/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>26241839

Here's the more important chart that people keep overlooking, mainly because the midwit's first thought would be that the cause for this is energy efficiency, ignoring Jevons paradox.

The chart contains enough information about the economic conditions of every generation within this timeframe. For an example, when it grew up until the 70s, every young adult entering the workforce managed to trade his calories for an ever-increasing control of raw energy. The food he was eating and the mortgage he was paying were significantly lower than what he was being paid while working. His job wasn't a modern indentured servitude to cover the living expenses equating to a net zero increase, there was an actual objective growth and an objective payout for his calories.

What you see on the far right of the chart is the direct opposite - not only is the average person working for a net zero increase nowadays, they're actually LOSING control over energy and they can afford less and less of it with every following day. An average American worker right now can afford the equivalent of energy capital as what someone from 1968 did. It's not like the former does not want to travel or does not want to blast the HVAC all day while playing games on his 3 monitors and 3080, he does, he just can't anymore. He eats inferior food designed for peasants, he lives in inferior peasant houses and he uses inferior peasant furniture. It's not like he can't eat grass-fed non-gmo vegetable-oil-free food or live in a house made to last or use furniture with actual wood, he can but he cannot afford it. The most he can afford is the rent of the home he doesn't own, with the junk food that he's forced to buy because everything with a healthy label is abnormally expensive, and the occasional utilization of his screens and PC for a few hours a day before he must go back to wageslaving for his rent. We have all these ways to waste energy nowadays but we just can't afford them. This is the blackest pill.