criminal conspiracy and resignation. And you can't even pretend that things were better a few years before that. After all, only fifty-five years ago, our country nearly ended the world during the Cuban missile crisis.
I hope and pray that most of the respondents didn't think very hard about that question before answering. Because if they did, then either our high school history books have become so whitewashed that nobody gets the full picture of just how bad things really were in America fifty years ago, the respondents slept through their American history classes, or the respondents did a little too much PCP in the 70s and don't remember the 60s anymore. Just saying.
Hmm, my own case... (Score:5, Interesting)
Old guy opinion follows:
Assuming I were my current age 50 years ago, I'd be long dead. The fix for my problems weren't even conceived of then. As is, in spite of my previous problems, and in spite of missing several internal organs, I expect I'll survive another 20 years or so (and in so doing, live longer than any of my grandparents managed).
Now, one could argue that being able to make the previous statement to a worldwide audience in almost realtime is a bad thing, but I also happen to think that that's one of the major improvements in life in the last 50 years (Yes, I was born rather before the internet existed).
And other things too numerous to mention. Hell, I was around before cable TV, much less the internet...
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Claims of old age do not correlate with UID!
Is there an age limit for creating a /. account? I must have missed that.
Housing costs (Score:5, Interesting)
For all that robotics is set to change this majorly over the next decade. Brick laying robots and rebar tying ones and etc. will start replacing a lot of construction work. But it doesn't help this very moment. Shelter is the other half of that "food and" for basics a person anywhere would hope to have. And having soaring housing costs all over the place isn't helping. Anyone hoping to get elected in the US or UK soonish would do well to tell people they'll do something about it, even though they can't actually do much.
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Until around 2000, the price of a home (on average) basically kept up with inflation.
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The price of the average home has nearly doubled in the US over the last 50 years
So what you are saying is that houses are getting cheaper per area?
"The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s [npr.org]; it now stands at 2,349 square feet".
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So what you are saying is that houses are getting cheaper per area? "The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s; it now stands at 2,349 square feet".
Yep, bigger house built to a better standard with fewer [prb.org] kids. A lot of the perceived "needs" of children today like each having their own room or of the parents like having a separate master bathroom would be an extravagant luxury in the 1960s. People are better off but they're still struggling equally hard or harder to keep up with everyone else. If your kid is the one with no Playstation and no iPhone it doesn't really help to say that you didn't have a Playstation or an iPhone when you grew up either. Cl
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Yeppers. Didn't have a bedroom to myself till my elder brother went off to college. And my parents didn't have a master bathroom till a year or so later, as I recall....
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Re:Housing costs (Score:5, Interesting)
The actual cost of the building is secondary to many other issues. Many communities actually don't want to make it easy to build new dwellings because they don't want traffic, immigrants, and change in general: for good or bad, people don't like change.
And the local gov't finds that they get more tax revenue if new houses cater to the wealthy, and therefore don't even try to make new housing cheaper. If newbies come in, they want rich newbies.
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The majority of soaring house costs are from opportunity and scarcity costs.
EG, "Good jobs in the city--- City is mostly big business buildings, no housing. What little housing there is, is very high demand-- so HUGE FUCKING PRICES" Couple that with absurd city zoning, and you have spiraling costs.
As jobs get more and more concentrated into tinier and tinier geographic areas, this trend will continue. Throw in high wage disparities, and you end up with very strange things happening indeed.
It has little to
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The most prominent problem is that the rust belt jobs all were centered around a single business, which shows that anything that's too specialized will suffer as soon as conditions changes.
Areas that are more diversified don't suffer from changes in conditions and economy as much as areas depending on a single business.
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It's already offshored to India, what you see in Silicon Valley is more shells and sales organizations and not so much tech anymore. The bulk tech work is done offshored already.
Venezuela: "political unrest, economic turbulance" (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not come out and mention the real cause of Venezuela's nightmare: Socialism [battleswarmblog.com].
Re:Venezuela: "political unrest, economic turbulan (Score:4, Insightful)
Because western europeans also live in socialist country and they have much better lives than most money worshipping yankees.
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Please define how you mean "better lives". I lived there for six years, and you've got precious few things better IMO.
Did they include people who remember 50 yrs ago? (Score:2)
In that time, I was already in my second year of college. Any diagnosis of cancer other than basal cell meant you automatically prepared for death. So far as we could see, the war in Vietnam would go on forever. Having scientific interests in that era meant being so radically different from everyone else that they might as well be living on another planet. Because no ordinary person had ever seen a computer, there was no inkling of how they might one day assume a place in the general culture. "Electronics"
Stupid American Responses (Score:5, Informative)
So, the response from Americans likely had a lot of people who weren't alive 50 yrs ago. I was 9 back then, so let me help you. It was 1967
1. We were in a hugely unpopular war in Vietnam.
2. There were race riots in the streets of Detroit...I lived there
3. Most people had 3-5 channels of black and white TV that typically ended around midnight.
4. Few people places air conditioning
5. Home telephones typically had "party lines"...you shared your number with neighbors and took turns.
6. There were no ATMs, grocery scanners, cell phones, personal computers, or even calculators.
7. Only about 50% of people completed high school...you can check census facts. Less than 20% had a 4 yr degree
8. Life expectancy was 14 years lower
I would argue that families were more tight knit back then, but other than that, if you think you're not better off today, you'll have to come up with some facts to back it up.
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2. And what has changed?
3. And most people were happy with that and then had more time to get off the couch and do something
4. People had more time to sit in a cool bath.
5. People don't recognize the old way was bad until they have the new way.
6. See number 5.
7. Yet most of them got a job and were able to survive... with less effort and expense!
8. Again, people accept the way things are as long as there isn't a massiv
Are people better at ordering lists? (Score:2)
Apparently not;
50 or 10? (Score:2)
Are you sure people are aware of what was happening 50 years ago, unless they are if 70+ demographics?
Remember the Best (Score:2)
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https://www.urbandictionary.co... [urbandictionary.com]
Did they ask ... (Score:2)
... anybody over 60?
Goddam
How do you get a valid response about what things (Score:2)
were like 50 years ago from people who are less than about 70 years old?
Compare generations (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm definitely richer at 59 than 9. Solved.
The real comparison is to my Dad, of course, 38 years older than I. I'm somewhat better off than he, but not much. Not really enough, considering I got two college degrees and he worked his way up to "engineer" from "surveyman" (when "engineer" was a job description, not always licensed) from only high school. He could afford to retire at the same age, actually had a bigger house. But my place is better located, and I'll be able to manage a little more travel. Much of that, however, comes from our inheritances from parents - he got almost nothing from his, same for my wife's parents.
A younger friend of mine who is about 60 years younger than my Dad, recently mentioned that when she wished aloud to just quit, her son joked she couldn't afford not to work unless she has a magic wand that makes money. Her nine-year-old was dead right. My parents never *needed* two incomes the way my friend does. Dad supported three kids, bought a 1600 sf. split level for us, took us on vacations to Disneyland and Mexico, had us all in an athletic club for the pool and skating rinks - on the salary of a highway construction engineer, never got past mid-level.
Oh, and all three of kid kids went to college, needing only summer jobs to pay the tuition; the only family expense was free rent and food.
As a report from Piketty's institute just confirmed ( https://boingboing.net/2017/12... [boingboing.net] ) "inequality in the Americas has been soaring since 1980", shortly after Dad retired. The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution ("Mulroney" here in Canada) won, and my young friend who can't quit her job, lost.
Only to people who were alive 50 years ago (Score:2)
People in their 20s and 30s have no clue how far we've come. My mother (RIP) was one of the earliest recipients of a triple heart bypass in 1980. She lived another 37 years. When I was a kid, it was a big deal to have your own computer.
Also, get off my lawn.
Yes. (Score:2)
I mean, stupid questions. 50 years ago we had Viet Nam, the cold war, racism that makes the tiny flares of it that we have no seem like a joke by comparison. Women were pretty much chattel. The world teetered on the perpetual brink of nuclear war. Poverty (as a percentage of the population) was rampant worldwide and what COUNTED as poverty was a lot poorer than what is counted as poverty now. A huge fraction of the world's population lived under outright tyrannies and oligarchies without even the fig l
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There are many ways to not do the liberal thing rather than only conservative, and they all fail, sometimes quite drastically.
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Nothing is perfect obviously.
But when you compare a liberal place like most of the europe or us to some authoritarian conservative/socialist country, well, generally the liberal one have a much better economy and happier people in general.
It's like that when the population can choose who rules em and can choose who they buy their stuff from, those in power tend to deliver a better service to not lose the spot to their rivals.
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For your definition of liberal and conservative, of course.
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Unless you include the country that's dead last on the list.
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Venezuela is not liberal, it's socialist. These are two quite different things, despite efforts to conflate the two..
Re: The trend here... (Score:2)
And its issues are in large part authoritarianism versus reactionary forces and an economy that lacks diversity. The Nordic nations are also fairly socialist, but make it work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Socialism is an economic system, "
Karl Marx was a philosopher.
And an economist, though a bad one who knew little of economics and allowed his philosophy to drive his economic thinking. Regardless, Das Kapital was unquestionably an economic treatise, and intended to be.
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The country that is dead first on the list is actually communist. Of course, few would dispute that it is better off than it was 50 years ago.
Re:The trend here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Liberal and conservative are not opposites.
"Liberal" means in favor of liberty. For example, if you want the freedom to own guns, or to retain untaxed property, you are liberal.
The opposite is "authoritarian."
"Conservative" means resisting change, as in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
The opposite is "progressive" which views change as good because it's "progress," fixing things that actually are broke.
Of course, the matter of whether the status quo is broke or not is opinion, and hinges on who is benefitting from it. Those who are doing well say it ain't broke, and tend to be conservative, and those who are hurt by it say it is broke, and tend to be progressive.
But for liberal and conservative to be opposed, can only happen when the status quo is unfree, and change increases freedom. Unfortunately, this is frequently the case, and results in conservativism aligning with authoritarianism.
In any case, the point is, if you are a conservative for valid reasons, don't call your opponents liberals. Call them progressives. Otherwise you are revealing yourself to be authoritarian, and on no one like authoritarians, because they are jerks.
Re:The trend here... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is correct. There is another source of confusion though: "liberal" has two quite different meanings.
One is the opposite of authoritarian, as you say.
The other refers to the political ideology of Capitalism. "Free" markets (especially in labor), laissez-faire government, "sound" finance. What most Americans think of as Conservatism is more properly called Liberalism.
The Democratic Party exploits this confusion to co-opt people with a liberal attitude into supporting the party's conservative agenda. Its emphasis on identity politics gets people all riled up about things which can have no effect on the power structure or economic status quo.
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It's not Liberal, it's Socialist.
But it's not really true that either, there's an optimal point somewhere when it starts to become worse on the other end of the spectrum as well.
Find the optimal point and you have progress, not having the optimal point and you cause problems.
Then we have the grade of corruption involved too - and a lot of politicians are corrupted regardless of country. It only comes down to that it manifests itself in different ways.
Re:Short Answer: Yes and No (Score:5, Insightful)
For what percentage of the population? (Score:2, Informative)
Unless you were a big name, or ran afoul of him in his/your travels, Hoover simply lacked the manpower compared to what is possible today.
The FBI is bigger in manpower, funding, and technology than it was 50 years ago, and apathy surrounding privacy and police conduct has only made it worse.
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The heavy hands of the state in relation to spying an invasion of privacy barely registers on most people's radar, both now and 50 years ago. The only thing the common person cares about is if they get actively persecuted.
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Tim Weiner's book about the FBI said that Nixon lost Hoover's support when Nixon started to ask for taps not just on "radicals" but on their friends and families that had no such activity.
In short, Hoover was a strong partisan about anybody protesting racism or economic persecution being an enemy of the state ... but at the very least he understood their were good people he should not try to "protect" by listening on their phone calls.
Today's NSA really does "protect" you by surveilling YOU.
They recognize n
I would say yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Fifty years ago was 1967. This was before the oil crunch. I would say, if you were getting out of college with -any- degree, you pretty much were set for life, since jobs were plentiful, especially because government gave a shit about doing the job right, since the attitude of "lets make things as shitty as possible until we get sued" was not around.
If I graduated with an engineering degree back then, my life was pretty much set. Same with a natural sciences degree.
Now, degrees are worthless in the workp
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I should imagine he's a bit shrivelled by now.
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No degree and I have a Tech job (Systems Engineer).
[John]
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Re:Short Answer: Yes and No (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that TFA simply asked if people thought they were better off than two generations ago, rather than doing some type of measurement. It's like asking random people if the US deficit is larger now compared to 5 years ago; it's a good way to see what people believe but it doesn't measure or determine the truth.
Re: Short Answer: Yes and No (Score:2)
Some kind of measurement like this?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/overdose-deaths-drive-down-u-s-life-expectancyagain-1513832460
2nd year of declining life expectancy
Measurement of a Feeling (Score:5, Informative)
Note that TFA simply asked if people thought they were better off than two generations ago, rather than doing some type of measurement.
Whether or not someone feels better off than they think they would have been 50 years ago is a purely subjective judgement. You might be able to prove that people actually are better off in terms of wealth, health etc. but it is still possible that they feel worse off despite this due to divisive politics, terrorist threats, mass immigration etc.
When it comes to how people feel the only practical measure is to ask them and trust their responses. A survey like this is a measurement of that subjective feeling.
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it is still possible that they feel worse off despite this due to divisive politics, terrorist threats,
Politics was WAY more divisive in 1967 than it is today, with race riots in hundreds of cities, anti-war protests, etc. In the 1960s we had real home-grown terrorism.
mass immigration etc.
I live in San Jose, which has a higher ratio of immigrants than any other big city in America. We also have the lowest crime rate of any big city, the best schools in the country, and fantastic restaurants. Why would "immigration" make things worse?
When it comes to how people feel the only practical measure is to ask them and trust their responses.
Except that almost none of the people being asked can actually remember 1967.
Re:Measurement of a Feeling (Score:5, Insightful)
Douglas Murray once said of Merkel that if she were honest she'd have said of the migrants "We have a bit more gang rape and beheading than we used to have, but then there's a wider range of cuisines."
http://www.kereport.com/2017/1... [kereport.com]
The "Strange Death of Europe" centers on the 2015 migration crisis, which you all remember was the moment when Angela Merkel massively exacerbated an already existing problem by announcing, unilaterally, that the external and internal borders of Europe were basically dissolved. In a single act, the mass movement of people that had been going on for decades sped up exponentially, so that Germany in a single year took in an additional 2 percent of its population. Sweden took in an additional almost 3 percent of its population. This is all part of a pattern. I say that has been going on for many decades. And, just like those previous decades, what happened after the 2015 crisis was that politicians and the media found excuses to justify something that would have happened anyway. So, for instance, German citizens and others were told that this mass migration, millions of people into Europe, was there would be a net economic gain for their society, that it would enrich their society. Now, actually, all of the studies that I have gone over on this show that, at best, most such migration cannot be called to be any kind of economic gain. A study in Britain showed that over a 15 year period, migrants took out 95 billion more in services than they put in taxation. And, of course they would. If you go to another country, you don't speak the language. You don't have the skills. It's going to be a very long time, before you've put in anything into the welfare system, remotely like the amount that you and your family will have taken out. But, this is one of the arguments that is made.
And, by the way, just as in all of the decades after the war, so in the post-2015 moment, the governments that came up with these explanations had to hedge around the facts, so that just like the labor government, after 1997, they had to pretend that the average migrant was a Luxemburgian hedge funder. And this is just one of the lies that gets told to the people, because once that one is shut down, once, for instance, you notice that the number of people who have been added to Germany's welfare bill in the last year, is almost exactly the number of the people who came in in 2015, once you go over that lie, you get to another one, which the German people and others were told; which is that we are an aging population. We are a graying population, and then, therefore, we need, obviously, to bring people in, to keep us and our society into the standards to which we've become accustomed. Of course, this argument always ignores one extraordinary thing, which none of the politicians ever seem to recognize, which is the startling fact that migrants get old as well. Amazingly enough, it's not just us Europeans who suffer the aging process. Who knew? But, of course, if you do believe in that idea, that you need to keep on bringing people to keep yourself in the custom that you're now used to, you get, what I describe as, the pyramid problem in migration. You keep having to bring in more and more people all the time, to keep yourselves in that sustainable societal moment.
So once you get the one of, well, okay maybe they don't make us richer. Maybe the aging population thing doesn't work. You get to another one, which is diversity. It doesn't matter if we're financially poorer. It doesn't matter, because we're so much more culturally rich. Now, I should say that there is something in this. What society - Europeans certainly wouldn't do this. What society doesn't want to know as much of interest and culture as the world has to offer? Who doesn't want to know as much about the world, and about the ideas of the world as possible? But, of course, the
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If Merkel were being honest, she'd say "crime may be up a bit, but now we have some young people to do the work so we'll all be able to keep our health care and retire comfortably instead of facing a demographic crisis that'll make our generation work into their 90s." Europe's birthrates are below replacement level, so the options are either find some migrants or take away all the benefits the baby boomer generation is counting on.
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My god, you are a genius! The solution to America's woes is to turn every city into San Jose, California! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? </sarcasm>
Re:Measurement of a Feeling (Score:5, Interesting)
You act like race [cnn.com] riots [cnbc.com] and political [latimes.com] riots [mercurynews.com] don't happen. Or that domestic [cnn.com] terrorism [cnn.com] doesn't [mysanantonio.com] exist.
As far as immigration goes, Miami has a larger percentage [citylab.com] of immigrants than San Jose and note that Los Angeles is not very far behind San Jose. And the violent crime rates of Miami and Los Angeles [wikipedia.org] dwarf that of San Jose. San Jose kind of bucks the trends - I think having billions and billions of dollars in "sillycon valley" makes that happen?
Or perhaps it's not the fact they're immigrant, but whether or not those immigrants are here legally [pewresearch.org]? After all, illegal immigrants are about 3.4% of the population [pewresearch.org] but they overwhelmingly commit [ussc.gov] most of the violent and drug crime in the US.
Or perhaps it has to do with the race of those immigrants? You do realize that 61.4% of all immigrants in San Jose are from Asia [immigrationforum.org], and Asians have some of the lowest crime rates [fbi.gov]. So maybe the fact your immigrant neighbors are here legally, making big money, and from ethnic backgrounds that for whatever reason have a much lower crime rate, you're in a unique spot and cannot being to extrapolate your experience to nationwide - because it is so different than most of the rest of the US?
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The poor things only had librium and valium and quaaludes, all available from an understanding doctor.
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And this surely points up how poorly educated younger people not alive and especially not adult 50 years ago have become. Some things are worse, in the name of making them better. Some things are so much better it's laughable to say we're worse off than 50 years ago.
50 years ago it was all about the ugly American. Today it's about the gulled stupid American. I expect those hoary old ethnic jokes about Poles, Russians, "Negros", "Wops" "Micks", and so forth to be recycled about Americans who neither know nor
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I see lots and lots of responses here saying it's so much better? Do you make 6 figures??
If you're not an engineer or programmer you're fucked. Times were better. With a bachelor's degree you could take in 6 figures easily adjusted for inflation. Tons of cheap housing in New York or Chicago for young people. Everyone owned a home no problem etc
Things are terrible now. Especially outside of your nice coding jobs.