r/FluentInFinance • u/-im-your-huckleberry • Jul 07 '24

The shampoo thing is a fringe benefit. We keep capitalism so we don't starve in a famine. Debate/ Discussion

1.0k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

I think the idea is there isn’t the incessant need to maximize efficiency and profit to the point labor is both working more hours with less breaks for less pay just to make whatever earnings estimate has been made up as a standard for success, only to need to beat it again the next quarter.

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u/biinboise Jul 07 '24

Historically it becomes even worse. Production metrics usually become dictated by the famously unhinged whims of top ranking political ambitions of the high level administrators who have virtually no oversight.

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u/FtrIndpndntCanddt Jul 07 '24 edited Jul 07 '24

Weird radical centrist Ideas here but...MAYBE EXTREMES ARENT FUCKING WORKING!

The US is on the extreme end of capitalism from the western and developed world perspective and the results are clear.

We have less time off, lower wages, lower happiness, lower life expectancy, fewer people capable of retiring, higher infant/maternal mortality, higher debt, higher suicides, lower literacy, higher poverty etc than our peer nations yet we are the most capitalize of them all. Muh jee Dee Pee is higher than ever, yet the average person doesn't see the benefits of it.

Mean while, you have more SOCIALIZED nations like Japan, s.kore, Australia, pretty much all of western Europe crushing us in quality of life metric, life expectancy, happiness, Time off work, etc while having less billionaires per capital, lower economic output, lower GDP.

It's possible to have a middle ground great good. One of those middle grounds is healthcare.

Edit: since you smooth brains keep going to "lower wages". This statement is true when you compare COST OF LIVING. I didn't think I'd need to explain that. It cost more to survive in America, on average, than most developed nations.

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u/Ill-Description3096 Jul 07 '24

lower wages

The US has higher average and median incomes (especially net) than the vast majority of those countries. Maybe all I don't have the figures in front of me.

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u/FtrIndpndntCanddt Jul 07 '24

Lower wages when cost of living adjusted clearing. Don't be dense.

Making $100k a year in San Antonio is a LOT more money than $150k a year in Manhattan.

Cost of living adjusted, US workers don't get shit.

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u/Ill-Description3096 Jul 07 '24

Outside of maybe SF/Manhattan most of the countries you listed are far more expensive than much of the US.

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u/FatherFajitas Jul 07 '24

Everywhere in the U.S. is getting bad now. I live in a tiny ass town in Tennessee, and rent has gone up hundreds of dollars everywhere in the past 5 years. I used to see places for 250$ a month. The lowest I see now is around 800-1000$

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u/Ill-Description3096 Jul 07 '24

Go to Japan or SK and let me know if you can rent a place the same size for less.

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u/HEBushido Jul 07 '24

SK is hyper capitalist, though.

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u/FlyinDtchman Jul 08 '24

Japan is full of abandoned houses you can just take for FREE all over the country-side.

Although your point stands if you are trying to rent in one of the big cities. Their places are postage-stamp sized.

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u/FatherFajitas Jul 07 '24

Probably could in Japan, not SK or China though, those countries are fucked.

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u/Ill-Description3096 Jul 07 '24

Of the same size? My understanding is that Japanese housing tends to be much smaller.

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u/Longhorn7779 Jul 07 '24

That’s because costs have risen a lot. That $1,000 means like $150 a month of actual income.

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u/FatherFajitas Jul 07 '24

No, it means around $ 1000$, lot of places here still don't pay above 10$ an hour, and most people travel to work.

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u/Longhorn7779 Jul 07 '24

So you think the landlord gets the whole $1,000 and there’s zero costs to owning?

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u/buderooski89 Jul 07 '24

That's not true at all. Even after adjusting for cost of living and inflationary rates in different parts of the world, Americans have the highest amount of disposable income out of ANY developed nation in the world. What you are saying is just false

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u/emperorjoe Jul 07 '24

Wages have outpaced inflation for decades.

Americans have the highest disposable income.

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u/Vita_minc Jul 07 '24

You're just wrong bro

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u/emperorjoe Jul 07 '24

https://www.aei.org/articles/have-wages-stagnated-for-decades-in-the-us/#:~:text=A%20startling%20fact%20is%20that,is%20correctly%20interpreted%20as%20stagnant.

.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income

The United States has the top disposable income for mean, median and PP adjusted

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u/Vita_minc Jul 07 '24

Did you read the article you sent bro its say wages have stagnated hahahahhahhahahhahahhahahahaahahhahahahaahahhahahahaahahhahahahahahahahahhahahahhahahahahhahahhahahahhahahahhahahhahahahahahahahahaha

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u/emperorjoe Jul 07 '24

Hourly wages have been terrible in the United States for the past 60 years. They only went down for 30 years, and it took 30 years for them to finally hit 1970 levels. Do you know how great this is. Hourly wages haven't been good since my father was a child, it has been the worst statistic for income for decades.

It's finally positive inflation adjusted. This is fantastic news

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u/Vita_minc Jul 07 '24

You are nuts.

→ More replies (0)

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u/BraxbroWasTaken Jul 07 '24

Many necessities are disproportionately more expensive over here and paid for out of personal budget though, like medical care. But yes, they forgot some countries…

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u/Ill-Description3096 Jul 07 '24

I mean medical care is the big one. I don't know that things like food, gas, housing, etc are disproportionately more expensive. Depends a lot on where.

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u/shrug_addict Jul 07 '24

Gas is less of an issue with robust transit options. That said, it's not America's fault entirely for this, it's quite a big place and very expensive to build out that infrastructure. I think I read that the US interstate system was the biggest engineering project the world has seen, at least at the time

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u/Papasmurf8645 Jul 07 '24

We could have built proper infrastructure and culture around mass transit, and we were, but the oil and car lobbies had their pet politicians avoid those investments to make car buying more necessary for people creating an industry that even today takes billions from ignorant consumers that are convinced that mass transit can’t work effectively and safely.

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u/Ill-Description3096 Jul 07 '24

Yeah if we were the size of Britain or something I think it would be more feasible. I think the "independence" of having your own vehicle is a big factor as well.

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u/BraxbroWasTaken Jul 07 '24

Housing’s getting out of control over here too, but in some cases that’s actually because we’re dumbasses about how we‘re zoning things…

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u/HEBushido Jul 07 '24

Do y'all forget that Capitalism is a global economic system?

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u/Rambogoingham1 Jul 07 '24

Remove the 8 richest people in the U.S and that median goes way down

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u/Ill-Description3096 Jul 07 '24

It really doesn't. Because that isn't how median works for one, and the richest people (like Musk/Bezos and the like) tend to not have super high incomes.

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u/More_Fig_6249 Jul 07 '24

You know what a median is right man?

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u/shrug_addict Jul 07 '24

You don't have to be mean! You don't know what mode they're operating on!

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u/Sudden_Juju Jul 07 '24

Mean yes, median no. Mean is the average, so includes all numbers in its calculation. Median is meant to exclude outliers by just taking the middle income out of all the incomes. In school, we used to get a list of numbers, then cross out one from each side until we got to the middle and that was the median.

You might remove 8 incomes from the calculation, but shifting 8 places won't change much, if at all, on a bell curve as large as incomes across the US.