For the last fifteen years or so, economic populism has become increasingly popular among both the political left and right. This rise has gone hand in hand with the proliferation of a narrative which says that the economic gains in this country have gone exclusively to elites since the 1970s while the incomes of regular people have stagnated as the cost of living necessities has increased making the current generation poorer than past ones. Previously, I’ve argued that modern societal progress seemingly hasn’t improved people’s psychological well being (Last, 2020). Some suggested that this unequal distribution of economic growth explains why. In this post, I will argue that, for the most part, this narrative is not true. Because COVID has obviously caused economic conditions to temporarily worsen, the data I’ll be looking at in this post will end prior to the pandemic.
Incomes Have Not Stagnated
In the early 2000’s research was published which claimed that the median American’s income hadn’t changed much since the 1970s. This research was heavily flawed, it failed to account for changes in household size, taxes, in-kind transfers from employers, and government transfers, and made no effort to measure income often not reported to the government. Today, we have far better research which accounts for each of these flaws and finds that the median American’s income increased by quite a lot over the last few decades. 
Looking at a longer time span, the differences that these methodological adjustments make is made especially clear in this chart taken from Elwell et al. (2019), which shows that adjusting for things like household size and transfer payments makes the difference between thinking the median income has only increased by around 5% since 1959 and seeing that it has actually more than doubled in that time.
Contemporary estimates of how the incomes of people at the bottom of the income distribution have changed since 1970 also display a growth of 44%.
Even this research is misleading though, because we’ve introduced new people into the American population over that time period. This fact can lead to counter-intuitive scenarios. For instance, if immigrants come here and increase their income relative to what it was prior to immigrating, but still have incomes below the median American, then, all else being equal, this will lead to a “decline” in the median American’s income even though no one experienced a decrease in income.
We can account for this flaw by looking at research which follows the same people over time. Such data shows that the median income of Americans in every class increased greatly between 1980 and 2012. Moreover, the greatest proportional gains went to those in the bottom quintile of the income distribution. Their incomes more than doubled over this period.
Other research has found that nearly all households in the bottom 20% of income in 1975 were no longer in the bottom 20% by 1991.
Income mobility was lesser between 1996 an 2005 (a shorter time span), but most households in the bottom 20% still managed to escape that quintile over that just 9 year period.
It’s also worth noting that poverty statistics often give a misleading impression about how common poverty is in America. The problem is this: often times people will report incomes below the poverty rate because they had a sudden, temporary, drop in income (for instance, due to regular, non-long term, unemployment) and as a result their income won’t reflect their life style. If we look at how many people were continually poor between the years 2009 and 2012, we find that only 2.7% of households meet this criteria of chronic poverty (Henderson, 2016).
We should also note that poor people’s lives have been materially improved with time. For instance,, unlike in 1984, by 2005 most poor households had a clothes dryer, a microwave, and air conditioning and by 2013 most had a home computer (Horwitz, 2015; Wagner, 2015). So even if the number of poor people remained the same, which it has not, and their incomes had stayed the same, which they have not, their material conditions would have still improved.
On the whole then, the material standards of living have risen over the last few decades for the median American and for poor Americans as well.
Unemployment is Slightly More Common and Lasts Longer
Turning to unemployment, we can see that, prior to COVID, the unemployment rate was similar to what it was 40 years ago. But over the long run there is clearly a trend towards fewer people working.
This is significantly due to college and retirement. If we look at the labor participation rates of people in prime working age, 25 to 54, we see that there’s been a large increase in the proportion of women working and a slight fall in the proportion of men working from roughly 98% down to roughly 88%. This does represent an increase in unemployment for men, but it also means that nearly all men still manage to find work.
It is also worth mentioning that the average duration of unemployment is now around 20 weeks while it used to be below 15.
Importantly, neither the change in unemployment nor the change in unemployment duration of the last twenty years can be blamed on a lack of job openings. As can be seen, prior to COVID there were actually more job openings than unemployed people and this was the best ratio of openings to unemployment seen since the statistic began to be recorded around 2000.
It thus seems that, to a significant degree, the slight increase in unemployment that we’ve observed is due to some combination of people not wanting the jobs that are available or not having the skills needed to perform said jobs. Given this, the data doesn’t allow us to tell to what degree unemployment among working age men has moderately increased due to a change in employment preferences as opposed to employment opportunity. Regardless, this moderate change falls well short of the picture often painted by populists.
People Spend Less on Necessities
Some people will say that even though certain luxury technologies have become cheaper, thus raising our total “material standard of living”, living essentials have greatly increased in price leaving normal people with nearly impossible bills to pay. Before looking at some of these living essentials in detail, I want to note that the proportion of income spent on housing, clothing, food, and utilities, has been declining for decades.
Of course, the two major items not included in this list are college and health insurance. But notice that these things were not thought of as necessities until very recently, and so it wouldn’t make since to put them on a chart going back to a time when almost no one had either of these things. I will look at education and health insurance individually, but in both cases it is important to remember that we aren’t just talking about a change in our material condition, we’re also talking about a change in our standards for what is considered necessary. But before turning to these items let’s look at housing since it is the other major cost that people commonly talk about increasing with time.
Homes Cost More Because They Are Larger
Adjusting for inflation, living spaces are more expensive than they used to be. For rent, prices increased by more than 60% between 1960 and 2014.
However, our homes are also much larger than they used to be.
If you adjust for dwelling size and look at price per square foot, we find that the median home price was basically the same in 2014 as it was in 1973.
Granted, it has increased slightly in the last five years, time will tell if this is another housing bubble, but even if it isn’t this represents a very small increase over a long period of time which saw many improvements to our housing standards (e.g. regulations concerning building materials like lead, clay, and asbestos) which could easily justify a small increase in price.
It’s also worth noting that despite our homes being larger and safer than in the past, the rate of homeownership has pretty much stayed constant, though it has shifted up in the age distribution. To some degree, this simply reflects the fact that more people go to college and marry late than used to be the case.
On the whole, housing prices leave little to complain about outside the fact that we as a society have shifted our standard for how large homes should be and so now it would be more difficult for an individual to purchase a home at the size that was typical 50 years ago.
Education Costs More But Is Manageable
Turning to education, the cost of college has more than doubled since the 1980s (NCES, 2018). The economic value of going to college, the degree to which each dollar spent on college predicts an increase in your future income, is higher than it used to be too and makes college a better investment than most plausible alternatives. But of course this is largely because so many employers now require a degree for jobs that used to lack such a requirement. So now college both costs more and is more necessary than in the past.
How much college costs varies greatly by college type. For public universities, the typical tuition and associated fees comes out to roughly 11k per year while that figure is roughly 38K for private universities. On top of tuition students must find a way to pay for normal living expenses not directly caused by school while attending classes.
In part, the solution society has set up for students is grant money. For the typical student at a public two year school, the grant money they receive will be greater than is the cost of their tuition so that it will cover all those expenses and a little of the cost of living.
For the typical student of a four year public school, grant money will account for around 65% of their tuition cost. Due to the remaining tuition cost and living expenses, they’ll still spend around 15K per year of their own money to get by.
For private schools, grant money typically covers only around a third of their tuition and these students spend another 27K of their own money on tuition and living expenses.
Students also often cover living expenses by living with their parents. This is true of roughly one in four students in general, and almost half of students from low income backgrounds.
Roughly 43% of students also work while in college (NCES, 2018). The median income of student works is $3,900 among full time students living with their parents and $13,880 among students not living with their parents (Urban Institute, 2019).
These figures suggest that, between grants and work, students can generally make enough to fund their life style and college classes before taking out any debt. It is therefore unclear exactly why the median college graduate takes out roughly $25,000 in debt.
Possibly, this is because many students prefer to not work while in college or to go to very expensive universities.
Regardless, the average starting salary of college graduates is $50,944 (NACE, 2019). The median may be a bit lower but reaches this level fairly quickly and rises far above it in people’s 30s and 40s.
So most people could pay off their college debt in a handful of years if they really wanted to. For the median college graduate, this would simply require living for a few years at the material standards of people who haven’t gone to college. Despite this, Hess (2019) says that “The Department of Education reports that the typical repayment period for borrowers with between $20,000 and $40,000 in federal student loans is 20 years, and a 2013 study of 61,000 respondents conducted by One Wisconsin Institute found that the average length of repayment for student debt borrowers is 21.1 years.” This obviously reflects a financial preference among college graduates and is not because the debt is so high that it necessitates decades to pay off.
In sum, despite rising prices there’s nothing in this data that makes education seem wildly or unmanageably expensive. There are irresponsible decisions someone could make about what schools to go to, whether to work while in school, and what kind of life style to have during and after school, that could land someone in a large amount of debt but this is by no means a necessity nor is the possibility of irresponsible decisions landing you in a bunch of debt particular to school. School is expensive, but it also has a large pay off for most people and the costs are typically very manageable.
Healthcare
Next let’s turn to healthcare. As is well known, spending per person on healthcare has increased dramatically over the last half century or so.
Of course, people also live longer than they did half a century ago, despite the increased prevalence of obesity, and that is in large part because health care has improved and more people have gotten access to it. So it’s not as if we are paying more now for the same set of services we got in 1970.
In fact, Dunn et al. (2020) found that health care costs actually declined between 2000 and 2017 if you adjust the cost of health care by its quality. In other words, its become cheaper in terms of the actual expected medial benefits but the range of quality you can pay for has improved so that the raw cost is still higher.
In large part, our response to the rising cost of healthcare has been to give everyone insurance. By the 1990’s we’d accomplished this for old people.
Among the total population, the rate of being uninsured fell by more than half between 1963 and 2014, leaving around 10% of people uninsured.
And this 10% is disproportionately made up of young adults.
So we need to look at how much people are paying for healthcare both directly and through insurance. Among non-elderly people who have health insurance through their employer, the median cost is pretty low and even the 90th percentile isn’t as high as you might think.
The cost for old people on Medicare is higher, but still not incredibly high even at the 90th percentile: “In 2017, the average beneficiary in traditional Medicare spent $5,801 on insurance premiums and medical services. One in ten people with Medicare spent at least $10,268.” – Miller (2020)
So, in the US, you can expect to pay a something like 3 – 6 grand a year on health care during your working years and a bit more when you’re old. Probably, you won’t need to spend much money at all when you are young. And if you’re poor the government will almost entirely cover your health care costs through Medicaid. But you should probably save some money for years down the line when you’ll have to spend more than average. All this is a significant expense, but, as with the other expenses I’ve looked at, it also seems obviously manageable for the vast majority of people.
Speculations and Conclusions
When it comes to income, education, housing, and healthcare, our system works reasonably well for the vast majority of people. So why has populist rhetoric to the contrary become so popular? Here are some speculative explanations:
First, in each case there are exceptions to “the system” generally working well. Some people are greatly hurt by these systems, sometimes through no fault of their own, and they are talked about an awful lot. By contrast, no one talks about how these things worked out fine for them. There are probably a few reasons for this. First, things being fine isn’t an interesting story. Second, if you’ve heard lots of people talk about how these systems have screwed them over then you might feel like it would be rude to talk about them treating you well as opposed to condemning them. Third, outing yourself as a non-victim might be socially unprofitable because victimhood is seen as a virtue in our society. And forth, everyone can convince themselves that these systems haven’t been good enough to them because no matter how good of a life you’ve had there will always be ways it could have gone better. So the stories people hear, both on the news and in person, tend to support populist rhetoric.
A second contributing factor is the fact that social scientists and politicians frequently tell people that the data shows the economy has screwed over all the regular people. For politicians, saying this is profitable because then you can say you will fight back against the elites for the people and thus try to capture votes. Social scientists are mostly left wingers who fail tests of basic statistical literacy, so their involvement in this is entirely unsurprising (Last, 2020).
These are the sorts of forces I’d guess are at play which explain how it is that economic populism has become so popular in a society where regular people’s economic position has been improving for decades and the economic system continues to work reasonably well for most people. Of course, we might still be concerned about the rare exceptions to the system working well, or we might argue that there are signs that the system will cease working well for most people in the future. But neither of these concerns could fuel an economically populist movement the way saying that most people are getting screwed over right now does.
To conclude, I’d like to reiterate that I’m not saying the modern system of politics and economics doesn’t have serious problems. I’m just saying that not producing enough material stuff for a sufficient number of people is not one of those problems.
Ideas and Data 
In general, I think you’re right (i.e. that populism is not caused by economics, something that has been documented by people at CSPI already and that the problems with the current system are social and not economic in nature). I haven’t looked into this in any extent, but I still have some doubts about your points.
– People still can’t afford things in the sense that they have to go into debt to afford them (like college or houses), I have seen somewhere that as a precentage of an average salary, the costs of these things have gone up quite massively since the 60s. This may be part of the decrease in spending on necessities, people paying off their debts. This means that while people are not poorer in what material things they have, they are poorer in real terms and this may contribute to dissatisfaction with the system.
– I know this is not the aim of the article, but I would like to note the waste that college really is and the “return” is just the consequence of more people going into college, because college itself doesn’t increase your competences, but is a type of signaling that is increasingly required by employers (Bryan Caplan in The Case against education has documented this well). so it is in fact a large net loss for everybody. Again going to a place for no reason for 4 years to get a worthless piece of paper is not something that makes people happy, not to mention the kind of propaganda in the universities themselves and the cost of delaying family formation, not to mention the loss of the most productive years of your life.
– I think it’s plausible that in fact the larger size of houses are a way for construction companies to make more money and people do not in fact “want” them. I’m not sure how would you test something like this.
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Something as simple as college textbooks have increased 10,000% in cost. Put that in context that, in the immediate post-war period, many colleges were government funded at upwards of 90%. That basically means the very costs for the lower classes to get economically ahead were being paid for by the rich, via progressive taxation, what today right-wingers would call socialism but is really just social democracy. But those same generations who benefited from it pulled the ladder up behind them.
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The Gini coefficient measures income inequality.
In the US it used to be .35 now it is .45, it has risen, income inequality has risen. In Western Europe and Japan it is still in the mid to upper thirties.
The economic changes in the last 50 years have used offshoring and globalization as a way to transfer wealth from the American Middle class to the former peasant class of China and India. They have become lower middle class and the American Middle class is now very lower middle class.
Chistopher Rufo has a documentary on the changes which, though emotionally charged, puts faces on the abstract categories of American Middle class in the cities of Youngstown, Ohio; Memphis, Tenn.; and Stockton, Cal.
These people have no jobs and no opportunities so the question is….’Why allow more immigrants?’
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Income inequality is a meaningless number used to get grants and raise taxes.
Who cares how rich someone else is if you can pay for the necessities of life?
And why would someone work for LESS income if what they EARN will be taken away from them and given to someone that either won’t work, doesn’t work, or has far less skill than them? The logical thing to do is to just STOP working and let the government take money from someone who is sweating in the fields and give it to you for your WANTS.
“Classes” are NOT static, they are measured in Quintiles. So, there are always 20% in each class. Therefore, ALL of the “American Middle class” cannot now be “very lower middle class”.
And how exactly has the American Middle Class become “very lower”? Can they only afford a 32″ TV instead of a 60″? Can they not pay for the necessities of life?
Yes, we have a “Great Awakening” coming soon when all those past due bills which were postponed but not forgiven come due in the next few months. But when that happens, Americans will land in the government and family safety nets and it is that new “fake” middle class in China and India and the rest of the world that will become very VERY lower class (not even middle) when Americans stop buying the products they got “rich” producing.
As for the documentary. I have been saying for DECADES, “We can learn ONE lesson from Illegal Immigrants: MOVE your frickin’ @$$ to where there are jobs!” Weren’t they paying $20 an hour in some god-forsaken place for people to work fast-food while those with even a little skill were making $50/hr. in the oil fields? Those “bad” off people with “no jobs and no opportunities” do NOT have any sort of “right” to live where they do at MY (or your) expense. My family had to move to where we could find jobs in 2002 and so should they.
And the answer to “Why allow more immigrants?” is:
1. Define your terms: legal, illegal, beneficial skills, family members (nuclear, extended)
2. Reject the premise that we shouldn’t allow ANY immigrants or an EXTREMELY limited number of people to PERMANENTLY settle in America.
3. Incentivise AMERICANS to do the jobs “no American will do” by cutting off government transfer payments and subsidies to farmers and businesses while reducing taxes and regulations so that those jobs become an attractive way to earn a living FOR Americans.
Sorry, the caffeine just kicked in.
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Borjas blamed immigration for lowered wages for the middle class.”Yes immigration hurts American workers” Politico magazine.No more immigration at all.
Charles Murray in Coming Apart detailed the effects on the White Middle class.He wrote an article titled Fishtown needs less Immigration in National Review.
It is easy to dismissively urge people to move to the jobs, to where?…Bangalore to work for half what you made before.But I forgot, people are nuts and bolts that fit together mechanically, MBA first year lesson
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How about from one state to another?
Americans think they have a Right to a job where THEY choose to live. That is arrogance.
In the early 90s, there was a recession, but Florida got hit by a hurricane and had a rebuilding boom.
Katrina “victims” sat on their asses collecting welfare instead of going back home to clean up.
The Dakota oil shale boom had fast-food jobs paying $20 an hour.
D what the illegal immigrants do, leave your family and share a room with a bunch of WORKERS until you can afford your own home or go back home.
Americans have an entitlement mentality. That is my point.
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Didn’t Nomads, the movie, win an award? I guess that is the answer, get yourself a tricked out plywood van and work at Amazon at Christmas time? No home, no family, married to a series of transient jobs “employment is my home”
What happened to Henry Ford’s ‘virtuous circle’?
The more the Gini coefficient rises, the harder it is to maintain the fiction that we in the USA “are all in this together”
USA …Strip Mall of Opportunity…but don’t stay in one place for long.
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We were NEVER “… all in this together”. Pretty much everything we “know” is a “myth”.
The deeper you dig, the more you find out that what you know is at best a general indication of reality.
I bet you thought everyone was in abject poverty during the Great Depression. Rough times yes, but a LOT of “winners” too.
And everyone does NOT die in refugee camps.
“The Way We Never Were”
Book by Stephanie Coontz
Bottom line: We really don’t know anything. We are just projecting our perception onto other people and other eras.
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We were never all in this together however at least we were not mandated by Procrustes(otherwise known as the USGov) to divide ourselves into squabbling ethnicities to grab our piece of the pie. The Census and SBA at 13 CFR 103.124 tell us by thier actions… “Diversity is our greatest weakness”
‘Label yourself different and get more.’
“§ 124.103 Who is socially disadvantaged?(a) General. Socially disadvantaged individuals are those who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias within American society because of their identities as members of groups and without regard to their individual qualities. The social disadvantage must stem from circumstances beyond their control.(b) Members of designated groups. (1) There is a rebuttable presumption that the following individuals are socially disadvantaged: Black Americans; Hispanic Americans; Native Americans (Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, or enrolled members of a Federally or State recognized Indian Tribe); Asian Pacific Americans (persons with origins from Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Vietnam, Korea, The Philippines, U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Republic of Palau), Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Samoa, Macao, Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, or Nauru); Subcontinent Asian Americans (persons with origins from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives Islands or Nepal); and members of other groups designated from time to time by SBA according to procedures set forth at paragraph (d) of this section. Being born in a country does not, by itself, suffice to make the birth country an individual’s country of origin for purposes of being included within a designated group. ”
We encourage ethnic division and wonder why people are skeptical and suspicious?
Add to that the rising statistic that our national Gini coefficient, measuring inequality, has risen to .45 while Western Europe and Japan still remain in the more equal mid 30s and Americans are dissatisfied, and feel the Elite has badly mismanaged things..
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The Gini coefficient is BS like most statistics. A way for some Ph.D. student to get a grant.
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You genuinely deserve to have your tongue cut out and your fingers chopped off if you’re just going to handwave away one of the most important fields in science and math like that.
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No, they don’t need to move to Bangalore. They can move to where workers are needed in America.
The reported unemployment rate is for ALL of America. Each locality has a different rate. Some higher, some lower.
And agriculture always needs workers. And Americans used to do those jobs. Yes, they brought in Braceros, but Americans were always part of the mix.
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“Income inequality is a meaningless number used to get grants and raise taxes.
Who cares how rich someone else is if you can pay for the necessities of life?”
Income inequality isn’t meaningless, it’s a term with a very transparent meaning. As for “who cares…”: because, among other reasons, wealth corresponds to political influence and social/cultural power. Massive inequality in wealth will generally correspond to inequality in power, especially in the age of neoliberalism. People tend to get upset when they feel powerless and that the game is rigged against them.
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Really?
I guess you sit around all day moping about how rich your boss and the owner of the company you work for are.
You must live a miserable existence.
Those peddling the income inequality BS call you being miserable a good thing. Mission accomplished for them.
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No, I don’t sit all day moping about how rich my boss and the owner of the company I work for are, nor is my existence miserable, nor does understanding the problems inherent in large wealth inequalities necessitate or imply the truth of such imputations. It seems that instead of addressing my arguments/claims you became angry and decided to make negative assertions about me instead. It seems, however, that such angry, hair-trigger outbursts are likely to be the fruits of a miserable mind.
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Whoa. Talk about a hair-trigger. Dial it back buddy.
I’m making observations about the people who tout the envy porn of income envy. They are all telling ME how I should feel about it.
Well I do feel bad that someone, IMO, is wasting money paying them and for studies researching that topic.
Name one society in all of history that was “equal”.
No, you may not be miserable, but income inequality is still meaningless and will NEVER be fixed.
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“Whoa. Talk about a hair-trigger. Dial it back buddy.”
Pot calling the kettle black, except the kettle isn’t even black.
In all seriousness, how old are you? 14? You don’t seem to be an adult, given how you only use ad-homs and bog-standard, first-day lolbertarianism arguments.
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You apparently don’t know the definition of ad hominem. “how old are you? 14?”
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“How Bad Has the US Economy Become for Regular People?”
I reject the premise of the question because most people don’t have a clue about their economic “status”. They just live their lives.
Because no economic entity is static, people move up and down through the economic quintiles, unless they are “told” that they are “bad” off by someone, they probably don’t even notice. I’m talking about 90% of the population. Because economic change, even a “Great Recession” (I use that because a lot of people are aware of that and lived through it.) is not as “rapid” or “dramatic” as the headlines make it out to be.
Even the “rapid” changes under Trump and the even faster changes under the “Biden Regime” are not noticeable to most people even with screaming headlines.
There are STILL, and always will be, 20% of the population in each of the economic quintiles. And movement through them will continue.
And 98% of Americans are still in the top 10% of worldwide income earners. Correct me if you have a better number. And I’m being pretty loose with that 2% since only 0.17% are homeless. I count government transfer payments as “income”. And I only include citizens. Add in the Underground Economy and we are at 99% plus of Americans being in the top 10%.
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Ignoring your bad arguments, did you take a wrong turn somewhere? You do know that the reason most of the world is poor is do to most of the world being brown and black, right? I’m assuming you don’t know that, though, given that hereditarians don’t ever make such a stupid argument as “the US is richer than most of the world so Americans have nothing to complain about.”
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So, what are two or more of my “bad arguments”?
I was unaware that skin tone determined one’s wealth.
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This entire blog is dedicating to showing how things like intelligence, personality, and criminality are extremely heritable and the real reason there’s such a gap between the races in these things is because of genetics. Again, how did you even get here? Did you not see all the articles talking about IQ and the race gaps in it?
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So, you are admitting to being a racist. That explains a lot. Based on your comments and your assertion that the darker the skin the less intelligent the person, yours must be pitch black.
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Ignoring your personal attacks and generic strawman, again I ask, how did you get here? I’m not trying to argue in favor of anything right now. I’m just asking some honest questions. How did you find this blog? How did you not know the author’s views on race?
Here’s all the articles on this blog – just from reading the titles, so there could be more (I haven’t read every article yet) – dealing with genetic gaps between races in intelligence, personality, criminality, and political views:
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2021/02/13/race-iq-and-brain-size/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2021/02/13/on-fagan-and-hollands-culture-fair-tests-of-intelligence/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2021/02/13/on-fagan-and-hollands-culture-fair-tests-of-intelligence/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2021/07/05/contemporary-racial-divergence-in-genotypic-iq/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2021/07/06/critiquing-charles-murray-on-changing-iq-gaps/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/09/30/on-proposed-environmental-causes-of-the-american-black-white-iq-gap/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/08/25/racial-ancestry-and-iq/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/08/23/population-differences-in-iq-related-genes/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/expert-surveys-on-race-and-iq/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/iqs-influence-on-individual-economic-and-educational-success/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2018/08/29/predicting-party-id-by-race/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/race-and-political-ideology/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2017/05/11/race-wealth-and-economic-freedom-in-north-and-south-america/
Could you just do me a favor and answer those two questions I asked? Someone with your beliefs probably wouldn’t be able to find this blog, and you certainly wouldn’t stick around. So, I’m really genuinely curious.
Also, because the author agrees with me on these things (or you could say I agree with them, if you’re so inclined), wouldn’t you say that they’re a “racist” and “so unintelligent their skin is pitch black.”
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You just don’t get it. It doesn’t matter how I found a public blog. I already told you it showed up in my feed. I didn’t stick around. YOU showed up and insulted and accused me.
Now you are pretending to want to know why I read something.
I also explained what I think of studies. They are at best a general indication of something, never replicated, and only accurate for calculations of the numbers gathered if the researcher didn’t ignore the results that didn’t support the conclusion they wanted..
Why would you paste a bunch of links that are in the blog? If I really care, is go find them.
If you go away, I will.
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You asked for evidence that this blog was in agreement with me on topics such as race and IQ, so I gave you the evidence. Do you have dementia or something? You keep forgetting what you’re saying.
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Ignoring the immature personal attacks and strawman, could you do me a favor? Scroll through the blog’s article list, and then answer me the next questions. How did you find this article? How were you not aware that the author of this blog agrees with me on the race and IQ thing when roughly have their articles directly discuss it? Did you just not bother to look at their other articles?
I’m not trying to debate you. I’m just really, genuinely curious about how you ended up on this blog when you’re very clearly not the kind of person who would even get near it, given its content.
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No clue how I ended up here. Probably just turned up in my WordPress feed.
Immature? “no u”?
C’mon dude, you are making this way too easy. Do you even bother to read you OWN comments?
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WordPress feed sounds like a good enough explanation to me. Didn’t know it did that, as I check everything manually.
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Is your screen name “Someone” or is that the default instead of “Anonymous”?
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So, just because “this blog is xyz” I can’t offer a differing opinion based on my decades of experience and knowledge?
You may wish to be a sycophant in an echo chamber, but I prefer to draw my own conclusions.
Of course, if you are saying this blog is racist, please confirm that. That way I can decide if I should report it to WordPress. I’m guessing they some policy against promoting racism.
I’m all for free speech, but there are limits.
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The point in me pointing out what the blog is about was to show how much it contrasts people like you. I never said that you couldn’t offer “a differing opinion based on my decades of experience and knowledge.” I said, or at least implied, that people with your opinions don’t really get near blogs like this, so I was surprised to find you here. Here are two articles dealing with race and IQ on this blog:
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/08/25/racial-ancestry-and-iq/
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/expert-surveys-on-race-and-iq/
One of them goes into how the experts are in more agreement with this blog than with you, in case you thought of pulling the, “muh academic consensus” card. And, here’s an article from this blog demonstrating, empirically, that “decades of experience” is not evidence:
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/05/31/lived-experience-is-not-evidence/
Feel free to report the blog for “racism.” It won’t work. WordPress allows all non-violent speech, and has actually come under fire because of that.
Also, it’s again surprising to someone so gung-ho about libertarianism and “freedom” to jump at the idea of reporting someone for “racism” and say, “I’m all for free speech, but there are limits.” What are your thoughts on the 1st Amendment? Also, for someone who makes themselves out as if they were opposed to “echo chambers,” you’re all too happy to shut down differing opinion.
Finally, you claim to have all this “knowledge” about how the racial gaps are entirely environmentally-caused. Mind giving some citations, then? Surely, someone who claims to have “decades of experience and knowledge” would have some citations on-hand for this, right? Or, could it be that you actually don’t have any knowledge on race and IQ and are just talking out of your ass?
As for my evidence, the articles provided in this comment, and the rest of the articles on this blog, do a far better job explaining it than I can.
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I’m a libertarian, not an anarchist.
Libertarianism promotes the rights and freedoms of people.
Racists seek to limit both.
Therefore, speech when it reduces rights and freedoms should not be free.
Also, when someone violates the rights and freedoms of another they need to suffer consequences.
You’ve got a lot to learn. I just don’t think you are ready to learn.
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BTW – in the thirst sentence, I should have used Democrats instead of Racists, since limiting the right and freedoms of people is what they seek to do.
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Making general claims about vast swaths of people without evidence is not a good way of convincing anybody. Saying, “You’ve got a lot to learn. I just don’t think you are ready to learn,” is not only a bad way of convincing anybody, I can say the exact same about you and nothing will have been accomplished. And I will. You have a lot to learn, but I just don’t think you are able to learn.
You want to know what I think? I think people like you, who make all these impossible claims about equality without evidence, should be ignored forever. Libertarianism, frankly, is already a very marginal opinion only supported by internet-addicted losers and corrupt politicians, if data from polling of the general populace is to be trusted (and it is, because it has some very large sample sizes). So, there isn’t even a point to talk with you people or take you seriously; there’s certainly not a point when you’re so dementia-addled that you can’t even address what your opponent is saying or provide evidence for your beliefs beyond, “muh lived experience.”
You’re actually more of an authoritarian than I am. Your views have been far more harmful to the entirety of humanity, but I don’t want to “punish” you or anything self-righteous like that. My solution is simply that you people should just be ignored.
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I think you should stop bothering me.
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Libertardianism was created by supremacist Jews for Jewish interests. Your hypocrisy is discoverd when one understands that almost all Libertardians moan about US Inc (chartered as a self-funding quasi public-private corporation) and their overreach into private affairs when, in fact, all Libertardians actually steal from thsoe who contracted with US Inc. to acquire entitlements. Hence, if you want to NOT be a hypocrite, revoke all tacit contracts with US Inc. Get rid of your bank account, stop using Federal Reserve notes, stop paying your taxes (which is voluntary; if you have relinquished all tacit contracts), if you are not doing commercial bussiness on public roads and are not usign Fed notes, then I’ll stop making fun of you… until then, you’re a lazy slob who probably has never homesteaded or sowed a seed in his life.
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The point in me pointing out what the blog is about was to show how much it contrasts people like you. I never said that you couldn’t offer “a differing opinion based on my decades of experience and knowledge.” I said, or at least implied, that people with your opinions don’t really get near blogs like this, so I was surprised to find you here.
The articles on race and IQ are all on this blog. You can literally just click the name at the top and find them all waiting for you. I can’t post any links in this comment because my comments don’t get posted if I do.
Feel free to report the blog for “racism.” It won’t work, and you might actually get suspended or striked for it. WordPress allows all speech covered by the 1st Amendment.
Also, it’s again surprising to see someone so gung-ho about libertarianism and “freedom” to jump at the idea of reporting someone for “racism” and say, “I’m all for free speech, but there are limits.” What are your thoughts on the 1st Amendment? Also, for someone who makes themselves out as if they were opposed to “echo chambers,” again, you’re all too happy to shut down differing opinions when it touches a sacred cow.
Finally, you claim to have all this “knowledge” about how the racial gaps are entirely environmentally-caused. Mind giving some citations, then? Surely, someone who claims to have “decades of experience and knowledge” would have some citations on-hand for this, right? Or, could it be that you actually don’t have any knowledge on race and IQ?
If you want any evidence for the link between race and IQ, among other things, I encourage you to read other articles by the author. He does a far better job than I can, it wastes less time.
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1. WordPress does not allow free speech. I’m aware of several blogs that were forced off.
2. No clue where you get the environmentally caused thing. My point is that from my knowledge and experience, virtually all studies are bullshit designed to support whatever narrative the person paying for them wants to be pushed at the moment.
3. There is no link between race and IQ for the simple reason that there is one human race that has freely interbred since the beginning. And two, IQ is a made-up measure. Finally, any sample size is so infinitesimal and limited compared to the entire population that it can’t possibly include subjects representative of the whole.
See, when you stop asking how old I am you get answers.
I’m curious about many things and that’s why I find a broad range of articles in my feed.
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Even if you reject most studies as biased, you must believe that there is some way to acquire knowledge of the world from data. You say that you’re curious about many things, so you must believe that knowledge is possible. You are making claims and arguments to other people, so you must believe that they have some way to judge those claims and arguments.
The human race hasn’t “interbred freely since the beginning”. Native Australians weren’t breeding with Native Americans, for example. Those populations were separate for at least 50,000 years. Even with no geographic barrier, genetic differences can persist between populations due to selection.
Visible traits differ by geography, which is how we can intuitively recognize race. You can tell if someone’s ancestors were from East Asia or West Africa by looking at them. Chinese and Nigerians look different. Racial categories are somewhat arbitrary, but they reflect real differences of genes and ancestry, and racial categories have different average mental traits, such as IQ, and behaviors, such as crime rates. People disagree about the reasons for those differences, but the differences are well-established.
A sample doesn’t have to be large relative to the population to give a good estimate. That’s a key principle of statistics and of science in general. Otherwise, we’d be unable to make any general claims. I couldn’t define the law of gravity until I had measured the trajectories of every planet, star and dust particle in the cosmos, for example. Also, we have stats that include huge populations, such as homicide stats by race for the US.
Yes, IQ is a made-up measure, like all measures, but it correlates with other made-up measures, so there must be underlying causal relationships.
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Actually, humans have interbred from the beginning. Just read about the regular surprises they uncover weekly.
And of course I can’t find the article I opened because I knew someone would make such a comment.
Did I say Australians and Americans? No
Did I say we can gain knowledge? No
I said that the statistics are bullshit and gathered for the purpose of being paid to create the bullshit.
Did you know that GDP is revised for over 10 years from the period?
Are any of those studies rigorously tested and repeated? No.
Not too long ago some organization decided to test a bunch of studies by exactly repeating them. The new results weren’t even close to the originals.
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Why is it that you can’t post evidence for these claims you’re making? Who established these supposed standards you’re referring to? How do you know these standards are accepted as scientific and as the consensus? What stops these standards for disqualifying other things? How is your “lived experience” more statistically meaningful than the lived experience of the 100s of thousands of people surveyed, studied, and analyzed in all the studies you’re trying to write off? What evidence do you have that these studies fail to replicate?
If you’re unable to post any citations, you’re a fraud. We can debate on these things, but you have to actually be willing to consider the evidence I provide. And if you think I have no legitimacy, well buddy, that can go both ways. I’m not going to waste my time talking to some sub-80IQ boomer on these day-1 lolbertarianism non-arguments. Again, if you do not give any citations (and your citations can’t just be some dumb news articles, they have to be raw data sets or scientific journals), I will not consider what you have to say and you will have shown to everyone else you have no actual basis for your knowledge.
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I’m very skeptical about the graph that shows spending on necessities as a percentage of income, from Pinker. What exactly is included in that? What is defined as “income” and what is defined as “necessity”? E.g. is transportation a necessity? Is income pre-tax or post-tax?
Compare to: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
I don’t think there’s any easy way to define “necessity”. E.g. you might need a car to get to work, but you don’t need a fancy one. Likewise for every category of expenditure. So….the idea you can chart this seems bogus.
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And even if there was a definition for “necessity” they would just change it so they can do another study with Other People’s Money.
Evidence the “inflation” numbers. They’ve changed so that it looks like today’s inflation is lower than yesterday’s.
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Do all of these studies you cited adjust for inflation? It’d be interesting if you did a similar analysis but based on race. This may give some insight regarding the populist sentiment that is being observed in the US as most of it appears to be pushed by White Americans. I think a lot of the populism is being fueled by the cultural shift occurring due to demographics and policies being pushed (like CRT) which, this populism, is being presented by the GOP establishment as being based on economics to try and control that sentiment before it morphs into something.
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And the Democrats are pushing something else and the Leftist yet something else. Plenty of blame to go around and never a SOLUTION to anything.
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I think populism is more a result of things of an immaterial nature – identity crises, social cohesion, etc. People consume more now than they did in the past, but they live in a kind of social austerity compared to that era. Working 8 hours a week for X dollars with the psychological stability a healthy and cohesive state offers is probably better overall than working 8 hours a week for X+i dollars a week without said benefits.
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A lot of the national populist talking points (Im thinking Ryan Girdusky, Pedro Gonzalez, Rod Dreher, The American Conservative in general) links wokeness as a feature, not of a bug of neo-liberalism (also a lot of the anti-woke left say this). This is a important to keep in mind since it links cultural problems (rise in gender ideology, replacement level immigration, extreme anti-whiteness, decline in traditional values) to economy.
This is basically the opposite rhetoric from what you heard from anti-capitalist left a while ago, fascism and authoritarianism as being intrinsically linked to neo-liberalism and capitalism.
[speculative]
I think it could be that (1) data points get linked, like currently Oreo and Cartoon Network promoting trans-visibility day and anti-racism, (historically the data points the anti-capitalist left saw was the opposite, Pinochet being propped up by neoliberalism, Mises being a economic advisor for Fascist regimes) (2) they
look for a socially / perceived morally acceptable cause that could be behind this problem and find economics. Cultural issues conjure up economic issues.
we shouldn’t forget overton window being a major factor, just as how many mainstream newspapers are blaming “COVID-19” for the rise in crime after the George Floyd Protests. Certain alternative ideas on why cultural liberalism is on the rise like Kevin Macdonald’s theory or Michael Woodley’s theory will brand you though-crimes like “anti-semite” or “eugenicist”, probably more compelling alternatives get little traction in the media.
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Hey Sean, I’m a fan of your work and I want to donate to you. Do you have a Patreon account?
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The claim that I’ve heard isn’t that inflation adjusted incomes have stagnated since the ’70s but that income and productivity of labor have diverged since that decade. That indeed is the case. See: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
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It should also be mentioned that measures of inflation are subject to ideological bias in order to make it seem like working people are “better off” than they really are. See: https://thegreatrecession.info/blog/us-inflation-rate-fraud/
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Pingback: How Bad Has the US Economy Become for Regular People? (1970 – 2020) – Attack the System
Reblogged this on Muunyayo .
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Your urban institute 2019 source says this
“Financial aid has become more generous and net prices have not risen as fast as published prices, [[[[but “working your way through college” is not the viable option it once was.“]]]]
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The highlight of this I think was you taking Walmart, a homeless man, and finding out the average income between them and calling that ‘middle class income’
Did you make it past the first picture in (Rose, 2018)?
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Pingback: Best Political Content Creators – Unraveler
Tbh, I don’t really see all this data (which seems robust enough) as incompatible with the idea that the US economy has gotten worse for regular people. I’m not going to try explaining it and I’m sorry for it, but I don’t think it’s my place to try and make a critique or whatever. You do great work, certainly greater work than me; so, I don’t feel it’s my place to try and assert my opinions here when in disagreement.
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