You don’t need to work at a FAANG to make really good money in tech. My wife has spent her career at various software companies, from regional type businesses to international companies, none of them huge but the salaries they pay were still outrageous compared to the normal world.
People with no direct reports but a good title making $200k+, directors and VPs making $300k+, senior VPs and executives $500k+ plus significant equity in RSUs or ownership in private companies whose only goal is to sell to VCs. Sales side can have a huge range obviously. She’s always been on the sales and marketing side but engineers also made bank at most or all of her stops.
When peole say tech I feel like they just automatically think of programmers but any tech company is going to gave a big staff of non technical workers and they’ll make good money too. They don’t just shovel it all to the coders and expect the other departments to make pennies.
But wrt to Commonwealth’s comment my experience is the complete opposite. I’m a millennial pretty much all of my friends and acquaintances are under 40. Most didn’t come from wealthy families. Majority are college grads but not all, all own a house with the exception of one who doesn’t care at all about it and would rather rent, work one job don’t have a bunch of side hustles, most have at least one kid. None are really in tech or finance, it’s a combo of blue collar (construction, manufacturing, trades) and white collar (sales, accounting, marketing, real estate, healthcare etc).
Man, that makes me feel pretty bad. Like everyone I know my age or younger who owns a home either their parents bought them their starter house outright or made the down payment or gave a huge assist on it, or subsidized them for several years to get them going.
But I’m talking about people I know well enough to know that about them, it’s not like any of them are advertising that. If I didn’t know better I’d just assume they did it themselves. Of course that also means the people I’m thinking of make up a small sample size.
And we all get a very biased sample one way or other. Almost everyone we know bought a house but that’s because the reason we know them is because they live in houses they bought near us. If we were renting an apartment would get to know a likely different group of people/cirumstances.
Biden doesn’t have to have a move available to not fuck up the messaging which is what this conversation has been about since the beginning.
The economy is pretty good if you’re one of the people benefitting from it. If you aren’t it’s really bad. The big problem with this economy isn’t that the economy is bad per se it’s that the outcomes it’s giving out are very unequal and that inequality is still growing… and we’re starting to reach the moderate dystopia level of misery for the bottom 50-60% and major dystopia for the <25%.
The end result is an economy no politician should brag about. It doesn’t matter that it’s growing, it doesn’t matter that some of us are doing well. It doesn’t matter that some of you are telling on yourselves by saying you don’t know anyone who is struggling. Yes that’s a result of the different social classes in America no longer having anything to do with each other and you being born into one of the higher ones.
No it doesn’t matter that the average home is larger than it was in the old days they literally stopped building homes that people making the median income could afford no later than than the great recession lol. The places where they’re building truly small homes those small homes still cost 300k+. The cost of living for the median family is extremely ugly right and they are going into debt to pay for it.
I swear this whole conversation is just me and CW pointing out over and over again that if your household makes 60-70k (which is ~median), has one child, and rents… you’re having a really bad time right now. That’s not a small segment of the population that’s tens of millions if not 100M+ people.
The entire problem is inequality. When inequality reaches a certain point you start shrinking the real lifestyles of the side that’s getting screwed in a growing economy and we’ve been there pretty much my whole working life. 2000-present might get written up in the history books as the one of the worst times to sell labor since the Industrial Revolution and the direct cause of the collapse of the US.
We have a business culture that prioritizes immediate profit taking over all else and it’s been this way since the 80’s. The long term impacts of that are starting to be felt extremely strongly. We’ve already fucked around and now we’re finding out.
EDIT: And not only are me and CW not wrong about this, it’s very obvious Biden agrees with us not you guys. You aren’t going to win an election in 2024 talking about how good voters have it economically, too many of them are doing awful.
Somewhere between real and much closer to hyperbole. Although think if you took the French handbag guy fortune and left him a couple billion to enjoy himself you could ship every ER doctor in USA 5 million dollars.
(Obviously that not the ideal way to spend that money but just pointing out I think the people we conceptualize as high earners currently are peasants compared to billionaires and also getting screwed by current system)
This is absolutely the correct take. The people who are the actual problem in the current system have net worth’s of 50MM+ and make dozens of times the median family income in ‘passive income’ (much of it is being taken from the pockets of anyone who doesn’t have the power to stop them from taking it in a very deliberate way). Doctors making what they make is a problem, but it’s mostly a problem because we should have paid them 80-100k to be in school/residency while they were training to be doctors and had 2-3x as many med school slots… all funded by the government.
One thing we all need to get comfortable with is the government being willing to go in and supply stuff directly when markets get fucked up. There are a lot of situations where a company / group of companies can capture a market and form a monopoly, and when that happens someone has to compete with them… and breaking into a monopolies turf isn’t the kind of thing that when it’s over inspires you to charge less than the maximum you could charge to get all that money you spent back. This results in one monopoly supplanting another being the only structural change available in many industries. The more concentrated an industry gets the less the value provided to customers or employee treatment matter to the people who own the industry.
There are situations where private enterprise is absolutely the best way to deliver a good/service and there are situations where the government is the best way to deliver a good/service. The more natural the monopoly the more likely it is that the government should just be in charge of doing that thing. Show me a large scale capital intensive project that there really can only be one of and I’ll show you something nobody should ever personally own.
Markets with low barriers to entry are what capitalism is for. Low barriers to entry = zero reason for the government to do anything but play referee and keep any of the antisocial strategies from being viable.
So I guess USA would be more wealthy if we confiscated the wealth of French citizens, but there’s no world in which the economic output of an average PHD therapist is enough to buy all those things you listed.
The bottom 50% have been the biggest winners in relative terms in the Biden economy. You can argue it’s not enough, but your opinion simply isn’t based on facts
That’s where the hyperbole comes in. But at same time I think there a reasonable argument society has lost its way when random bro with bachelors is getting paid 200k+ to help Zuck make kids life miserable and the PhD psychologists trying to put the pieces back together making less than 65k.
I believe it was either Bernie Sanders or Robert Reich who posted on Twitter that 50% of all stocks in the US are owned by the top1% and 87% are owned by the top10%.
Funny thing about this, in some families the best opportunity to be in touch with lower class folks is to talk to their own fucking kids that are struggling. Of course in many cases parents’ response to this is that the kids must be lazy pieces of shit because they don’t have a house and two kids by now.
I haven’t followed all the discussion points in this thread closely, but this article in The Atlantic seems to follow CW’s side of the argument fairly well.
The temptation for liberal economists and politicians to deny the pain experienced by many Americans, and to condescend when they might instead try to empathize, is perhaps understandable in a fraught election year. But working- and middle-class Americans might conclude that they are wiser to trust their feelings and checking accounts than to rely on liberal economists riffing as Jedi masters.
My Dad’s response to housing costs, climate change, and Trumpism is something like, “I sure am glad I’ll be gone soon and don’t have to deal with all this shit.”
Proceeds to vote straight R, he claims except for Trump (I don’t believe that anymore).
I mean this perfectly sums up the post-truth world we now live in. Facts are no longer relevant; how I feel is all that matters and I’M FEELING OUTRAGED BECAUSE THEY SAY I SHOULD BE OUTRAGED.
Sure but they aren’t trusting their accounts. They aren’t measuring shit, they’re going by feels in a media space dominated by republican propaganda and bothside-ism
