Anecdote: In the Los Angeles of the 1950s and 1960s, average young couples would move the California and optimistically start a family. Natives too.
When I say "average" I mean it. In my neighborhood of Altadena, my friend's dads were furniture upholsterers, security guards, KFC employee (manager?), construction workers, small college professor, salesmen. In general, they owned houses. When wives worked, it was in the pink-collar ghetto, and often only seasonally, as to buy holiday presents.
"Today, the median listing home price in Los Angeles, CA was $1.2M, trending up 22.5% year-over-year. "
So....the ability to buy a house, and have a decent-paying job, be respected by a wife for the ability to provide---that's all gone for the average guy along the entire West Coast. Much of the Northeast too, I would guess.
I get it, that median incomes per capita are higher now than in the 1960s. Something is screwy with that perspective. Wages for young men, adjusted for inflation, are lower than in the 1960s.
I agree. We'd make very bad Swedes or Danes - US in particular with the added difference of it's size. I guess I'm skeptical of alternatives to higher taxes because we tried one here when the Blair government funded spending on health and education by letting the City go lightly regulated for a decade and scooping up the increased tax take. That left us with a banking crisis, austerity and 15 years (possibly more) of increasingly wayward Tory government. In hindsight, I can't help wishing Blair had spent his considerable political capital on raising taxes in his second term, rather than on extravagant, regime change adventures in the Middle East. But given the intellectual tide in the 90's and noughties, that's wishful thinking.
It's a pretty grim picture - very robustly drawn - but grim. I wonder how this looks in different European countries. Suicide, as I recall, is an outcome in Todd's family structure/ anthropological cultural base analysis, so contrasts between the UK (like the US - absolute nuclear and a bit of regionalised authoritarian) and, say, France (all 4 main types but egalitarian nuclear dominant) or Germany (authoritarian with a bit of eg nuc around the Rhine region) would be interesting. Also, are mortality rates higher in US regions where the AF implantation is higher - i.e. where the population is more likely to be of German or Swedish origin. Anyway, very convincing. Thanks for the reminder about Todd being the only one to predict the 'Final Fall' of the Soviet Union. So seldom see anyone making this point. The challenge is getting political-economic cultures like the US and UK, with their absolute nuclear family emphasis on the individual, to adopt the more collective-oriented policies required to mitigate these problems. 'Tax' and 'welfare' have become two of the dirtiest words in the English language, I'm afraid.
This is very well written, thanks for writing it. However, I always like to nit pick on this sort of stuff and point out that the per capita numbers of these bad conditions/events (like suicide, "deaths of despair" stuff) for each formal educational completion level cohort are still quite low. And that for all the above metrics --and even income as well-- the variance within cohorts is much greater than the variance between them. So I always wonder if there are other features that should be considered?
Nice to see a solid, fact based treatment of this question. Your rebuttal of Iglesias is convincing.
Anecdote: In the Los Angeles of the 1950s and 1960s, average young couples would move the California and optimistically start a family. Natives too.
When I say "average" I mean it. In my neighborhood of Altadena, my friend's dads were furniture upholsterers, security guards, KFC employee (manager?), construction workers, small college professor, salesmen. In general, they owned houses. When wives worked, it was in the pink-collar ghetto, and often only seasonally, as to buy holiday presents.
"Today, the median listing home price in Los Angeles, CA was $1.2M, trending up 22.5% year-over-year. "
So....the ability to buy a house, and have a decent-paying job, be respected by a wife for the ability to provide---that's all gone for the average guy along the entire West Coast. Much of the Northeast too, I would guess.
I get it, that median incomes per capita are higher now than in the 1960s. Something is screwy with that perspective. Wages for young men, adjusted for inflation, are lower than in the 1960s.
Canada is facing a similar demographic wreck.
Globalism?
I agree. We'd make very bad Swedes or Danes - US in particular with the added difference of it's size. I guess I'm skeptical of alternatives to higher taxes because we tried one here when the Blair government funded spending on health and education by letting the City go lightly regulated for a decade and scooping up the increased tax take. That left us with a banking crisis, austerity and 15 years (possibly more) of increasingly wayward Tory government. In hindsight, I can't help wishing Blair had spent his considerable political capital on raising taxes in his second term, rather than on extravagant, regime change adventures in the Middle East. But given the intellectual tide in the 90's and noughties, that's wishful thinking.
Nice collection of evidence. "Predicting the collapse of the United States of America..."
Don't bother reading Yglesias or Noah Smith
It's a pretty grim picture - very robustly drawn - but grim. I wonder how this looks in different European countries. Suicide, as I recall, is an outcome in Todd's family structure/ anthropological cultural base analysis, so contrasts between the UK (like the US - absolute nuclear and a bit of regionalised authoritarian) and, say, France (all 4 main types but egalitarian nuclear dominant) or Germany (authoritarian with a bit of eg nuc around the Rhine region) would be interesting. Also, are mortality rates higher in US regions where the AF implantation is higher - i.e. where the population is more likely to be of German or Swedish origin. Anyway, very convincing. Thanks for the reminder about Todd being the only one to predict the 'Final Fall' of the Soviet Union. So seldom see anyone making this point. The challenge is getting political-economic cultures like the US and UK, with their absolute nuclear family emphasis on the individual, to adopt the more collective-oriented policies required to mitigate these problems. 'Tax' and 'welfare' have become two of the dirtiest words in the English language, I'm afraid.
This is very well written, thanks for writing it. However, I always like to nit pick on this sort of stuff and point out that the per capita numbers of these bad conditions/events (like suicide, "deaths of despair" stuff) for each formal educational completion level cohort are still quite low. And that for all the above metrics --and even income as well-- the variance within cohorts is much greater than the variance between them. So I always wonder if there are other features that should be considered?
Are we surprised by the wilful blindness of tendentious apologists like Levitz and Yglesias? Thank you for this comprehensive rebuttal.
But does anyone of influence and authority care?