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In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product's and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.

Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?

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[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

With Globalization from the 80s onwards, the income from work (which in turn feeds consumption) in developed countries started going down, and on the consumer side that income shortfall was compensated by growing debt.

Then in 2008 the debt growth and hence Economic growth under that new model were jobs were outsourced, was stopped, hard, because too much debt had been accumulated and the Economy was becoming unable to service the interest on that debt (think about it: if $1000 are lent today and in a year's time $1050 is due, to repay the principal plus interest, those $50 of interest have to be created as new wealth in the meanwhile. Now expand that to the whole Economy - more debt = more wealth has to be created to pay interest).

Central banks intervened by lowering interest rates to historically low levels (the so-called Zero Interest Rate Policy) supposedly temporary but not really, which in turn extended how much debt the whole Economy could stand without sinking under the weight of servicing the interest on it (lower interest rates = more debt for the same amount of interest needing servicing).

We're running out of runway again, so what's been hapenning is that, to maining profitability in an environment were all but a few are getting poorer (the ones getting richer are those will all that money which they lend, who have been receiving the interest for loaning money) companies are cutting on the cost side, so manpower, product quality and even trying to push consumers into new and more profitable models such as everything as a service.

This is just one side of the whole thing. There's also a resource depletion side in that most of the easy and cheap stuff to extract - from minerals to oil - has long been extracted and that too goes against continued growth, which is another pressure on companies to keep profits growing by other means.

[-] thonofpy@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago

The list of resources we are running out of should include resiliant ecosystems. Apart from that, to me, the entire comment could be summarized as "capitalism".

[-] ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub 1 points 9 months ago

Look Im a socialist leaning centrist but anyone who critiques just capitalism doesn't realize communists are authoritarian state capitalists. I agree there are serious economic flaws in our system, but saying capitalism explains everything just doesn't make sense.

As bad as things are here, the cost of living and costs of energy grew much more outside of America. Additionally, look at China's housing economic crash and demographic issues. Those are decisions made by State Capitalists, and their people are suffering from it.

Again, America has several reasons to fuck off, and I want some socialism, but for the sake of argument, saying "capitalism" doesn't amount to much you can critique about America's response to COVID versus any other country's strategy

this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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