Ask Lemmy

i'm brazilian, my brother moved to Portugal some years ago and his quality of life improved dramatically. He used to live near a bank that was robbed pretty frequently and that was pretty frightening

Even though he moved to another country, my bro isn't rich (sure seems that way though, compared to living standards here lol). It's just that there you can be not rich and still have quality of life, safety and be able to actually afford things.

I'm currently living in Brazil and rly what worries me most is that one day I will want/need to live alone but rent can be very expensive (i'll probably never own a home or even my own apartment, this is unacceptable and it's the reality we live in), and the minimum wage in Brazil (and probably lots of other countries) is absolutely dogshit.

The rich don't stay rich by letting other people join their club

We are reaching the limits of an "infinite growth" mindset. You can't make money infinitely, which is why we are witness unprecedented amounts of shrinkflation, price gouging, and of course, enshitification. And housing prices.

I'm curious about the same things - which you won't find in this thread. Apart from a couple people who actually tried to answer OP's question it's just typical blah-blah.

Take some of it with caution. Powerful forces are amplifying unhappiness.

Some things suck. No area is thriving. Dictators are taking power and there are several distressing wars.

Things have been worse and improved, but it us not a straight line.

When the USSR broke up you had Russian cab drivers in NYC with PhDs. I worked with a woman programmer who had a PhD in condensed matter physics from Moscow State U.

the 22 people with 12 digits in their net worth don't want you to have a spot at the table. they'd sooner kill you than risk letting you have upward mobility

At some point our species is going to have to move beyond this rapacious zero-sum logic of "unsticking" economies and "getting ahead" and instead learn how to distribute all that wealth better.

At a very big picture scale, we've hit the point where the macro level benefit of extracting resources to drive economic and human population growth is less than the cost of such extraction and its associated pollution and other externalized costs, and the cost of providing the now very large population its standard of living.

It is now too costly to even maintain the real economy and real living standards as they are, thus everything becomes more expensive, more and more people fall into poverty, famines occur from food shortages/price hikes, more and more are killed or uprooted or financially devastated from more frequent and severe natural disasters.

Thats the latest update to the World 3 model, from 'The Limits to Growth', originally done by MIT back in the 1960s.

Recalibration23 is the latest revision.

Main difference is the old 'pollution' metric was just replaced with co2 level, which is much easier to measure accurately.

...

This is why everything is obscenely financialized.

Overwhelming financialization is a very good historical indicator that a civilization level collapse is about to occur, and it also coincides with an absurd wealth disparity, as financialization necessarily cannibalizes the remaining real economy, concentrates wealth, and makes the investment done by the smaller and smaller oligarch class less and less profitable and rational, chasing insane schemes and blowing up bubbles.

...

Here's standard of living:

In 2050, average human standard of living will be roughly where it was in the Great Depression / WW2.

And about a billion people will have died, largely from famine/overbearing food costs, and natural disasters, intensified by global warming.

I had a sociology professor (who was brilliant and enlightening) who said that the future of the economy was in services. That was in 1999 / 2000. Now we have subscription everything (with rampant price hikes) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and the like. Companies / corporations get to get fat on this shift in the business model. Workers get shafted with Uber and such. Anyone with a 9-5 career is seeing the ever-present squeeze of the markets ("we must grow at all costs or we're dead") slowly turn in on them and reduce their prospects.

After the end of the Soviet Union, people talked about "the end of history." Wrong. This is the end. The beginning happened somewhere not very long in the past. We're still at the opening, however. It's only going to keep getting worse and worse as capitalism eats itself and the world. All the best times already happened (lucky boomers). Strap in. It's gonna be a hell of a ride (or a ride straight to hell).

It also happens in Asia, I can say that some of them are similar to what you said. In my country, many young people have a hard time finding a job even if they are university graduates. Necessities is getting more expensive.

There are also many people and households who are trapped in huge debts from online loans.

Many small businesses stuck or fail, only the business of the oligarchs can survive. and their business destroys small businesses and harms the people.

In China this led to something they call 'lying flat', in Korea it's called N-po generation.

Yes, the same stuff is mirrored in the EU. We also had george floyd protests.

Leads me to believe it's all more a cultural phenomena. Imitation of the popular rethoric.

The world was experiencing unprecedented economic growth for decades in the run up to the 2008 crash. Sure there were some rocky periods but the general trend was upwards and even in the 70s where there were problems with inflation new technologies were improving people's living standards all the time.

Now we have growth stagnating; raw materials and international trade becoming more expensive (existing sources becoming depleted, tarrifs); then finally technological gains are happening but for consumers. I'm not sure I've seen a big improvement since the original iPhone.

The killer thing I haven't mentioned yet is overcentralisation of economies in major cities/hubs. If you want the best possible job then you probably need to move to a megacity like London, Paris, New York, Sydney... but then a shortage of new housing in these places has pushed prices into the stratosphere. You better hope you have an economically active partner who has also landed their dream job in megacity! Oh and the inheritance required for a deposit on a flat.

Within countries that last problem can be tackled with better industrial strategies to some extent. Maybe grants and subsidies to open say biotech labs in more affordable parts of the country. In theory since we have increasingly become service based economies, or producers of e-goods like digital copies of videogames, this should also be possible by doubling down on remote jobs as a viable mode of working and possibly offering tax breaks/financial incentives to move to less populated areas. Here in Scotland if you want to be a primary/elementary school teacher on a remote island you can command a salary of ~2x what you would get on the mainland as part of a scheme to entice teachers to live in remote communities.

It's very much the same in the UK and, from what I hear first hand, also in Germany, Australia and Canada

My rough take:

The industrial revolution never stopped, we are still very much on the trajectory that accelerated in the 18th/19th centuries.

The trend is to concentrate wealth in a production owning class. WWI and WWII were temporary disruptions to this. The post war consensus saw great national projects and investment happen at just the same time that mixed skill labour was in wide demand thanks to technology's progress at that point. The baby boomers were advantaged by this and ended up with disproportionate ownership of land and production means.

The last 50 years has been a slow return to trend. With production slowly transitioning from manual labour to mental labour to fully automated labour. The freak occurrence that benefitted baby boomers has not repeated.

The trend will continue to devalue the work of most individuals. A small proportion will be able to leverage rapidly advancing technology and take a small stake in the monopoly of the 0.001%. The rest will progressively be priced out of elevating themselves into the middle class. The result being that there becomes a vast underclass characterised by renting, inability to start a family, and insecurity but just enough comfort to prevent rioting. There'll be a vast range of skill within that class, however effort with make only a token difference to wealth.

I think this happens in other countries too. It's a result of neoliberalism:

• They cut spending on education, social security and publix infrastructure. That makes it harder for the youth to get started.
• They also cut taxes on the wealthy - meaning a lot of the wealth remains with older generations and especially the richest 5%.
• And finally, they pursue union busting, deregulation and globalization. By playing out the interests of workers in different countries (or different ethnicities in the same country) they're making it harder to collectively bargain for good wages and good working conditions.

Now, I think the US is having it especially bad. In Germany they do regularly cut social security but we have public health insurance (though the rich get to opt out instead of paying their share) and overall a wealth distribution which is not good but also not quite as bad as the US. We also have a very different job market: Due to lack of highly educated workers, it's easy to get a job and good conditions if you have a good education (which is basically free if you can afford to take the time). And they can't fire you willy-nilly, this is hugely important for becoming financially stable and feeling safe.

Our main problem economically is the "Debt Brake" - a rule that limits government debt (and thus spending) without accounting for the required infrastructure investments. That doesn't make any economic sense - anyone would loan money to make an investment if that facilitates economic growth!