Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air. The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant. All with an explicit goal of increasing the price of stock most of those people do not own.
IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.
This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country. We've chosen to reward those who move money around and trade capital more than we reward those who labor. And this at a time when, supposedly, the country is trying to increase its ability to build things.
We're on the same wavelength. To me, I find it hard not to think about our explosive growth as a country happening at the same time we refuse to expand representation of the public. These charts are very frustrating to me: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN11547
The people in power do not want to lose control, but clearly have no idea how to manage the scale of what has been built. There's an American leadership crisis going on right now that is hard to ignore, both in public and private life.
To make the tax incidence on wages and capital gains equivalent, you must first deduct losses due to inflation and risk. For wages, inflation and risk round to zero. For long-term capital gains inflation and risk are large and often the majority of the "gain". Short-term capital gains are already taxed like wages.
In the US, unlike some other developed countries, there is a very limited ability to deduct losses due to inflation and risk from long-term capital gains. Consequently, if they made the tax rate the same as wages then the tax incidence on capital gains would be much higher than wages.
As a policy matter in the US, they fix this large difference in tax incidence by reducing the tax rate instead of adjusting the cost basis for inflation and allowing full deductibility of losses.
If you pencil out the implications of these two policies, I suspect you'd find that you like the way the US does it better. Making risk and inflation deductible to equalize tax incidence enables a lot of financial structuring.
>> The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant.
The richest people I know are trying to convince everyone
1. There is a "worker shortage" in an attempt to bring in immigrant workers whom they can boss around and keep on a leash
2. That "AI is taking jobs" so you cannot point the people who are really taking jobs -- policy makers
3. There is "low unemployment" to perpetuate the myth that the economy is great
4. "Anyone can make it" while their nepo-babies get back-door access to jobs at top firms and claim "they worked hard up the ranks"
I agree, I think this is a longer way to say what I was feeling. It's a rigamarole by people with too much money. If they had less money, they wouldn't be able to do it. So at the end of the day the root cause to me is the inequality. it allows special treatment and the ability to manipulate our daily life (through social apps, news, etc) in a way that they are completely insulated from, feeling no pain whatsoever. Huge policy failure to let so few people have so much influence
> Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air.
I agree, but I think it's more than just a "vibe in the air". Throughout my youth and young adulthood, we (GenXers) knew vaguely about rich people, but nothing specific, just that rich people existed and they had nice stuff. Now, thanks to social media and the decline of humility, the lifestyles of rich people isn't just known, it's pushed in front of our faces constantly. And too often the message is straight from A Bronx Tale: "The working man is a sucker".
I thought about that, but anecdotally i know many renters addicted to Robinhood. i think housing prices and therefore the cash necessary to get a loan have shifted this divide a bit
I guess, but ... people then vote to give those rich folks power.
I don't doubt there are vast differences in opportunity and even rights at this point, but I don't think that's how people see it. Not if they're trying to get more of those folks in power.
If you're smart or lucky enough to to land that 6-figure job, then times are pretty good. There are tons of stories on subreddits, e.g. r/FIRE, r/investing, r/fatfire, etc., of people with large nest eggs and home ownership at an early age. But those are outliers. There are many opportunities to get rich if you are lucky and or smart enough to land them, like in tech or finance. But this is not much consolation for those who lack those attributes. By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.
The following site breaks down the living wage required for families of various sizes, and the wage of various industries.
I compared the living wage for my own family size with the average wage per industry and realized there were only 3 industries I could earn a living wage in, management, computers, or legal. Fortunately I have experience in the computer industry (surprise HN).
Let me spell it out. The following industries provide a below living wage, on average, for a single parent with one child: business & financial operations, architecture & engineering, life, physical, & social science, community & social service, education, training, & library, arts, design, entertainment, sports, & media, healthcare practitioners & technical, healthcare support, protective service, food preparation & serving related, building & grounds cleaning & maintenance, personal care & service, sales & related, office & administrative support, farming, fishing, & forestry, construction & extraction, installation, maintenance, & repair, production, transportation & material moving.
<By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.
These are words that most won't like to read or reply to, but are none the less true. After working with many people for many years, it became apparent that some of us are "smarter" then others. Through the fluke(?) of genetics/whatever of life, some can only attain a certain job status. A compassionate society and government must take this into consideration. We tend to label some as "lazy" who can't rise in economic status, but in many instances,they are doing the best they can.
Are they good? Sure you can go on vacation and drop some coin living lavishly,
but if the rest of your friends and family are struggling to pay rent while you've FIREd, wouldn't you, oh I dunno, feel guilty? Wouldn't you rather not watch the world burn? Wouldn't you rather live in a world where you want to have kids and they'll have a future?
I think that also assumes that you're able to use that entire 6 figures for yourself. And that you're able to save in these HCOL places that the 6 figures are made. And/or that you're married.
Many of the people that I know in that 6 figure range (the "normal" 100-300ish range) are helping others. Family and the like.
It's also 3-4k for an apartment in many of the HCOL places. That's before food, transportation, and taxes.
And many people are doing it solo, not married.
I'm not saying 6 figure earners are to be pitied. I'm just saying that the money goes out the door just as quickly as it comes in.
I've only known a "good" economy from about 1995-1999 when the internet went mainstream and for the briefest of moments, we got a taste of what public investment in tech feels like.
The powers that be quickly saw the danger in that and IMHO orchestrated the Dot Bomb, 9/11, the Housing Bubble, etc to keep as much money as possible out of public hands so that the average person wouldn't have the means to participate in the stock market.
Suze Orman told everyone to put their savings into Vanguard in the 2000s and they did. But since America chose to invest in McMansions and SUVs instead of moonshots and automation, Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit. Along with countless other zero-sum game thinkers who choose to work within existing systems of control rather than pursuing innovations which could raise the median standard of living. This is why as America has been losing its empire status as holder of the world's reserve currency, it's been colonizing itself, particularly its young.
So that's my greatest disappointment with the present era. That we collectively chose to invest in private profit rather than shared prosperity.
Now, tons of people will complain that I'm oversimplifying and will kick and scream in resistance to what I'm saying. But at the end of the day, personal wealth represents wages withheld from workers. I don't know why we worship people who have reached positions of power and wealth, whose purpose for existing seems to be to withhold resources from everyone else.
Sincere question:
Do you have thoughts as to how we can invest our $ if our goal is to support the "good economy" instead of attempting to ride the wave of the rich getting richer?
I would like to be part of the solution instead of contributing to the problem, but it is challenging to identify companies in which to invest without supporting the status quo.
I am not "rich," but wish I could better vote with what assets I do have.
> Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit.
I'm not sure you understand what Vanguard does. They are not an investment bank nor a VC firm. They run mutual funds and ETFs, so the assets that "Vanguard" owns are owned by the fund holders (in fact in the case of Vanguard, the fund holders also own Vanguard itself).
I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.
For any current students reading this, it's entirely doable to finish your program with real experience and connections under your belt. Not just with internships, but TA, research, and student org leadership experience absolutely count too. There are tons of overlooked low-stakes zero-experience opportunities available only to university students, and it's really useful to develop the habit of identifying and pursuing those.
Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it. If you do that's everyone telling that you don't belong there and you'll have a hard life if you ignore them.
Pretty much all of the good stuff I've done in my life have resulted from going off the beaten path. AP courses and SAT scores are the core of the beaten path, so everyone is competing for the same stuff. But the world is big, actually, and there's incredible opportunities for meaningful work once you start looking around more broadly. These sorts of jobs aren't necessarily "stable" employment, but I've never once felt precarious. Rather, I find that doing meaningful work with concrete impact tends to create more opportunities dynamically - if you can demonstrate that you get shit done, people will want your help getting their shit done. And if the work you choose is meaningful, it is very easy to make the case that you've done good and important things.
Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.
While I agree with you on everything, this doesnt really work for everyone
1. It requires a level of maturity and wisdom most recent graduates do not have (I certainly didn't have this when I graduated). Despite all my entrepreneurship courses in college, working at a dot-com startup, etc, I wouldn't have been able to do this out of college.
2. Not everyone is going to be enterprising. Historically, we've provided a path forward to smart people who just want a line job, not start/sell a business
Your CV indicates you graduated in 2006, so effectively into a different world. You should consider carefully how the world has changed for young people entering the workforce before dispensing advice, because they find themselves in a very different landscape to you and advice like "Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started" is trite and frankly insulting.
But they still will be faring better than others though. I am sure STEM grads are doing better than law school grads or humanities grads. But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired
> But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired
The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech". I graduated with a science degree in 2009-2010 and it was fucking awful. The only job I could find was at the University I went to and it paid like $5/hr above minimum wage. I left the field entirely pretty quickly.
We have flooded the STEM market with foreign workers. Sometimes we don't even give the foreign workers real jobs, we pretend they are "grad students" and pay them a pittance doing high level science at the universities. I generally like all the foreign folks I've worked with, but they are definitely suppressing the wages of natives to an insane degree.
You could just as easily argue that we simply aren't creating enough jobs to make use of the labor force, which traditionally has been a very dangerous place for an empire—especially the core—to be in.
On the flip side, back in the 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers. I'm not sure you can decide what's "normal" based on what was happening two decades ago. Two decades ago, we were smack between two big economic crashes. And all this depends so, so much on geographic locale.
I got out of school in the mid 90's, and had three good job offers to choose from within a month of graduating. It wasn't because I was special, as most of my friends had similar experiences. It just matters what kind of job market you happen to graduate into.
Isn’t this a bit obvious? I mean I’ve known this since I started working in 1997. The first job you have generally shatters this illusion that job security and economic gains are tied to “hard work”.
In the sense hard work is needed but only if you see if adding to what you consider a quality of life (which could be economic gain, generational wealth, bragging rights to a promotion, etc.). Each person has their criteria.
If you work in corporate America, hard work isn’t going to save you from layoffs or get you a bigger bonus unless that work is tied to making someone high up in your reporting chain look really good.
The current American system is premised on people buying into this. If people don't there is no societal foundation which probably leads to societal change. It's like the one societal contract we have (had). Not society helps you, not society puts a roof on your head. Not we're in a society together, so when you get sick we help out. Purely just 'if you work hard, you will be rewarded, and the rewards will take care of the things our social model doesn't'.
To show that this isn't exclusive to USA - I heard that in Japan nowadays workers can't rely on their megacorp to provide them predictable work position and can be fired regardless of their tenure. This is all after being told for decades that megacorp is literally their family and they should dedicate their whole time to it.
As you say, it's obvious to pretty much anyone who's ever worked a day in their life but, at the same time, culturally we pretend otherwise. Guys like Musk or Bloomberg talk about working 90 hour weeks and sleeping under their desks. We still want the cultural myth of hard work = success, whatever the reality is, because this allows those who've achieved economic gain to feel better about themselves.
It's a cultural and messaging issue, you have to tear down the illusion and performance art. Bloomberg is 83, Jamie Dimon is 69, these folks holding court age out eventually. The work is in pushing the Overton window over time about the meaning, purpose, and value of work, as well as how it is performed. "What does the data show? What matters?"
(I exclude Musk in my example because his cult of personality is on a different level than the usual work effort cult pushed by the usual business suspects).
Where in corporate America have you worked? At my previous place, there was a well defined career ladder, and what work was necessary to climb it as an individual contributor (vs a manager). Putting in more work meant climbing that ladder, which lead to pay increases and bonuses, and there was a formula somewhere on Confluence as to how those were calculated.
I thought the same thing as I left the church, but it's so ingrained in many people in ways they don't even realize.
Another commenter mentions the "just world fallacy," which I agree drives this sentiment directly: if you work hard, you get good things. If you got bad things, it's because you didn't work hard (enough).
There's lots of feedback loops that perpetuate this: survivorship bias, historic wealth (ye olde boomer-bought-a-house-on-a-single-factory-salary), startup CEOs. I find the description of the American poor who don't see themselves as poor but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" to be incredibly true.
Additionally, in many cases the people who're the most affected have the least resources to make themselves heard, the classic "rich people don't have the same 24 hours a day as the rest of us."
So, yeah, to a degree it should be obvious to anyone who goes looking, but there's so many sociological effects layered on top of each other that make it counterintuitive to someone for whom the system is working well.
37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%).
69% live in a home they or someone in their household owns.
That sounds a lot like young adults yet to get off their feet.
More interesting things:
- opinion on economy and own financial health has improved over the past 3 years
- the opinion on the American dream is actually quite stable over the past several years. There is a slight negative trend. You could write the same article 3 years ago.
>> 37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%).
I think the confusion here is the definition of various BLS metrics on unemployment. If I have a STEM degree, for example, but was working as a cashier -- I wouldnt officially be considered unemployed. In practical terms, many of these individuals would label themselves as unemployed, as they may be seeking work aligned to their aspirations/degrees/years-of-training. Same for gig work, Uber driving, Door Dashing, Amazon deliveries, etc.
Also, once you are unemployed/underemployed for long enough, it gets treated as "structural unemployment" and doesn't get counted, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.
I have friends' parents who were used to making 50k, 60k, or more. They dont have the same opportunities and now might be faced with making much less, often without benefits. In one case, I knew someone who was offered 35k p/t without benefits (thus, they would then just sink 20k of that into healthcare.) They did the math and the 35k was a net negative considering having to pay for healthcare, transportation to work, etc. Instead they just stayed unemployed. That isnt counted as unemployment, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.
It is important to note that retired people are not employed. 31% of respondents were 60+ years old. Some chunk of the 18-29 year olds were likely full time students. There are also other people who can't or don't need to work.
4-5% unemployment rate captures something different from "do you have a job right now, yes/no?". There are also different "unemployment rates" that mean different things.
FWIW, adults might live in homes owned by their spouse or child. It doesn't necessarily point to children living their parent's home.
Thanks for the information. So unemployed != unemployed.
In any case it doesnt really change anything 37% unemployed and 69% living in a home they or someone in their household owns sounds like a lot of young people who havent left the nest.
The poll is conducted on the internet. Busy people are less likely to fill out surveys and are more likely to believe that hard work leads to economic gains.
Note that the data are not reported raw, though. While the sample does not match the population, it is post-stratified and weighted to reflect the US population. (See the last two pages of your link for the study methodology.)
No that's close to the compliment of the male labor participation rate. 4-5% is only the people who have lost their jobs in the past six months and are actively looking for another one.
I have not read the whole of "Capital in 21st Century", just the opening chapter. But the picture the chapter painted was quiet grim - income inequality growing rapidly every year as "innovation" and jobs declined. In other words Piketty's numbers have shown that one cannot work their way to a comfortable living years ago and IMO this is at the heart of almost all political processes these days - inability to earn a living wage. The "leaders" use a whole range of tactics to divert the discontent onto other things like big government or immigration, and those are important topics, but they are not _the_ problem. Wage stagnation is the ultimate issue.
Is indeed an issue, as it corresponds with the malaise you describe.
> wage stagnation
is in part due to the government increasing the costs of hiring people. That indirectly results in correspondingly lower wages. The so-called "employers' contribution" is a misrepresentation.
> government increasing the costs of hiring people
This is lazy thinking. If the government is indeed increasing costs, this is happening to everyone across the board. So why would anyone in particular be affected by this? It could even be true in a situation where profits were falling across the economy, but the numbers show that profits are INCREASING for most companies in the US at least. So how can these companies justify that it is the government forcing them to hire less people if they have more money every year?
I am not going to say that I have the data but from what I remember that was not identified as one of the causative concerns in the book.
Subjectively I doubt that that is a systematic driver of income inequality. For example in 60s the taxes in the higher margins were extremely high (80% I think?) and worker bargaining power was strong. Yet it was a period of unprecedented growth and innovation, one where ideas of invisible hand and tide that lifts all boats were forged but in reality it was not a laissez-fair period at all.
The article may be referring to page 14, actually.
The question on page 14 is "Do you think the American Dream--that if you work hard you'll get ahead--still holds
true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?
And the results are (from 2023 to 2025):
Still holds true: 36, 34, 31 (downward trend)
Never held true: 18, 17, 23 (upward trend)
Once held true but not anymore: 45, 49, 46 (mixed trend)
Its a report on how people feel. It measures how people say they feel. It's limited in usefulness but not worthless. Id just hazard against reading too much into it.
I think the problem is the loss of the middle class. The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left. It doesn't matter how hard or how smart you work.
I think you sum up the type of despair people feel pretty well.
It's really more helpful to look at "middle class or better." Because yes, the middle class has shrunk. But more of that share went to the UPPER income tiers.
The middle class went from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. But the lower income brackets saw a +3% change while upper saw +8%.
Economists and rich people indeed think in terms of scarce resources. Any economics book will tell you that it is about managing scarce resources. Rich people will never allow for example the government to give increasingly more money and resources to lower income people, because they fear there's note enough for them. They don't believe in abundance for everyone.
Being "middle class" is a mindset, not a category of wealth. It's something of an anachronism from when there were two distinct classes: nobility/clergy, and the peasants. The middle class, the bourgeoisie (because they lived it towns, bourgs) didn't fit into either existing class. One can be wealthy or poor and still be middle class. Social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and emphasis on external, impersonal values are the hallmarks of this mindset.
Readit News
IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.
This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country. We've chosen to reward those who move money around and trade capital more than we reward those who labor. And this at a time when, supposedly, the country is trying to increase its ability to build things.
I thought this specific fact worth mentioning.
The people in power do not want to lose control, but clearly have no idea how to manage the scale of what has been built. There's an American leadership crisis going on right now that is hard to ignore, both in public and private life.
To make the tax incidence on wages and capital gains equivalent, you must first deduct losses due to inflation and risk. For wages, inflation and risk round to zero. For long-term capital gains inflation and risk are large and often the majority of the "gain". Short-term capital gains are already taxed like wages.
In the US, unlike some other developed countries, there is a very limited ability to deduct losses due to inflation and risk from long-term capital gains. Consequently, if they made the tax rate the same as wages then the tax incidence on capital gains would be much higher than wages.
As a policy matter in the US, they fix this large difference in tax incidence by reducing the tax rate instead of adjusting the cost basis for inflation and allowing full deductibility of losses.
If you pencil out the implications of these two policies, I suspect you'd find that you like the way the US does it better. Making risk and inflation deductible to equalize tax incidence enables a lot of financial structuring.
2. Long term investors invest in things that great new jobs, it is not just moving capital around.
Is it? I've heard that low capital gain taxes are better for long-term GDP growth.
The richest people I know are trying to convince everyone
1. There is a "worker shortage" in an attempt to bring in immigrant workers whom they can boss around and keep on a leash
2. That "AI is taking jobs" so you cannot point the people who are really taking jobs -- policy makers
3. There is "low unemployment" to perpetuate the myth that the economy is great
4. "Anyone can make it" while their nepo-babies get back-door access to jobs at top firms and claim "they worked hard up the ranks"
I agree, but I think it's more than just a "vibe in the air". Throughout my youth and young adulthood, we (GenXers) knew vaguely about rich people, but nothing specific, just that rich people existed and they had nice stuff. Now, thanks to social media and the decline of humility, the lifestyles of rich people isn't just known, it's pushed in front of our faces constantly. And too often the message is straight from A Bronx Tale: "The working man is a sucker".
In many places there's a divide between home owners and people who rent.
I don't doubt there are vast differences in opportunity and even rights at this point, but I don't think that's how people see it. Not if they're trying to get more of those folks in power.
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I compared the living wage for my own family size with the average wage per industry and realized there were only 3 industries I could earn a living wage in, management, computers, or legal. Fortunately I have experience in the computer industry (surprise HN).
Let me spell it out. The following industries provide a below living wage, on average, for a single parent with one child: business & financial operations, architecture & engineering, life, physical, & social science, community & social service, education, training, & library, arts, design, entertainment, sports, & media, healthcare practitioners & technical, healthcare support, protective service, food preparation & serving related, building & grounds cleaning & maintenance, personal care & service, sales & related, office & administrative support, farming, fishing, & forestry, construction & extraction, installation, maintenance, & repair, production, transportation & material moving.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/ example: https://livingwage.mit.edu/states/49
These are words that most won't like to read or reply to, but are none the less true. After working with many people for many years, it became apparent that some of us are "smarter" then others. Through the fluke(?) of genetics/whatever of life, some can only attain a certain job status. A compassionate society and government must take this into consideration. We tend to label some as "lazy" who can't rise in economic status, but in many instances,they are doing the best they can.
Many of the people that I know in that 6 figure range (the "normal" 100-300ish range) are helping others. Family and the like.
It's also 3-4k for an apartment in many of the HCOL places. That's before food, transportation, and taxes.
And many people are doing it solo, not married.
I'm not saying 6 figure earners are to be pitied. I'm just saying that the money goes out the door just as quickly as it comes in.
The powers that be quickly saw the danger in that and IMHO orchestrated the Dot Bomb, 9/11, the Housing Bubble, etc to keep as much money as possible out of public hands so that the average person wouldn't have the means to participate in the stock market.
Suze Orman told everyone to put their savings into Vanguard in the 2000s and they did. But since America chose to invest in McMansions and SUVs instead of moonshots and automation, Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit. Along with countless other zero-sum game thinkers who choose to work within existing systems of control rather than pursuing innovations which could raise the median standard of living. This is why as America has been losing its empire status as holder of the world's reserve currency, it's been colonizing itself, particularly its young.
So that's my greatest disappointment with the present era. That we collectively chose to invest in private profit rather than shared prosperity.
Now, tons of people will complain that I'm oversimplifying and will kick and scream in resistance to what I'm saying. But at the end of the day, personal wealth represents wages withheld from workers. I don't know why we worship people who have reached positions of power and wealth, whose purpose for existing seems to be to withhold resources from everyone else.
I would like to be part of the solution instead of contributing to the problem, but it is challenging to identify companies in which to invest without supporting the status quo.
I am not "rich," but wish I could better vote with what assets I do have.
I'm not sure you understand what Vanguard does. They are not an investment bank nor a VC firm. They run mutual funds and ETFs, so the assets that "Vanguard" owns are owned by the fund holders (in fact in the case of Vanguard, the fund holders also own Vanguard itself).
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Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.
1. It requires a level of maturity and wisdom most recent graduates do not have (I certainly didn't have this when I graduated). Despite all my entrepreneurship courses in college, working at a dot-com startup, etc, I wouldn't have been able to do this out of college.
2. Not everyone is going to be enterprising. Historically, we've provided a path forward to smart people who just want a line job, not start/sell a business
The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech". I graduated with a science degree in 2009-2010 and it was fucking awful. The only job I could find was at the University I went to and it paid like $5/hr above minimum wage. I left the field entirely pretty quickly.
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FWIW, as a hiring manager, I'd almost always pick a new graduate with co-op experience over somebody without it (all else being roughly equal).
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In the sense hard work is needed but only if you see if adding to what you consider a quality of life (which could be economic gain, generational wealth, bragging rights to a promotion, etc.). Each person has their criteria.
If you work in corporate America, hard work isn’t going to save you from layoffs or get you a bigger bonus unless that work is tied to making someone high up in your reporting chain look really good.
(I exclude Musk in my example because his cult of personality is on a different level than the usual work effort cult pushed by the usual business suspects).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy
I thought the same thing as I left the church, but it's so ingrained in many people in ways they don't even realize.
Another commenter mentions the "just world fallacy," which I agree drives this sentiment directly: if you work hard, you get good things. If you got bad things, it's because you didn't work hard (enough).
There's lots of feedback loops that perpetuate this: survivorship bias, historic wealth (ye olde boomer-bought-a-house-on-a-single-factory-salary), startup CEOs. I find the description of the American poor who don't see themselves as poor but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" to be incredibly true.
Additionally, in many cases the people who're the most affected have the least resources to make themselves heard, the classic "rich people don't have the same 24 hours a day as the rest of us."
So, yeah, to a degree it should be obvious to anyone who goes looking, but there's so many sociological effects layered on top of each other that make it counterintuitive to someone for whom the system is working well.
37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%).
69% live in a home they or someone in their household owns.
That sounds a lot like young adults yet to get off their feet.
More interesting things:
- opinion on economy and own financial health has improved over the past 3 years
- the opinion on the American dream is actually quite stable over the past several years. There is a slight negative trend. You could write the same article 3 years ago.
I think the confusion here is the definition of various BLS metrics on unemployment. If I have a STEM degree, for example, but was working as a cashier -- I wouldnt officially be considered unemployed. In practical terms, many of these individuals would label themselves as unemployed, as they may be seeking work aligned to their aspirations/degrees/years-of-training. Same for gig work, Uber driving, Door Dashing, Amazon deliveries, etc.
Also, once you are unemployed/underemployed for long enough, it gets treated as "structural unemployment" and doesn't get counted, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.
I have friends' parents who were used to making 50k, 60k, or more. They dont have the same opportunities and now might be faced with making much less, often without benefits. In one case, I knew someone who was offered 35k p/t without benefits (thus, they would then just sink 20k of that into healthcare.) They did the math and the 35k was a net negative considering having to pay for healthcare, transportation to work, etc. Instead they just stayed unemployed. That isnt counted as unemployment, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
4-5% unemployment rate captures something different from "do you have a job right now, yes/no?". There are also different "unemployment rates" that mean different things.
FWIW, adults might live in homes owned by their spouse or child. It doesn't necessarily point to children living their parent's home.
But no reason 37% of people randomly asked, who are not currently working, would necessarily fit those criteria
In any case it doesnt really change anything 37% unemployed and 69% living in a home they or someone in their household owns sounds like a lot of young people who havent left the nest.
Is indeed an issue, as it corresponds with the malaise you describe.
> wage stagnation
is in part due to the government increasing the costs of hiring people. That indirectly results in correspondingly lower wages. The so-called "employers' contribution" is a misrepresentation.
This is lazy thinking. If the government is indeed increasing costs, this is happening to everyone across the board. So why would anyone in particular be affected by this? It could even be true in a situation where profits were falling across the economy, but the numbers show that profits are INCREASING for most companies in the US at least. So how can these companies justify that it is the government forcing them to hire less people if they have more money every year?
Subjectively I doubt that that is a systematic driver of income inequality. For example in 60s the taxes in the higher margins were extremely high (80% I think?) and worker bargaining power was strong. Yet it was a period of unprecedented growth and innovation, one where ideas of invisible hand and tide that lifts all boats were forged but in reality it was not a laissez-fair period at all.
https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJu...
Including previous values:
25% July 2025
29% July 2024
28% March 2023
27% May 2022
Interesting other measurement:
Neither agree nor disagree: 32% 24% 28% 27%
So... not really much change over the past 3 years.
The question on page 14 is "Do you think the American Dream--that if you work hard you'll get ahead--still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?
And the results are (from 2023 to 2025):
Still holds true: 36, 34, 31 (downward trend)
Never held true: 18, 17, 23 (upward trend)
Once held true but not anymore: 45, 49, 46 (mixed trend)
The difference in opinion on the economy was more significant. But it went the other direction (positive) so I guess they couldn't use that.
It's really more helpful to look at "middle class or better." Because yes, the middle class has shrunk. But more of that share went to the UPPER income tiers.
The middle class went from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. But the lower income brackets saw a +3% change while upper saw +8%.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/the-incredible...
>The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left.
There simply is not a static pool of resources.
Economists and rich people indeed think in terms of scarce resources. Any economics book will tell you that it is about managing scarce resources. Rich people will never allow for example the government to give increasingly more money and resources to lower income people, because they fear there's note enough for them. They don't believe in abundance for everyone.