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Terribly sorry for the late reply - I fell ill and have been spending the last few days away from the internet. I totally understand if you don't want to continue this here and start a new topic, but I feel bad about leaving a substantive reply unanswered so I'm going to respond late anyway.
I think that the problem here comes when "the economy" gets increasingly decoupled from what's actually happening in the lives of the people involved. From the perspective of the individual person, I think that their ability to form a family and sustain themselves is one of the main reasons that they actually go and participate in the economy, and one of the main desired outputs they have of the system. As for 1982, wasn't that the ending of a minor recession and a significant year in financial policy? I don't know how much value there is in comparing individual years when what matters is the trendline as a whole, as this kind of data can be noisy on a year to year basis.
Oh, my apologies. My mistake!
I think there are two big countervailing factors here governing that period. The first is that a significant portion of energy was spent somewhere else during those years - something fairly important happened in 2001 and a lot of US energy consumption shifted overseas to places like Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't think overseas military activity is counted in a measure of domestic energy consumption, even though it obviously represents a significant investment of energy and fossil fuels. The second is that you're talking about the period largely recognised as the formation of the housing bubble. Speculative bubbles may indeed make economic numbers look a lot higher, but I don't think they're real productive activity in any way.
To use some statistics from April (I find no reason to believe that things have changed since)... https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/04/07/evaluations-of-the-economy-and-the-state-of-the-nation/
19% of Americans think that these are "good economic times". 46% of Americans think that the economy is getting worse not better, and 77% of them believe that the economy is unfairly arranged in order to benefit powerful interests. A majority of the population is concerned with the price of basic staple items and the cost of housing. If these are good economic times, why are they only perceived as such by a slim minority of people? My answer is that they're accurately perceiving the shifts in costs/income/value available to them - if you're in the 20 percent these are great times, if you're not then they really aren't.
Sure, but there's a big list. First of all - measures of inflation are altered and massaged in ways that make it less than accurate. This is done both for political messaging purposes and to keep inflation-indexed payments at a lower value. The second is that there's a lot of economic activity in the financial sector that doesn't actually relate to or account for any real tangible wealth creation - and in fact usually leads to wealth destruction and misallocation of capital. Third is that a lot of "economic activity" actually consists less of productive work and wealth generation than it does consumption - outsourcing and off-shoring included here. Someone who sells a productive asset (like a manufacturing base) to someone else (like China) would make economic indicators go up in several big ways in the short-term, but actually do so in ways that are negative for the economy from a longer-term outlook. Flooding the labour force with illegal immigrants saves costs in some ways and again artificially juices economic numbers, but a lot of the costs associated with them don't show up in easily measurable economic statistics.
There are absolutely statistics and evidence that would change my mind here, but they're going to be exceedingly annoying to find and generate. For my contention that inflation is understated, you'd have to go back over decades of economic data and re-calculate inflation measures using more accurate metrics. With regards to family formation, that's also falsifiable - if you can present a compelling and rigorous explanation for why people are no longer having children or forming families that doesn't involve economic concerns I'd absolutely admit to being wrong(but good luck making that case). For some of these claims I'm not sure exactly how you'd falsify them because the data you'd have to present is just totally at odds with the world we're living in - I will be extremely impressed if you can somehow demonstrate that selling the productive manufacturing base to China hasn't caused substantial problems for the US while the entire US government considers China to be their greatest current danger in no small part due to their incredible manufacturing capacity.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Take an American worker with no college degree and wage-based employment living in a mid-sized city and I think they're going to have a much harder time finding a job that pays enough to support a family in the same way that people in 1960s America could. I also think the phrase "1960s standard of living" also requires some interrogation, because while something like an internet connection very clearly isn't in the 1960s standard of living, it is also effectively a requirement to participate in polite society in the modern day given how closely tied it is to employment and government services etc. Somebody in the 1960s didn't have a smartphone but if you don't have even a shitty smartphone in the modern day you are just not employable in the wage economy.
As for Biden, I don't really have any problems with him per se - he's little more than an empty suit who is barely cognitively there at this point. He played a part in the economic reconfigurations which have caused so many issues, but I don't think he really makes any important decisions himself now. Sure he's nakedly corrupt and made vast amounts of money through influence-selling and corruption, but I don't think he had a particularly prominent or influential role during the time when the economy got hollowed out. I'm not sure you can even point to the direct decision-makers involved in a lot of these changes and I'm not suggesting a giant conspiracy either - a lot of the people involved in the process were taking steps which were exceedingly rational for them at the time. I don't blame a factory owner for outsourcing manufacturing when he faced with a choice between getting outcompeted by someone who did (and then going bankrupt) or making a gigantic temporary profit.
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