This is so true. And just to further the point, productivity has gone up. Many jobs are faster & easier & take less time and fewer people to do. So more stuff is getting done per work hour. And yet, as you say, its somehow harder to afford cost of living on the pay of those work hours. So where is all that extra productivity going?

A lot of it goes to waste, possibly 'undervalued' by market distortions. (For example, tech like phones and laptops and TVs, take huge amounts of work to create - but are somehow relatively cheap. A low-cost wireless mouse costs about as much as buying lunch. That's pretty weird considering what's involved. The churn of using and replacing that stuff is sucking up a lot of productivity behind the scenes.) But yeah, the bigger effect is growing inequality. Ultra wealthy people and company sucking up all the profits from our productivity; and spending it on... well, a lot of stuff. One example that comes to mind is the enormous amount of resources going into building and running data centres at the moment. Land, water, raw materials, basic labour, skilled labour... and some promise that it is all going to be worth it, but right now its essentially just our collective wealth getting poured into machines that are currently doing more harm than good. It's a level of resource tradeoff that no normal person would make. But at the ultra-wealthy top, the cost doesn't matter so much to them, and the benefits including locking people into a cycle of dependency - so that the owners can say at the top unchallenged. It's not hard to see how that's a good deal for them, but not for anyone else.

Our massive productivity gains have been eaten up by the billionaire/owner class.

i completely agree with that and it's not that we have a productivity problem, we also long ago lost interest in needs vs wants and most of what we do as a society is based around the latter letting the former fall beside the wayside.

The really really weird shit is this is all encouraged by voters, LNP, ONP and ALP.

Does no one seem to remember that you used to be able to support a family of 5 on one modest income?

while that's true, it was of a different time and has rose tinted glasses. As my mother said, the reason she became a teacher was so she didn't have to give up work when she became pregnant and the two photos my mother has of her with her family shows they (8 kids and her parents) lived in a tin shack. All my grandparents died in their late 60's or early 70s not needing endless medical care and decades of pension.

Twisting the avocado toast meme, anecdotally, my 20 something nieces have spent more time overseas travelling then I have and I'm 59. One is off to Canada again for months as we speak and the other just got back from Japan, again, for the 4th time and she's 23, and that's just one of the many countries she's been to.

There's also any number of grumpy 60+yr olds (the ones apparently employed and raising a family of 5) who say they cant afford Australia anymore, so what happened to their so called wealth? YT is full of single, aged pensioners retired to Laos, Thailand and more recently Cambodia (because they can't afford Thailand)

on YT; Fiasco Dagama, Brett Voyage and read the comments section. The comme td unironically blaming migrants while their plan is to migrate and geo arbitrage :)

I retired at 40 (am now 60) and lived off grid in a little cottage in the bush because i never fitted in anywhere in Australia anyway.

New car sales are at an all time high (what a joke that is) discretionary spending (trinkets and gee jaws) also keeps rising.

Compare that with the have massive savings in Super and we're the second richest country per person on earth after Luxembourg,

Theb we're the biggest users of diesel (and have no oil) on the planet per capita because we're too incompetent to build electrified rail, in a country that's massive... the one token build recently, Inland Rail, has been scrapped from incompetence.

I'd suggest folks re read the Lucky Country, from the 1960s, the ironically titled book that pointed out we're a bunch of fools, electing idiots. The title was about we were lucky we had access to tremendous primary capital we expended (back then more farming, now mining) and it dulled our minds so we didn't have to think too much. Not much has changed

The last sane Prime Minster we had was Gough Whitlam and it's mostly been a shit show ever since, enabled by voters.

Yeah media will skirt around the real problem for ever if they can. Now the new term is "money circulation"