The savings rate is not simply the amount of money that is stowed away in an FDIC-insured bank account. It’s any amount of money not spent, which can be invested in any number of ways to generate return on investment. A standard stock and bond mix would have performed much better than the 6% generated in the 70s (the premium looks even better once you include the significant inflation during that same time) and would have most people on track to have a healthy nest egg.
As for my value-over-replacement term (yes, I did borrow it from Sabermetrics), it denotes a very real dynamic in the labor force that you seem to be refusing to acknowledge. People ARE commodities in the labor market. Hell, it’s kind of implied in the second word in the term “labor market”.
People are people, but when they work for an employer, they are objectified into something that is not an actual person. When I buy food at a restaurant, I don’t think about the employees who are cooking, cleaning, serving, etc. They aren’t people in my interaction with them. They are simply “thing that cooks food” or “thing that brings food to me”. The vast majority of jobs are not jobs in which a person’s personality is supposed to shine through. They’re expected to perform their duties in a certain way.
Turnover costs are a very important metric to a business that employs a lot of people. But you’re kidding yourself if you think that turnover costs are the same across every position, company, and sector. It’s lower (in both relative and absolute terms) for low-skill positions and higher for high-skill position.
You keep saying that workers’ bargaining power has been stolen from them. It couldn’t be more false. There hasn’t been a significant change to the Wagner Act since 1959. Unions are on the outs because most of the companies they dominated in the 60s and 70s went into bankruptcy. Pensions are gone because the companies that offered them went bankrupt. The fact is the good ol’ days of the labor market (which were only good if you were white and male) are long gone and it isn’t because special interests screwed over the middle class, it’s because the rest of the world caught up.
Also, on your accusation of eugenics… Fertility rates have plummeted from their high in the 60s and the widespread availability of birth control has disproportionately impacted low wealth households. I’m simply observing (and predicting) the result of a lifestyle choice. By no means do I think that people from low wealth households are genetically deficient (hell, my parents grew up in poor, rural China).
The America that I dreamed of is an America that allowed my incredibly intelligent and hardworking parents to come here and flourish. The America that I dreamed of rewards discipline and intelligence. And it just so happens that my dream of America is pretty damn close to how America actually is.
