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wintermutehal ,

If somebody could politely explain to me, why is the economy doing well but my paycheck provides less and less each month? I feel like these numbers are divorced from my everyday experiences. Does the inflation of goods not factor in?

echo64 ,

The economy booming means that shareholders make big returns. It doesn’t have any connection to workers. Worker benefits are rarely connected to how well economies or companies are doing. It doesn’t really relate to inflation. It’s just a measure of how well businesses are doing. They are doing well thanks to taking more out of your monthly.

wintermutehal ,

This is exactly along the lines of what I thought. It’s just so strange to me to have people cheer a good economy when it can mean so little for your average peon.

halcyoncmdr ,
@halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world avatar

That’s because they’ve been conditioned to believe that the economy as a whole doing good somehow means something for the average person.

btaf45 OP ,

It doesn’t have any connection to workers.

Someone didn't read the article.

[The US economy added a whopping 353,000 jobs last month]

nix ,
@nix@merv.news avatar

Jobs that dont pay enough to afford a house, rent, healthcare or basic living standards. Also its probably a lot of people who got hired for a second or third job

echo64 ,

Workers already have a job.

Aleric ,

Bingo. The company I work for just announced their 2023 results: successful but not as wildly successful as they’d hoped. Accordingly, stockholders get larger dividends than ever before while employees get layoffs, rolling furloughs, and pay cuts.

angelsomething ,

This so called “economy” loosely translates to like, 12 or 15 companies siphoning away the financial benefits produced by the working class, hence the discrepancy between it doing well and the low wages people have to survive with.

wintermutehal ,

Thank you for responding! This was my view too, just needed a little reassurance that this measure means very little to your average person.

vexikron , (edited )

There are a couple things going on.

Usually in reports like this there are mentions of job growth (ie new recorded hiring) unemployment going down and average income levels rising.

Ok so yes, jobs are created, wonderful.

But lots of things arent recorded as job losses.

Generally speaking, if you dont file for unemployment, or dont qualify, but still lost a job, you dont show up without doing far, far more exhaustive research than these headline numbers illustrate.

And any prole has either had this happen to themselves or someone they know by this point, at least amongst people I know.

Or, if you are out of the workforce due to an injury, illness and/or esrly retirement, that usually doesnt show up as a job loss, but does show up as ‘not in the workforce’.

And, if youre not in the workforce, you are not considered unemployed, as you are not in the pool if possibly employable workers.

So, wonderful, that not in work force number is still high compared to historical norms, as a proportion of the whole population. Its going up.

Income. This one is easy.

Thats usually always a headline of average income.

Cool. Averages dont mean dick in an economy where the vast number of people earn little, and only a few earn a lot. So what did we learn in basic statstics hopefully?

5 5 5 5 5 has an average of 5

1 1 1 2 20 /also/ has an average of 5.

Further compounding things, Americans are now drowning in personal debt, so much so that even quite a lot of people who /appear/ to be well off actually have as much net worth as many who appear not well off.

The maths and data on that is /way/ more complicated, but the rough breakdown is:

1/4 of Americans have significantly negative net worth, ie -5000 or worse.

1/4 of Americans have roughly 0 net worth.

1/4 of Americans have roughly positive net worth, ie up to 10k.

Then the higher you go from there its an exponential scale of less and less people having more and more money.

Ending up with something like the richest 1% of Americans have more net worth / wealth than the bottom 60%.

The confusing part is that for incomes below basically about a quarter mil a year, there is again actually significsntly wide variance in the relationship of yearly income to net worth.

Many people of modest means are actually in financially better positions than many people who would basically be their boss, or bosses boss…

But can you imagine that the richer ones either hide this and lie about it, or act like its fine and not a problem for them, but it /is/ a problem for those of lower income, and /they/ are irresponsible and need personal austerity finances, while they (the higher incomed folks) dont?

So anyway, there ya go, theres /some/ explanation of whats going on from someone with a bachelors in econ, specialty in econometrics and environmental econ, and another bachelors in poli sci.

For me to actually lay all this out with proper cited studies and data sets would basically be a phd thesis, im tired, go away.

Basically the title of this thesis would be ‘How the American Economy Enforced And Solidified An Economic Caste System Structure Following the 08 Financial Crisis’ and would focus heavily on how income mobility has been extremely reduced for large segments of society in the past 15 years.

Hilariously I cant afford to pay for a PHD, so whats the fucking point rofl.

EDIT;

2 other major factors: Rent and Healthcare.

Both of those are absolute shit shows right now, and vaaaaastly take more proportional income from a poorer person than a richer one.

Remember when most people owned homes by their 30s?

Haha, yeah, good one, me neither.

EDIT 2: Alternative spicy title for the PHD Thesis would be:

“An aggregate, ends justify the means, moral argument for the justness and validity of,

at best,

letting all the baby boomers die scared and alone in old folks homes with poorly trained and paid staff who will abuse them until they die painful, terrifying, lonely deaths,

or, at worst,

why we should actually just start killing /enough/ of them that it scares the rest of them into selling their barely-not-foreclosed-on second homes they are renting out based not on actual market rates but on the prices dictated by their mortgage payments… why we should kill enough of them that they sell these properties for about 1/4 of what they think they are worth.”

Probably that one wouldnt fly. Probably.

SuiXi3D ,
@SuiXi3D@kbin.social avatar

Always replace ‘The Economy’ with ‘Rich People’s Yacht Money’ and you’ve got your answer.

yogthos ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

Marx explained this very phenomenon in Das Kapital. Creating jobs is a meaningless metric when employers aren’t required to pay people a living wage. Minimum wage in US is nowhere close to being livable at this point, and what happens is that people are simply having to get multiple full time jobs to pay their bills. In fact, 37% of the population is now working two full time jobs now.

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/04a8a5ad-420c-4191-b12b-10cb9a791efd.jpeg

protist ,

Low unemployment and rising wages means it’s a good time to find a new job that pays more. The absolute best time to get more money is to get a new job. Staying in the same job for a long time almost always means your wages will stagnate, most companies don’t reward loyalty, they abuse it

rockSlayer ,

*in nonunion workplaces.

Organize a union now for more job and life stability in the future.

protist ,

You are correct!

cyborganism ,

It’s not YOUR economy. It’s the BUSINESS economy.

Syo ,
@Syo@kbin.social avatar

For the average Joe, economy doing well means the job market is healthy, robust in the aggregate. All this does is give you the leverage to renegotiate salary/benefits or change jobs.

Regardless how much money your boss makes, even if he makes tenfold from last year, he's not going to voluntarily increase your pay beyond annual adjustments.

At the end, you need to take the initiative to change your income.

btaf45 OP ,

Does the inflation of goods not factor in?

[...thanks to slowing inflation]

[This job market keeps rewriting the history books.

The latest superlative: The unemployment rate has now stayed safely below 4% for two full years. The last time the unemployment rate was this low for this long, Richard Nixon was in the White House.]

Jknaraa ,

Because the advent of computers allows for all kinds of creative new ways to massage numbers to “prove” something to people, even when it flies in the face of what is obviously happening in the real world.

Bakkoda ,
@Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works avatar

That’s exactly why. All that money you aren’t making is what’s fueling the economy for investors and stockholders. Can’t do millions of dollars of stock buybacks with your own money.

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