Here's my direct experience in the real world: America is awash with refugees from what must be a great conflict or natural catastrophe. We call these refugees "the homeless." I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 32 years. Tech capital of the world, beautiful people, scenic, nice weather, home to the smart, ambitious, wealthy, and so on.Around eight years ago, empty stretches of roadways suddenly filled with dozens of vehicles--encampments of the homeless. Patches of lawn near freeway offramps were suddenly filled with tents and trash. A tent encampment arose a block from our house--not in a "bad neighborhood," just not a protected enclave in the hills.A homeless individual--does it really make us feel better to call this person "unhoused"?--started sleeping right beneath our bedroom window. I had to hose human excrement off our somewhat sheltered (and therefore ideal to use as a toilet) front entry. (We moved away in early 2019. Some solutions are systemic, some are individual initiative.)
Charts of GDP--it's going up!--aren't really relevant when you're hosing human excrement off your front porch. Neither are rising sales of EVs--we're saving the planet by stripmining it to make two billion unrecyclable batteries! These are abstractions, and they do nothing to reverse the startling decay of everyday life.What caused this enormous flood of domestic refugees? We like simple answers and simple solutions, but there aren't any. The unaffordability of essentials such as shelter are certainly a factor, but the decay of family, social ties and the economy all play a part.How can we claim with a straight face that "life is getting more prosperous" when half the populace owns essentially zero financial wealth? Trillions in stimulus has piled up tens of trillions in financial wealth, but how has so little trickled down to the 170 million Americans who comprise the bottom 50%? Can we declare "this is an increasingly prosperous nation" after pondering this chart? That 170 million Americans own a grand total of 2.6% of the nation's enormous financial wealth? That's statistical noise, not prosperity.
