[rangerone314]

YEAR..........1950............2000...............2009............X(from1950 to 2009)
college.........$625...........$25,170............$38,970....................62X
S&P................16.66..........1,012.................1009....................60X
Medical (per cap)..148........4,642................8,516....................57X

oil....................$2.49............$32...................$70....................28X
gold....................$40..........$272................$1000....................25X
house.............$7,354.....119,600.........@ 180,000....................24X

CPI factor.........0.113...........0.85.....................$1.................@ 9X

Medical.................28.........1,353................2,555....................91X

I used 1960 for medical, since I didn't have 1950 data. For College I used UPenn stats.

Any thoughts on what this tells us????

My initial thought is upper tier (health, college, S&P), and lower tier (oil, gold, house) clusters.

Also that CPI reflects only cheap crap from China. The lower tier reflects raw materials (including land) and limited resources, upper tier being services and economic generated.

[pup55]

You're forgetting a couple....

The 1950 average family income was $3100, in 2008 it's around 60,000, an increase of only 20X so relative to some of this stuff, family income has increased much less....

The 1950 family paid about $700 per year on food, about 20% of their income....in 2005, the last year where I kept track, this was about $4500 which is a smaller fraction of income....only about 7%. In those days, people planted gardens in their backyard to get less expensive food.

The typical car owner, keeping in mind that a lot of people did not have a car, drove 4200 miles per year, paid 27 cents per gallon, and only got 15 mpg, for an operating expense of about 9 cents per mile.

Keep in mind that the average tax rate in 1950 was about 20% (from all levels of government). Of the remaining $2633 per family, here is the breakdown:

747 food
605 housing
1303 net income
265.5 Savings 10%
1037.5 disposable
86.45833333 monthly excess
45 dollars per month to run the car
41.45833333 utilities, clothes, everything else

note that despite the BS, the average family saved 10% of their income, and the remaining $1000 or so per year was considered disposable. The $45 per month to run the car was a substantial chunk of the family's disposable income.....

so a lot of people did not bother to get the car......they would rather save the money and take the bus, or live close to work and walk....Shocking, isn't it? Between that time, and now, it is an absolute passage into adulthood that you take out a loan and pay for too much car.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2006-02-23-fed-incomes_x.htm
http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/f08.html
[url]http://www.epinet.org/datazone/fambud/fam_bud_calc_tech_doc.pdf#search='average%20family%20food%20cost'
[/url]

I looked up a lot of this stuff a couple of years ago so some of these links might be dead. The AAA is the keeper of a lot of the historical transportation data....

My thinking has always been that if you could just get back to somewhere around 1950 for per-capita energy usage, we could all be happy and healthy, and live a pretty good life, still better than 75% of the world's population, and tell Saudi to stick it, because we really would be pretty close to energy self-sufficient.

But, to do that, someone is going to have to walk.

[AirlinePilot]

But, to do that, someone is going to have to walk.

Probably a bunch more folks are going to have to die.

[rangerone314]

Here's what I was thinking last night about those figures & how they cluster...

I'm thinking that housing, gold and oil all being around 25-fold increase since 1950 respresents the REAL rate of inflation in the US, once you get rid of the cheap-crap-made-in-China issue.

The 60-fold increase in college tuition, health and stocks (as represented by the S&P) can be viewed as an increase in wealth by CERTAIN sectors. What is tuition and health expenses for one person is income for another group. So view the 60X tier as the increasing gap between the elites & upper class & wealthy in the US (Doctors, lawyers, professors, CEOs) and the middle class.

[pup55]

The 60-fold increase in college tuition, health and stocks (as represented by the S&P) can be viewed as an increase in wealth by CERTAIN sectors.

You are going to touch off a rant, if you are not careful.

Yes, I did a lot of work a couple of years ago on this issue. Since 1972, which not coincidentally was the year that the US passed PO, the average family income, inflation adjusted for the bottom 3 pentiles (the lowest 60% of the income distribution) has been in steady decline. For the top 20%, there has been a nice increase, and about even-steven for the 60-to 80% group. Someone can dig up that old thread if they want.....

We talked just the other day about the problem of upward social mobility and how a kid born in the US to a family in the lowest 1/5 of the income scale has less than a 2% chance of making it to the highest 1/5.....the lowest rate in the industrialized nations. So much for your "land of opportunity"....

So the effects of all of this on society are going to be pretty big, and the effects are going to be felt for generations to come....and the US ends up being one of those third world places like Argentina where all the wealth is accumulated among the social elite.......if it has not already...

And at some point you end up like it is in other places in South America, where if you do happen to be prosperous, you are careful not to show it off too much for fear that someone will rob you, or kidnap you off of the street in front of your house, and there are private police forces and security guards for the wealthy to protect them from the bottom 80% who are getting increasingly miserable....

and this whole situation gets worse and worse in places like Birmingham where the local police force is out of money....

So the question is, can anything be done to change the situation? Well, you have elected a kid from the bottom 1/5 of the income scale to the office of President of the United States and the outcome after six months has been: an unprecedented transfer of wealth from your grandchildren directly to the pockets of the fatcats other stakeholders in the banking system, via an unprecedented intergenerational robbery known as the TARP program, 99% of the benefit of which went to the top 1% of the income scale...

So, obviously, democracy, as we know it, is not the answer.

Silly humans. What are you going to do?

[rangerone314]

The 60-fold increase in college tuition, health and stocks (as represented by the S&P) can be viewed as an increase in wealth by CERTAIN sectors.

You are going to touch off a rant, if you are not careful.

Yes, I did a lot of work a couple of years ago on this issue. Since 1972, which not coincidentally was the year that the US passed PO, the average family income, inflation adjusted for the bottom 3 pentiles (the lowest 60% of the income distribution) has been in steady decline. For the top 20%, there has been a nice increase, and about even-steven for the 60-to 80% group. Someone can dig up that old thread if they want.....

We talked just the other day about the problem of upward social mobility and how a kid born in the US to a family in the lowest 1/5 of the income scale has less than a 2% chance of making it to the highest 1/5.....the lowest rate in the industrialized nations. So much for your "land of opportunity"....

So the effects of all of this on society are going to be pretty big, and the effects are going to be felt for generations to come....and the US ends up being one of those third world places like Argentina where all the wealth is accumulated among the social elite.......if it has not already...

And at some point you end up like it is in other places in South America, where if you do happen to be prosperous, you are careful not to show it off too much for fear that someone will rob you, or kidnap you off of the street in front of your house, and there are private police forces and security guards for the wealthy to protect them from the bottom 80% who are getting increasingly miserable....

and this whole situation gets worse and worse in places like Birmingham where the local police force is out of money....

So the question is, can anything be done to change the situation? Well, you have elected a kid from the bottom 1/5 of the income scale to the office of President of the United States and the outcome after six months has been: an unprecedented transfer of wealth from your grandchildren directly to the pockets of the fatcats other stakeholders in the banking system, via an unprecedented intergenerational robbery known as the TARP program, 99% of the benefit of which went to the top 1% of the income scale...

So, obviously, democracy, as we know it, is not the answer.

Silly humans. What are you going to do?

Let me answer that with a quote form my favorite philosopher, Oswald Spengler, who writes from 1918, and hard to believe he was writing in 1918 and not 2008:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West#Democracy.2C_media.2C_and_money

Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. The thorough penetration of money's power throughout a society is yet another marker of the shift from Culture to Civilization.

Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler's argument. The "tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers" is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective. The principles of equality, natural rights, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press are all disguises for class war (the bourgeois against the aristocracy). Freedom, to Spengler, is a negative concept, simply entailing the repudiation of any tradition. In reality, freedom of the press requires money, and entails ownership, thus serving money at the end. Suffrage involves electioneering, in which the donations rule the day. The ideologies espoused by candidates, whether Socialism or Liberalism, are set in motion by, and ultimately serve, only money. "Free" press does not spread free opinion—it generates opinion, Spengler maintains.

Spengler admits that in his era money has already won, in the form of democracy. But in destroying the old elements of the Culture, it prepares the way for the rise of a new and overpowering figure: the Caesar. Before such a leader, money collapses, and in the Imperial Age the politics of money fades away.

Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever.

Spengler notes that the greater the concentration of wealth in individuals, the more the fight for political power revolved around questions of money. One cannot even call this corruption or degeneracy, because this is in fact the necessary end of mature democratic systems.

On the subject of the press, Spengler is equally as contemptuous. Instead of conversations between men, the press and the "electrical news-service keep the waking-consciousness of whole people and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year." Through the media, money is turned into force—the more spent, the more intense its influence.

For the press to function, universal education is necessary. Along with schooling comes a demand for the shepherding of the masses, as an object of party politics. Those that originally believed education to be solely for the enlightenment of each individual prepared the way for the power of the press, and eventually for the rise of the Caesar. There is no longer a need for leaders to impose military service, because the press will stir the public into a frenzy, clamor for weapons, and force their leaders into a conflict.

The only force which can counter money, in Spengler's estimation, is blood. As for Marx, his critique of capitalism is put forth in the same language and on the same assumptions as those of Adam Smith. His protest is more a recognition of capitalism's veracity, than a refutation. The only aim is to "confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects."

Note: by "blood" Spengler is refering to ethnic or tribal ties...

The future of "democracy/plutocracy" in the US is for some Caesar demogogue to arise like Napoleon, strengthening the Executive further, appealing to the common people againt the elites and their obvious unfair monopolization of wealth. It does seem to be an eternal cycle.

[patience]

Quote:
"Silly humans. What are you going to do?"

A Elect a benevolent dictator. (I'm starting to think that's what many thought they would get with Obama. Oh well.)

B Suffer through it, learn the lessons, and try to pass them on to the next generations. Tried that in the 1930's. After that generation passed on, we repeated the mistakes. See Kondratieff Wave.

C Try intelligent thinking, for a change. Good luck with that.


My bet is on B as an outcome.

[rangerone314]

Quote:
"Silly humans. What are you going to do?"

A Elect a benevolent dictator. (I'm starting to think that's what many thought they would get with Obama. Oh well.)

B Suffer through it, learn the lessons, and try to pass them on to the next generations. Tried that in the 1930's. After that generation passed on, we repeated the mistakes. See Kondratieff Wave.

C Try intelligent thinking, for a change. Good luck with that.


My bet is on B as an outcome.

+1

Betting on C and hoping people act intelligently is like expecting teenagers NOT to have sex, and fraternities NOT to get drunk, or politicians NOT to be corrupt. The day those 4 things all happen at the same time will probably be when Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are all aligned during a solar eclipse (and will probably last as long as a solar eclipse)

[Pops]

Thanks for reminding me of your efforts Pup. I was stumbling around with the olduvi theory for old time sake the other day and looked for some correlation between primary energy per capita and the effect to average Joe and didn't get anywhere.


I did make a new chart of primary ff energy/person/year to see what caused the jump recently and of course it was mostly our old friend coal -


Anyway Pup, if you can tell me some keywords I'd like to look your old thread up...

[pup55]

Hi, Pops:

I did a few threads on "gas affordability index" in about 2006 that you might be able to locate....I need to re-learn how to search the archive... the point at the time was that there was a period where the high fuel prices, as a percentage of disposable income, were at record levels for the lowest 40% of the wage earners, but for the fat cats, their income had managed to keep ahead of the game temporarily.

I think this was in the era right after Katrina hit, or maybe just before....

Since then, naturally, we have gone completely over the top on that thanks to the $4.37 prices of last summer. Also, we have had a minimum wage increase since then, so perhaps I will recalculate it when sufficiently motivated.

I think I used the words "schmoe" and "fat cat" and "gas affordability index" frequently at the time....

I was in Springfield briefly yesterday, had a pleasant dawn run down by 44... wish I could have gone fishing. One of these days when I can spend some time I will come and look for you.

[Umber]

Silly humans. What are you going to do?

Shoot first and ask questions later.

Umber