Is that the economy, or is it the way people are socialized to think about the economy, and life in general? The suicide rate in America is four times higher than in the poor developing country I’m from.
After decades of prosperity, the USA has lost the majority of the generational knowledge and skills that poor people pass on to their children. I've spoken with people who spend almost an entire day's wage on a visit to the local laundromat.
Moreover, the poor here have very little access to mutual aid networks due to the loss of "third places" like churches. It's not uncommon to hear of poor people here having their children taken away by the state because they were just making ends meet and can't afford to pay for child care and have nobody to rely on to watch their kids after school; not even a neighbor.
Being poor is depressing, but I suspect watching your standard of living decline, your hopes and dreams destroyed, and your children forced to struggle in ways you or your parents never had to before hits harder.
If you have socialized people into a culture where higher housing and educational costs more than offsetting the fact you make more money than your parents did at the same age causes four times as many people to kill the selves than folks in a Bangladeshi village, then I’m sorry the problem is your culture. You have created a culture where people have no resilience to a bump in the road.
And the economy isn't even that bad in general. I don't understand this tendency on the internet just so overly exaggerate how bad the economy is. Unemployment is near record lows right now. We have a bit of wage growth lag in the last few years thanks to everything going on, but up until then we had pretty strong wage growth.
I don't know if I'm just in a bubble because I don't live in one of the big cities with crazy housing prices? Right now it seems to be better time to be out and getting a job than any.
> And the economy isn't even that bad in general. I don't understand this tendency on the internet just so overly exaggerate how bad the economy is. Unemployment is near record lows right now.
Unemployment doesn't tell us a whole lot. There's more people out of work today than before. Unemployment numbers don't tell you about the people whose only employment is part time or pays a fraction of what it used to pay either.
In the US evictions are on the rise, homelessness is on the rise, child poverty is on the rise, household debt is on the rise, utility service disconnections are rising, 80% of people in the US think their children will grow to be worse off than they are. None of this signals a healthy economy. The economy is making many already rich people even more money than ever before while the middle class increasingly struggles and the poor face ever rising expenses.
Outside of the tech world, this is a great time to find a job, but that doesn't mean you'll make enough money to support yourself. Programmers have it a bit rough right now, and it always hurts like hell to see your standard of living decline, but it's not that bad really. For so much of the country their standard of living starts a lot lower and it's still getting worse.
