What is going on with the economy?

[toasty7718]

Seriously, how did the economy get this bad? My generation (gen Z) sends out applications to 100s of jobs and we still struggle to get a single job interview even with the right credentials. I just have to accept at this point that most of us are never going to be able to buy a house or even start a family when we're living paycheck to paycheck due to a system that is rotten down to its core. 

 

The level of greed and corruption present in governance, big-tech, and AI firms right now is unprecedented in the history of this country. Clinton had to resign for lying to congress, and almost 30 years later our current president commits crimes on a daily basis. 

 

My YouTube algorithm is flooded with doomerism content at this point because of how pessimistic I am about the future, so maybe this is just skewed.

 

How did we let this system get this rotten?

[Breakingthewall]

I'd say that before long, many Westerns will consider the least miserable option to leave the cities to farm, living on little money, in a stable, let's say low profile but dignified way. It sounds a bit boring, but the other option is misery. The other option would be big money, business. But living in the cities being low profile is going to be more shitty every year 

[Apparition of Jack]

The current economy still runs under the assumptions the boomers had, which is a basic high school qualification (and/or college degree or trade certificate) was all that you needed to get a good-paying job, which was enough to buy a proper house, a car or two, and yearly vacations without too much stress.

The problem is things have changed drastically since then. Housing has in some areas increased by over ten times in price, and inflation means even things like rent, groceries etc take more out of someone’s paycheck than they did in the past.

Someone working a basic IT job on let’s say $65,000 a year is never going to be able to afford a house if the median house price is $800,000+, let alone finance a car, clothing, bills, etc without some serious financial stress. Not to mention, the consumer culture has changed dramatically too - things like the rise of the subscription model means that people are easily paying over $100 a month for entertainment, when before a movie ticket would genuinely cost like $5 and things like TV, music, etc werent all paywalled behind $20+ subscription fees. (Of course, it’s possible to avoid paying for these things with some discipline, but that requires more conscious decision making, when often people are simply too tired after work to manage all their subscriptions responsibly and just want to watch the latest Netflix drama or whatever. Not to mention that so much of online consumption is based off predatory practices like addictive mobile game purchases or loot boxes for video games, making it easier than ever to drop $50 for something online that you’ll never really use afterwards.)

Basicallt, I think we need to rethink our economy entirely. We should support policies that give renters more rights (considering how much more common it is to rent these days,) invest in large public housing projects, open up land for new sustainable housing developments, consider some sort of UBI, pass universal health legislation so people aren’t struggling under crippling debt, etc. The problem is too many unelected interests have too much financial interest in keeping things the way they are (landlords, private equity firms buying up new housing, health insurance companies charging ridiculous prices for basic care, etc.) so the political will is slow and resistant to change. I’m seeing some positive trends to change this though, such as the rise of AOC/Mamadani, but for now we’re still deep in the thick of it.

I guess for now just keep being as financially responsible as possible and pushing for more conscious change in government to create a more equitable economy in the future.

[enchanted]

14 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

Seriously, how did the economy get this bad? My generation (gen Z) sends out applications to 100s of jobs and we still struggle to get a single job interview even with the right credentials. I just have to accept at this point that most of us are never going to be able to buy a house or even start a family when we're living paycheck to paycheck due to a system that is rotten down to its core. 

 

The level of greed and corruption present in governance, big-tech, and AI firms right now is unprecedented in the history of this country. Clinton had to resign for lying to congress, and almost 30 years later our current president commits crimes on a daily basis. 

 

My YouTube algorithm is flooded with doomerism content at this point because of how pessimistic I am about the future, so maybe this is just skewed.

 

How did we let this system get this rotten?

Yes this the situation that young people are facing throughout the western world. 

A few reasons are: decades of outsourcing jobs, wealth concentration by the wealthy, and 3rd world population booms that compete for resources with wealthier countries.

Also our genius parents and grandparents decided to fund everything on credit and live well beyond their means for the future generations to pay the debt. We are the future generation that is being stuck with the bill. 

Interestingly, Europe colonized/owned the world and then it cannibalized itself with two unnecessary world wars that forced them to decolonize.  Arguably It's been a slow decline since then (despite the few years of post war boom). 

[DocWatts]

To add to what's already been said, the metrics that have traditionally been used to gauge how well 'the economy' is doing - the stock market, unemployment, inflation - have become increasingly decoupled from the well-being of the bottom 80% of the country.

While on paper the United States had a world-class economy under Biden, the numbers masked a cost of living crisis that has made owning a home or starting a family an impossible dream for at least half the country.

'Unemployment' may be something like 4%, but a huge portion of those jobs don't pay enough to meet a person's basic needs, let alone provide a firm foundation to build a prosperous life from.

Trump cynically used this crisis to lie and con his way into power, having no intention whatsoever of addressing these kitchen table issues. On the contrary, the last 9 months have been a process of intentionally adding jet fuel to this dumpster fire.

40 million Americans are about to find themselves going hungry due to an abrupt disruption of nutritional subsidies, thanks to Trump's government shutdown.

Add to that that the US economy is being artificially propped up by a speculative AI bubble, which is poised to pop in the coming years. No one yet knows what the fallout from this will look like, but a second version of the 2008 Financial Crisis and Great Recession isn't an unreasonable starting point.

Edited Tuesday at 04:29 PM by DocWatts

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

It is just a socio-economic blackpill that most people in society individually do not provide very much of what society considers to be valuable to it at a particuliar time (such that they would be irreplacable), or are just not lucky enough, so whenever there is a crisis in capitalism - which is inevitable because no system is perfect and humans are neither - it is the majority that is most affected. Perhaps technological progress will change this, perhaps not. It is the job of a state to remedy this as much as possible, but the state can only do so much

[Basman]

The environment has been optimized to suit business needs, with an oversupply of workers, inflated real estate value, among other. Credentialism is largely just coping with a highly unequal relation between workers and employers relative to leverage over available jobs. Add to that we simply need less workers now than in the past due to technology, but our system is built on everyone getting payed for their contributions. Then you can wonder who is going to keep a consumerist economy going if people don't have a job?

Economic exclusions makes the rich richer, but alienates trust in institutions among the rest.

[toasty7718]

What do you see happening by the year 2030, economy wise? will the AI bubble have popped by then? what do you see as possible ramifications for the AI bubble popping?

[zazen]

On 18/03/2025 at 9:07 AM, zazen said:

 

The real economy runs on people and productivity, but the system we’ve got runs on printing and predation. The first two build civilisations and the real economy, last two grow financialized empires on the bones of the working class.

The economy is supposed to be made of three P’s - people, productivity, and printing. But only the first two are real. The third is just the duct tape holding together a broken economy. Printing exists because growth doesn’t. But even when growth does happen, it doesn’t even go where it should - due to financialization, thus we have a divergence of Main Street (real economy) and Wall Street (financialized economy).

Printing was originally meant to compensate for a lack of people or productivity. If a country had a shrinking workforce or stagnating innovation, monetary expansion could help bridge the gap temporarily by lowering borrowing costs, encouraging investment, and keeping the system running. But when the economy became financialized, printing took on a new role. Instead of being used to fuel real expansion, it became a siphoning mechanism - a way to extract economic gains away from the people actually producing them and toward those who control capital.

Even when productivity grows, wages stay stagnant. When workers produce more due to innovations and efficiencies, their share of the economy shrinks. Why? Because financialization changed the way growth is distributed. Instead of rewarding workers with higher wages, corporations use productivity gains to increase profits - and those profits don’t get reinvested in the people who created them. They get funneled into stock buybacks, leveraged asset acquisitions, and financial engineering schemes that boost corporate valuations without actually producing anything new.

Printing fuels that process. It doesn’t compensate workers but asset holders. When liquidity is injected, it doesn’t flow into wages or real economic growth but into financial markets. It inflates stock prices, real estate, and corporate assets, making the wealthy wealthier while doing nothing for the real economy. This is why there is a correlation of asset prices and stocks with the printing of money - fed intervention.

MAGA and libertarians who believe de-regulation = growth, are partially right. Deregulation can unleash growth, but that growth isn’t distributed in a financialized economy. Deregulation allowed corporations to stop reinvesting in wages and start pumping up stock values instead. Buybacks, asset inflation, and debt leveraged acquisitions is the new growth model.

This is why wages have stagnated while the economy has “expanded.” It’s not that growth isn’t happening but that all the benefits are getting funneled upward. 

And this is why the stock market will never fully collapse. It can dip and crash but it can’t be allowed to die. The system isn’t built on real economic activity anymore but on debt, collateralized against assets that must always go up. If asset prices fall too much, the credit markets seize up, and that’s game over. The financial system is a ponzi scheme in a bulletproof vest - its built to take a hit, but never to hit the ground.

They can let stocks take a hit and let small holders take losses, while the big players scoop up assets on the cheap. But once asset prices get affected too much and credit markets freeze, the Fed will step in with liquidity to avoid systemic collapse.

Structural changes and financialization are distorting our economies which is also distorting our politics - feedback loop into each other.

We will need a cultural revolution before we can have a political revolution that can handle all the changes coming our way that make our old models obsolete for the new world which de-values our labour (physical plane - automation), our intelligence (mental plane - AI, quantum computing) and our energy (energetic plane - fusion, nuclear etc).

 With the triad of labour, intelligence and energy / matter - once all three become abundant, scarcity economics as we know it dies. The issue is, just like with financialization - abundance is accrued to oligarchic elites. Which is why we’ll need a cultural-political revolution that subordinates capital to the state - so that it can serve the public rather than the few. Otherwise we’re in for techno feudalism.  In a structural sense the West has maintained this dynamic through its “evolution”.

Every major technological leap (railroads, oil, internet, AI) has been captured by private oligarchies first, then regulated too late. The logic is: monopolize, financialize, securitize, and drip the benefits down.

China’s model with all its faults, is built differently. It treats breakthroughs as national assets, integrated into long term social planning. When China gains efficiency - it tends to invest it downward into infrastructure, housing, education, or production capacity. In the West, efficiency gains get hoovered up to the top to shareholders and speculative capital.

Edited yesterday at 08:46 AM by zazen