A nasty little fact that is studiously ignored in discussions of inflation.
From Charles Hugh Smith's Of Two Minds blog, August 23:
The Social Recession Is Accelerating
Did wages rise 10-fold to match the 10-fold rise in the cost of a modest house? No. That is social recession in a nutshell.
A reader asked about the term social recession which he'd noted in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Here is the paragraph:
"Stagnation in opportunities to work and earn (i.e. a financial recession) leads to social recession, a loss of opportunities for adulthood: a rewarding career, family, and a home of one's own. In a social recession, unemployed young people may be mired in adolescent narcissism, eschewing ambitions not just in work but in romance and marriage."
The reader asked if I could recommend any further reading on social recession and I replied that I could not, as the topic is not well-recognized or studied.
In my analysis, social recession refers to the narrowing of opportunities to marry and raise a family, own a home and have a secure livelihood from the vast majority of the populace to an elite selected by fierce competition--a competition few have the means to win, as the winners tend to win by choosing their parents wisely.
In the purely financial / economic terms of growth of GDP, household income, corporate profits and the value of assets, the US has only been in an economic recession for a few months in 2008-09 and at the start of the pandemic lockdown. But when measured by the ability of just about anyone willing to work hard and practice basic frugality to buy a house and start a family, the US has been in a social recession since 2009.
Demographics / economics analyst Chris H., who tweets as CH @economica, recently posted charts which reflect this social recession, most strikingly in the collapse of the US birthrate that started in 2009. He asked: "The largest childbearing population in US history has gone on strike...maybe we should know why?"
Some might argue that this decline in births is coincidental to the Global Financial Crisis , but since social recession has its roots firmly in the economic opportunities available to the average worker, that argument is specious....
....MUCH MORE
Earlier today: "The Housing Market And Interest Rates: 3.4% Is The Magic Number"
And as noted in June 2022's "Redefining the Working Class Beyond white men in hard hats":
There seems to be something akin to an actual plan to charge the plebs everything they earn to cover food, shelter, and basic necessities and further, to drive them into debt servitude to the tune of 5% - 10% of annual income per year....
Or, going back to 2013:
"Ben Franklin on Labor Economics (or how to create an underclass)":
The easiest way to create a dependent class is to price them out of the real estate markets.
"In countries fully settled…those who cannot get land must labor for others that have it; when laborers are plenty, their wages will be low; by low wages a family is supported with difficulty; this difficulty deters many from marriage, who therefore long continue servants and single...."
—Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751
And many, many more. If interested use the 'search blog' box upper lwft.