we're so far away from the American dream that it's hard to believe it ever really existed it used to be a simple formula if you got a good education and worked hard at your job you'd have enough left over to support a family and see you through to the end today it's all Fallen apart forgetting owning a home you'd be proud of or building anything meaningful you'll be lucky to even retire at all over the past few decades every single part of the American dream has been Stripped Away so let's find out how it happened
and why you'll probably never get to retire and the solution to this kids growing up 50 years ago had a pretty easy time planning out the rest of their lives it all began with a good education it didn't necessarily mean going to college either for most people a high school diploma was enough to almost guarantee them a good place in society you've probably heard about what it used to be like nearly every job is well paid enough to support a family on just one income anyone with enough discipline to put in the work could afford
a house large enough to be a family home once you were in your 60s you most likely paid off your house and your pension would be good enough to comfortably retire but right now it seems hard to believe that someone like a mailman would enjoy that kind of luxury of wealth and it's not just Nostalgia talking in 1974 the average postal worker in the US made between 9 and 1/2 to $122,000 a year as a basic salary that didn't include a cost of living adjustment double pay on holidays and tons of other benefits in total
you could clear 15 to 16,000 in a good year and the average home back then was around $36,000 just 2 and 1 half years of wages could buy one outright or you could spend a couple of decades living comfortably while you paid off the mortgage but it's a different story to to day even the most well-paid mailman earning 60k a year would have to work nearly three times as much to afford the same home these essential jobs which are necessary for society to keep on functioning just aren't worth aiming for anymore what should be a
good respectable career barely allows you to survive in lots of cities in the US it would be impossible to even scratch out a living working one of these blue collor jobs so people adapted and the bar got higher nowadays a college degree or years of specialist training is the bare minimum to find a place in the dwindling middle class on out people with degrees earn over 30,000 more than those who only went to high school but even then it's no guarantee of success it doesn't factor in the massive amount of debt College will put you
in a debt you could be paying off for decades to come with so many more graduates there's more competition than ever for a relatively small amount of well-paying jobs as well it's why companies have become so ruthless and uncaring with how they find their employees when every job they post gets tens or hundreds of applicants they can afford to be choosy today nearly all companies use automated systems to reject most of the applications before anyone else ever reads them if you don't have the experience or put enough keywords in your CV it's already over it's
put tons of people in a situation where they need experience to get a job in the field but can't get a job without the experience to begin with 50 years ago a high school diploma was enough to put you on the path to a comfy retirement today you might have a college degree and you might be lucky enough to land what should be an exceptional job but even with all of this you're still going to be hard pressed to retire before your body simply gives up it's simply a consequence of the fact that companies don't
value their employees anymore they don't need to because today there's always someone waiting to take your place if you don't like the deal they're offering a lot of these problems have come from there being way more people in the labor market now there's a bunch of reasons for this but immigration is one all kinds of immigrants both legal and illegal add more supply to the market for lots of jobs they're desperately needed Western Healthcare systems and other vital Industries pretty much run on migrant labor it's going to a point where 20% of the UK's NHS
staff are first generation immigrants for other Industries though the SP of the labor pool means wages fall or stay stagnant but it's not just people moving into the country that's making things that's bad in the job market it's companies moving their operations out of the country so-called offshoring is almost completely destroyed entire Industries manufacturing mining pretty much anything that is in a service industry left the West long ago 60% of companies outsourc work abroad over 14 million jobs that aren't in the US anymore even if it makes the customer experience much worse all leads to
an inferior product if it's cutting cost down then the happy to do it with so many other options it isn't surprising that companies don't care about keeping their employees around anymore it used to be the case that companies would reward their employees if they stayed in the job you could build a whole career rising up the ranks of a single company and getting richly rewarded for never leaving they needed you back then it was just how it worked some companies still operate like this today but not many the benefits of a low skilled Workforce don't
show up on balance sheets they might have much more efficient ways of doing things skills gained from years or Decades of experience but because you can't measure something like that it's hard for a company to know what it had until it's gone so managers and Executives looking to pinch pennies neglect their duties to their employees sometimes they just fire them or Outsource their work but a lot of the time they just don't give them the right motivation to stay it's been a long process spanning for decades but we can see the result of it now
it's ridiculously more lucrative it's become so normal for people to jump ship every few years first is the problem with how hard it can actually be to climb the ladder at most giant companies before when single jobs used to pay enough to let you and your family live comfortably it was different if you didn't want to you didn't have to climb the ranks to make a good life but now that the only top positions promise that kind of safety you're almost always forced to keep climbing or searching for something new always in a limbo state
of insecurity never knowing if you'll get another paycheck today it's far harder to convince your current boss to give you a raise compared to convincing a new company to give you a better starting salary workers who stay with their current jobs for over 2 years earn a staggering 50% Less on average than those who switch employers it's created an environment that rewards jumping ship as companies don't care about keeping people on either they'll have no problem firing people who put 20 or 30 years of work for them as you'll just names and numbers on a
spreadsheet anyway it's an especially big problem for people who are towards the end of their careers as it's much harder for them to convince other companies to hire them all of these things have made having a job today like treading water if you don't keep moving it seems like you'll drown even with job hopping though wages just aren't what they were today you'll be lucky if your raise even matches the inflation rate for decades wage growth remains steady keeping up with everything else but since then it's been a very different story now it's not like
people are doing less work in fact the opposite is usually the case productivity has steadily risen for the past 80 years improvements in technology efficiency and a larger Workforce have made sure of that we aren't any less hardworking than previous generations productivity has only gone up while wages have remained stagnant from 1948 to 1973 the two stats were in lock stat both Rising by about 90% since then productivity went up another 70% but hourly wages for employees only r by imly 10% no matter what people say online in truth we're not really any less hardworking
than before so where's all the money gone it's no coincidence that we've got so many more billionaires than ever before the top 1% have seen their wages grow by nearly 140% almost 14 times more than the regular person people who actually keep Society Running which means there's simply less money to go around and therefore less money to save for retirement or ever put in a pension but even the pensions are worse today it was recently discovered that n out of 10 pensions schemes in the UK perform worse than the ftce AllShare index which tracks the
top 600 companies on the London Stock Market they've become yet another thing for the finance industry to suck money out of and when they get their bets wrong it's the regular people who suffer the consequences and it just means less money for when you can't work anymore and that's if that day ever comes as the state pension isn't much these days but it's still higher than wages however governments across the West have been raising the retirement age even taking that Pistons away from the scores of hardworking people in France got raised recently to 64 but
that's actually generous compared to other countries in the UK it's 66 and it's going to go up even more in the US it's 67 however before we continue I want to tell you about a video sponsor ODU you see recently I've been using ODU for my own website to promote the YouTube channel and school community and it's one of the best website Builders I've ever used but what's really great about ODU is that it's much more than that ODU is an all-in-one management software that offers entrepreneurs a range of applications to facilitate the daily management
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life and the market treated them that way since then though house prices have only risen making their Investments worth many times what they initially paid even after account for inflation if they bought early then all that housing money didn't just go to some landlord or some corporation like it does for young people today instead it was yet another way they were directly investing in their future and their retirement back then the principal was small so it wasn't long before their entire mortgage was paid off for the house something that's almost impossible for most young people
today often these homeowners are the ones supporting laws that make building new homes much harder enemies have change in any form they block the building of new homes in fear of the people who might end up living in them it's a selfish move pushed forward by a small minority of people but it means that barely any new homes are getting built after benefiting greatly from the opportunities they had they've closed the door behind them but it's not really people who own just one home that are behind the ludicrous rise in house prices instead it's the
way that corporations and businesses have used them as financial investments over the past 50 or so years the housing market transformed it used to be a way for people to get a roof over their heads and build their own lives but now it mostly exists as yet another place to store money tons of that excess wealth May by the increase in productivity has found its way there corporations buy up homes and either run them out at insane prices or just leave them empty while their value goes up and it all worked out for the people
who bought a home a few decades ago but now it's a big part of their retirement plans if they ever need money they can simply down size once the kids have moved out and pocket the differences which is often hundreds of thousands of dollars but it's those who were never Rich enough to own a home to begin with OR people entering the market today that are suffering the costs of this with how crazy the ratio between wage and house prices has gotten lots of people will never be able to afford to buy they'll be stuck
renting watching thousands and thousands of dollars go into someone else's bank account rent prices along with housing prices have massively increased it's something that's only gotten worse with time the biggest rise in rent has happened recently and there's no signs that that's going to stop between 2019 and 2023 the average rent went up by over 30% across the US they've outpace wages across this same time period in 44 of the 50 largest cities in the US which is yet another example of something that's only gotten more expensive in comparison to pay rent food utility bills
all the essentials have generally gotten more expensive compared to wages while wages are beginning to catch up to some things like food prices it's too little too late six out of 10 Americans feel like the economy is in recession but unfortunately it might just be the new normal it's because people have been pushed out of the system entirely most people's finances are in bad shape whatever the stock market might look like even if it does go up by a percentage point or two they don't feel it people are being squeezed so hard that they can't
get the funds together to save for the future a staggering 78% of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck scraping together what they can to survive for lots of people it's only getting worse over 50 million are now using food banks 12 million rely on predatory payday loans just to see themselves through the week and what's going to happen when all of these people start entering retirement without anything saved for the future it's these kinds of societal conditions that pave the way to tyranny as when people go hungry and they don't have enough for their families
it builds anger and resentment and we're already quickly getting to a place where there's no point for honest working people to still have faith in a system that has Trot in them over and over again and with more and more people coming into the West more pressure on Government Services a massively aging population that won't be sustainably lifted by Generation Z it will cause massive tension in the west and without any hope people will do anything and support anyone who says they can make things better no matter the cost right now the left pretty much
ignores that this is happening pretending that everything is normal meanwhile the right seems to corop this anger and tries to use it for their own purposes but as we'll see neither side of the spectrum is ready to deal with the massive societal changes that are about to take place automation is coming it doesn't matter how many people will lose their jobs it's an Unstoppable economic truth we've already seen it happen time and time again nearly everyone who used to work in agriculture each person could only really make enough food to feed themselves and a few
others with automation this all changed now only around 10% of the US Works in in agriculture in countries with far less Farmland like in the UK it's only 1% as technology progressed new jobs stepped in to fill the Gap most people move from farms to the factories but more recently these jobs have been drying up fast as well most of the factories in the west closed long ago and today they're on the brink of extinction because of automation it was the reason for 88% of factory jobs that vanished between 2000 and 2010 and now we're
facing an even greater shift in the fabric of society while AI still has its quirks and can be a great re resource for many people it also has a very dark potential in some ways to wipe out jobs of millions across the economy but it won't just be factory work as this time although their jobs are still under threat the main casualty will be the transportation industry driving in some way or another is still the most common job in 29 States so far it's been impossible for companies to replace them but that won't last long
forever soon AI will be able to replace drivers entirely already in places like California you're starting to see driverless cars and not just cars but actual taxis and Ubers and in tests automated trucks have been able to detect and avoid obstacles with Incredible precision and speed and the company's pushing this forward expect to have whole fleets of autonomous trucks in just 3 or 4 years time now of course this has many benefits and it has even more benefits for most of the companies no driver means no wages to pay and AI systems don't get tired
so they don't have to take brakes which means your passes can be there quicker prices can be cheaper and once the technology is sound the trucks will be far safer for other vehicles however the there are still some Kinks to figure out like how well they perform in wet conditions in busy cities or even uneven terrain but we'll see them on the main highways very soon and because of this they could end up replacing over 90% of the 500,000 L haul truckers working in the US right now but it isn't just the transportation industry either
tons of office jobs related to data entry or admin work will disappear the legal industry and the healthcare industry will have tons of jobs replaced because ultimately AI is better than most people I mean it's better than most doctors at spotting signs of cancer and scans for example call centers already make you talk to a chatboard at the first point of contact some estimates put the amount of jobs lost to AI in the relatively near future at 300 million up 1/5 of all jobs by 2050 so what happens to all of the people who do
eventually get replaced now most of them aren't going to fit into another role in society these aren't people who are going to learn how to code and design these systems which are the only jobs the AI can really create ironically that's a job that will soon be replaced as well now there is the argument that the jobs technology takes we also create new jobs and replace those when people stopped using horses as their main mode of Transport cars created a whole new industry to replace them but we don't know if this will always be the
case the jobs related to AI are far more complicated than most people can handle it takes natural talent and years of study to even get started with them for the first time the machines that are replacing jobs are smarter than we are and whilst this has a bunch of benefits in terms of making our lifestyle so much easier and better with AI there's the worrying thought of what if we can't keep up with it as this will mean even less money in the pockets of regular people which brings us back around to retirement with all
of these jobs soon to be replaced the people working them will have lost their ability to survive even while they're still young and healthy never mind what they'll do when they're too old or too sick to do any kind of work we've seen that over the past 50 years the world has become less designed for people and more for machines and the profit they make the economy will eventually recover from the chaos of the past two decades but we won't see the benefits it'll take a complete shift in the way the economy has run for
current Generations to even dream of retiring but we'll have to wait and see whether people in society can actually cope with it
