Hi YF

> It sounds like your real complaint that older voters have hijacked the mechanism of government to steal from the young. (See also cost of living in NIMBY-filled places like NYC and London.)

That sure is a major part of my complaint yeah.

You probably already know this but that is something Niall Ferguson in his Reith lectures several years ago referred to as the breakdown of Burke's Social Contract, that inter-generational warfare will ultimately turn young people to the right wing whether they like it or not (four years after that claim, we witness the surge of alt-right, chan culture going from random to the right, the ever broader resonance of neoreactionary thinking). At some point I think these social critiques of their parent's religion (constantly reliving the 60s rebellion against their parents) convert to something about political economy and this all goes supernova. I don't think Trump is that point, this is a trend that is just beginning. I think the implosion of social democracy is on the way. Briefly, it is an end to migrants, healthcare and pensions (and military subsidies for us Euros). Instead resurgent tribalism, provoked and maintained by the Net and a total pull down of all those leftist memes about equality, oh the humanity, colonialism and so on. Basically from the perspective of the NYT it is the End Times. Hello and welcome back to the Victorian Era (2.0)!

All this is a symptom rather than a cause. Generational rebellion is quite normal after all. A total reinterpretation of history requires more of an explanation. That is what happens when the foundations come into question. Egalitarianism and universal thinking (as personified by Thomas Friedman) tends to flourish in times of peace and wealth, aristocracy when peace and wealth are in question. This is good news for Silicon Valley actually. And DARPA.

That means the cause is a lack of true economic growth. All economic growth must ultimately source from technological progress. The relationship between the technological world -> economic world -> social world -> political world is complicated but it exists, it is the bedrock of all.

Notice how money is free at 0% interest. Notice serious drops in oil price. Notice hordes of well educated students with no money. Notice lack of inflation. Notice the pervasive underemployment. The economy has lost its mojo. All those signs should traditionally have led to explosive economic growth, startup formation but they ain't. The economy has lost its mojo in some structural way and the levers at the Fed and ECB aren't responding except with the sound of grinding gears.

I think your graph from the Fed tells us more about the Fed than real incomes. Compensation! Total fudge factor when they are getting ridden for not producing results I'm sure.

>> I suspect this is all better explained by lack of technological change (ex-computation) with logical follow through in the growth statistics and wages.

> In that case, why has the US experienced significant compensation growth? Does the US have technology that they don't share with Europe?

First, I cannot prove this without expertise in forensic accounting but I'll tell you what I suspect to be true. I realize that isn't great but I don't know there's something better when talking at this kind of scale.

It is mostly demotic accounting fraud. Europe has already been there and done that with social democratic policy. There are some outliers but it is mostly fraud - by which I mean magick money from nowhere. Your compensation is coming from redistributive policies that fuck the future for short term political gains. As is tradition. A voucher for marked up dental work and broken roads.

The thing with those compensations is that you can make them seem infinite in scope, but tweak the parameters such that people don't actually receive a genuine benefit.

In my country we have free healthcare. You will also die on the waiting list before it materializes so people pay twice (taxed + also get private insurance). In the UK across the water pensioners appear to have a good deal but everybody suspects the entitlements aren't going to exist when they are called upon. I hear something similar is going on with SS in the USA. Entitlements are part real initially (borrowed perhaps from infrastructure funds or Fort Knox, somewhere where the loss isn't obvious for a long time) but it is ultimately a hypothetical.

Similar thing goes for corporate compensation. You surely know most of that is pure fraud. Dental work valued at 250 bucks when it is really worth 50 on the market, that kind of thing, only on an industrial scales across all the institutions.

We ought to thinking of this like a value investor. They like to see hard cold cash dividends. That guarantees something is working, right? And the absence of that... traditionally is either serious growth or serious bullshit.

> Do you have data on total compensation per hour in other countries, or are you just relaying anecdotes?

Total comp per hour I couldn't find anywhere (probably difficult as hell to calculate, esp. historically) but these graphs sum up the picture I'm trying to relay.

http://imgur.com/a/gioau

You'll rightfully complain compensation is missing from the graphs. Then again I would argue compensation was missing from the data for most of historical time. What was the value of a working housewife who converted staples into nutritious meals? That is a kind of compensation just as healthcare from a government is. Maybe if people had the time to prepare decent meals and relax for a bit instead of being harried by bills and rent they would be less unfit and thereby...