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Terribly performing memecoin (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

If you compare it with Gold

Which you shouldn't do because gold is a very volatile commodity. It went down from 2012 to 2018, then up from 2018 to 2024, then it went up extremely quickly since 2024. Gold is just something people put money in based on FOMO, or based on fears of stock market crashes, or based on other "vibes".

In addition, a lot of the world's gold is simply held in the form of jewelry in India. It's not even used as a direct "investment", it's just a pretty, shiny metal.

the USD moved in lockstep until the US left the Gold [Standard]

You'll never guess why that happened... although if you look at the name of the standard, it might give you a clue.

which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s

In the US. You know, essentially the only industrialized country that escaped from WWII with its manufacturing infrastructure intact, and was, as a result, supplying the entire world while everyone else was rebuilding.

The UK was another victor in WWII along with the US, but their workers weren't living in luxury. Rationing of meat ended in 1954 in the UK, nearly 10 years after the war. If you want to know what it was like in the UK in the post-war period, just look at stories of the early lives of the members of the Beatles.

In the US, the post war period not only followed the war, but also the great depression. The great depression ended with the New Deal, which shifted a lot of power from the rich to the workers. Workers from 1945 to the 1970s or so greatly benefited from those policies.

So, this 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker's salary wasn't typical. It was probably the best off that workers were in the world since European workers who survived the black plague -- and all it took was a devastating world war that destroyed the infrastructure of most of the world's developed countries, other than the USA, plus a devastating depression lasting a decade that forced the government to institute programs that gave workers benefits.

(Oh yeah, and it only applied to white Americans.)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Actually the story of the 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker’s salary is from Britain:

    • A journalist in The Guardian discovered that his university educated daughter's salary was the same salary inflation adjusted as his factory worker father's salary, yet wasn't enough for even a small appartment in London whilst hist father's salary paid for the above mentioned house, car and family of 5, so he wrote an article about it.

    Mind you, we see some version of this in plenty of other countries in at least the West - the story of how two university educated people need to work full time in a white collar job now to afford what a single blue collar salary paid in the 1970s is pretty common, though the difference from peak to through isn't as large as in countries which were wealthier back in the 60s.

    Even in my own native Portugal which was under a Fascist dictatorship until 74 and thus had no prosperous 60s in any way form or shape (in fact by then the country was so poor it was the recipient of Food Aid from the rest of Europe) and only really rose to normal European standards after the 74 Revolution, you see that effect between the 80s and present day - it now takes the salary of 2 university white collar workers to buy what my father's single blue collar worker salary bought in the 80s.

    People's purchasing power is way down even though according to official inflation figures it's supposedly not.

    Note that official inflation figures are used in calculating GDP, were they deflate the Raw/Nominal GDP to make the Real GDP (the official one) and the more the inflation the less the Official GDP - in other words, the less the official inflation the more politicians can claim to have "grown the GDP" - ever since polticians started harping in the Press all about the GDP grew under their government there has been a strong political motivation to understate inflation (which is probably why the official inflation figures don't include house price inflation).

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