Is the 'stuck' economy a global phenomenon? Americans share frustrations about not being able to get ahead despite education - is this a universal experience?

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

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

It's social ossification, an inevitable part of the systemic cycle.

The people at the top have wealth to enable all the best opportunities go to their children and friends' children.

So all the plebs are left struggling for scraps.

There are more children of mega-rich than mega rich, and even accounting for portion who flaunt off or abandon family path, than there are mega-top positions, so most of the second tier positions go to them too.

Then, of course, neoliberal policies have made things less equal so that the poorer you are you now need to work even harder and be even more exception than you did before.

Edit: am British. See it here, seen it over the pond and in (the PR of) China, too.

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'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.

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.

Go look at housing prices vs incomes in the USA, then do the same for Canada. I'll let you draw your own conclusions on how people feel up here.

In my experience, things are a bit similar in Austria, Europe. I had worked an internship in a software development company around 2016, and things were splendid. Everybody was in a good mood, and things seemed to move smoothly. One year later, in 2017, people were holding back a bit more.

I went there again in 2019, and it was okay. In 2020, the business closed.

I think the halt of economic growth is a global phenomenon. Throughout human history, there used to be three big waves of development:

• agricultural (farmers) - biochemical work
• industrial (machine operators and construction) - mechanical work
• information (IT) - electrical/information work

now, it seems to me, the economy is fully developed, and growth slows down. The only growth i foresee in the future will be the settlement of Mars (because mars can theoretically hold up to 1 billion people), and "cleaning up" on Earth (renewable energy).

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!

Sounds like this whole capitalism thing we were sold was a lie. And most countries adopted it or already had that system before the U.S. showed up. Capitalism requires infinite growth, so we artificial insert these boom bust cycles to make the rich richer, and everybody else can eat a dick.

We have worse wealth inequality than the golden age

Americans are indoctrinated that you have to work for someone else to live, that you have to have a lot of nice things to look successful, that certain jobs are down the chain of the hierarchy, and that there is a hierarchy at all. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires and all that.

Sweden. I'm sure some would disagree, but from my perspective, things here are more OK. Most people i know thats my age (35) with a degree (free tuition) earn more than their parents. Live in decent houses and can comfortably support family with 2 kids on like 1.5 salary.

Not as easy without an education, of course, but if you manage a stem degree, you will likely live a decent life.

No opinion on this as I’m an American, but as evidence I’d point out that ruling parties all over the world have been removed from power.

Brazil has been stuck for a number of years now, at the very least since 2016. Then again, Brazil being kinda shitty overall is just the average experience, our inequality has always been among the worst ranked in the world