I had recent experience with flying because I went to Los Angeles for work a couple of times this year and unfortunately will make one more trip before 2024 is over. A common topic of discussion out there is how my younger coworkers in LA can't afford to buy houses in the metro area.
An engineer job in LA gets you what was a working class lifestyle in "Walker, Texas Ranger" days in that city. There is no chance for those engineers to buy a house in the LA metro area, plus it would be foolish to tie up $1M in a house that's worth $250,000 almost anywhere else in the US... not too many years ago, like in 2015 such a house would have been maybe $130,000 in my area.
One of the symptoms/reasons for the decline in quality of life is the value of the dollar plunged. It's halved since 1993. A $170,000 salary in 2024 money was about $80,000 in "Walker, Texas Ranger" time money, but I think the numeric comparison doesn't capture all that's gone awry over the years and doesn't show what's really causing the decline in quality of life and the increasing difficulty of maintaining a "middle class" level of consumption.
I think the failure of "life scripts" is how most people experience the system failing. A high school aged student in Los Angeles might receive the life script of "engineer in tech" as a viable path to an upper middle class lifestyle when they are growing up... but then the anecdotal evidence and life experience shows how the steps along that path really doesn't lead to the intended outcomes.
So what's really happening? I think it's actually quite simple. The economic system in the US produces X quantity of goods per year. In 1993 the US population what 258M by census estimates. Today it's 341M! For some period of time the economic system increased output at least at the rate of population growth, but I don't think that's the case anymore, also the number of high paying jobs hasn't kept pace. In tech, for example, the number of people employed has been flat going back to 2022. Salary growth has not kept pace with productivity either--it's been flat relative to productivity for a long time. Executives and shareholders snarfed up those productivity gains.
Then on top of that generalized theft, the system has gotten aggressively preachy about ideological insanity topics--basically global warmaids and the high value of gays and trannies.
Why participate in this shitty scam system? Middle and working class people finally realized that it makes no sense to play along anymore so they're not. Young people are especially disenfrachised--why would they enter the workforce on the bottom rung of the economic ladder in a shithole city like LA or NYC? They can't even afford rent for an apartment with the salary provided by a job obtained via six figure college debts.
The idea the political system will solve any of these problems is laughable. Every passing year I see more clearly how insane it is to expect some politician weirdos to solve any problems.
Anyway, what should a person do to avoid ending up as soylent green? One possible strategy is to look at your life script, especially if your young, and unfold all the assumptions that inform the narrative of the life script. One that's obviously failed is the "college degree=job and middle class income"... so everybody knows that now. It was modified to "work in the trades if you don't get a STEM degree", so I'd be skeptical about those assumptions too, because now, more and more people are going to work in the trades. The competition in STEM fields is global because India and China produce a huge number of STEM graduates and tech, in general is saturated.
In general, it's insufficient to blindly follow any life script and expect the intended outcome to occur, and it will be increasingly necessary to look ahead and take risks and experiment to invent novel paths or to find niche scenarios to exploit.
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