We Sure Have A Lot Of Complaints As The Most Pampered People In History
Workers at all income brackets are actually doing quite well overall.
No one can deny that we have problems in America in 2023. There are mass shootings, there is Russian disinformation, there are apparently spy balloons floating overhead. We should, of course, continue to do our best to address the many serious issues we face. One might consider our task to be to continually form a more perfect Union.
That being said, we live in what is unquestionably the most pampered era in human history. Yeah, I didn’t like wearing a mask during COVID-19 either, but it still beat fighting in the crusades or having a giant ground sloth use you like a beanbag chair, which are the sorts of things our ancestors had to worry about for almost the entirety of our 300,000-year history as a species.
Even in more recognizable times, we have it pretty good compared to those just a few generations prior. For instance, Los Angeles had approximately 373 homicides in calendar year 2022 — no small number, and surely a tragedy for each and every person affected. But if the Los Angeles homicide rate had been at the same point it was at during the mid-1800s, Los Angelinos would have inflicted upon one another more like 7,698 homicides last year. Throughout America, violent crime rates made gains on their very long-term downward trend last year (although property crime rates were up somewhat).
It’s good not to have something like a 1 in 500 shot of getting murdered every single year. It’s also good to have things like food and shoes.
Again, I’ll emphasize that we absolutely have too much wealth inequality and that is bad and we should do even more about it. But less well-off people in the U.S. are nonetheless doing better overall than they ever have been. From 2020 to late 2022, the net worth of the poorest 50% of Americans doubled to reach its highest level in history. In fact, even as the top 1% of households by income lost close to 16% of their overall wealth from the fourth quarter of 2021 through the third quarter of 2022, the lowest 20% of Americans by income increased their wealth over the same period by about 10%.
Just like it is good that you have a much lower chance of getting shot these days because you bumped into somebody’s horse or whatever, and it is good that you no longer need to worry about being smashed into jelly by Pleistocene megafauna, it is a good thing that lower earners today have more resources at their disposal than ever before.
Workers at all income brackets are actually doing quite well overall. Wages and benefits grew 5.1% on an annual basis in the final quarter of 2022 compared to a year prior, which was tied with the 2022 April-June figure as the strongest quarter ever since this data has been tracked. Unemployment matched a 53-year low. Inflation remains high — fueled at least in part by that high wage growth — although inflation has been steadily cooling in response to the Fed’s campaign of interest rate hikes.
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Despite obvious gains on metrics you’d expect to factor into it, when polled about their levels of satisfaction, a strong majority of Americans pretty consistently says the country is headed in the wrong direction. The whole right direction versus wrong direction thing is not defined at all well — we don’t know much about what people really mean with these responses.
Perhaps Americans just like to complain. Pretty good evidence of this is that it is the lowest 20% of Americans by income (who still, obviously, need to buy necessities) who have made big wealth gains in recent quarters, even as the wealth of those in much higher income brackets has suffered. More than half of six-figure earners have been whining about living paycheck to paycheck. Consider, though, that if people earning way less can get by and simultaneously build their wealth while higher earners can’t, maybe all that means is higher earners are buying too much shit that they don’t need (which, by the way, is pretty much the definition of what causes inflation).
Nevertheless, there are some signs of budding optimism. A strong majority of Americans now say that they think they will be better off financially a year from now.
I don’t necessarily know if we’re on the right track or the wrong track, or what that even means. I do know that perspective can help anyone get through the day, and if you zoom out a little, it’s pretty clear that we have it nice in the here and now. Even more granularly, the latest stats, for what they’re worth, paint a pretty rosy picture.
I know it’s fun to grouse. But we could probably do ourselves a favor by embracing some gratitude here and there too.
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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
