rbasaria":143f9xit said:
...got curious and started looking at salaries in the 80s. Average US salary was something around 12k a year...and that was the equivalent of about 40k today....but you could do A LOT more with 12k in the 80s than you can with 40k today...
You are correct. Inflation may explain the difference in absolute dollar price from decade to decade but what most people notice in their daily lives is buying power and/or standard of living which has decreased substantially really since at least the 1950's I would say. Someone with some formal education in economics might be able to explain this more clearly with more accurate language but you no doubt get the point if you go to the grocery store or buy basic necessities of daily life. I say 1950s because this was our little party we threw for ourselves after WWII in the U.S. This was a time when someone with a high school diploma and a decent sent of morals and work ethic could feed, cloth and house a family. Fast forward to 2013. If you are a small family with both parents who are both college educated and both working you "might" be able to do the same thing. Everyone else is falling behind. Of course, normal modern living includes a lot of "stuff" that wasn't around or wasn't necessary in the 1950's. Cell phone plan, cable TV, Air conditioning, car for every adult in the home...
We will no doubt see a relentless decline in living standard going forward. This is driven primarily by energy supplies. Petroleum being the primary energy resource of industrial economies is the lynch pin for economic growth. A $10/barrel the U.S. economy hums along very nicely. At $100/barrel it shits and dies. Since U.S. domestic production peaked in the 70's (remember the oil embargo, that was OPEC telling everyone who's in charge now) we have seen a shift in U.S. economic activities in response to this startling fact. From manufacturing and farming, to technology, to information, to the so called service economy (a shell game). Now OPEC (read Saudi Arabia) has peaked. Now global petroleum supplies are on the way down, not up, for the first time ever. So what to we do. Well, we tried making finance and banking the backbone of the economy, an economy based on economic activity for the sake of economic activity. Interesting scam. That didn't work out so well. The latest plans seems to be a combination of money printing and accounting fraud. Any bets on how that plays out? Ever hear of the Weimar republic?
The problems created by the unavoidable decline in energy supply going forward is compounded by several side effects of abundant energy supplies of the preceding 100 years, namely overpopulation and climate change. There is a lot of talk about the U.S. becoming energy independent on the heels of shale oil and fracking tight rock for natural gas. I could expound about how this isn't going to work but I'm tired of typing so suffice it to say its bullshit. If you'd like to learn why check out
http://kunstler.com/
http://peakoil.com/
http://www.peakoil.net/
to get you started.
Having said that, I do think that a lot of countries will become "energy independent" in the not distant future, just not in the way everyone has got in mind. That is to say at a much lower state of energy consumption (read economic activity) based on whatever happens to be a locally available to you. Of course, a lot of this can be mitigated or minimized by some changes now, such as reactivating small city and towns, relocalizing food production and manufacturing, and deglobalizing the economy. 10,000 mile supply chains for goods and materials don't work in a declining energy economy. The bugga boo is overpopulation. We need to not just decrease the human population growth rate, we have to reverse it into a negative growth rate. And how do you convince people to do that? how do you convince people to do anything when the problem is so pernicious. After all, today does't seem that different from yesterday and tomorrow might not be that different from today, but over the long haul the trend is obvious. Yet we can choose to act or nature will employee more blunt instruments.
So there, that's why a bolt on guitar costs $1,500.
