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Why so serious? Nate Silver of 538.com points out we're not doing so bad after all.

Housing prices are significantly off their peaks, for instance, but have still increased by roughly 20 percent since January 2000, after adjustment for inflation. And we remain wealthier now than we were at almost any other point in the past (per capita disposable income is about 18 percent higher than it was a decade ago). If the good times are never as good as they seem, neither, perhaps, are the bad ones so bad.
via esquire.com

Chill out people! Maybe the world isn't coming to an end. If anything, we are falling for recency bias, which is what got us in this ridiculous quagmire in the first place.

Posted over 4 years ago

3 responses

brad jackson upvoted this
Vincent Chu said
Nonetheless, we remain one of the most profligate societies in the world, where the catch-phrase of the past decade was "bling bling" and not lasting value.

Even more distressingly, the wealth distribution of the country has increasingly skewed towards the wealthy. While I'm all for rewarding those who produce more, in this case, the inequality in distribution has come in spite of record increases in productivity over all segments of the economy. In other words, the increases in productivity squeezed out of workers throughout the past 15 years was, in most cases, left unrewarded.

While we may be 'richer' as a whole, is it any wonder that people look around and feel poorer? Those who have benefited over the past decade should take a long, hard look into the mirror and ask themselves: "Was I really generating that much wealth?"

Tony said
I still contend we are closer to the precipice of economic ruin than we realize. But that's just me.