Identification of trends in the decline in US income over the past five decades

Abstract

The aim of the work is to test the well-known prediction of Karl Marx about the tendency to reduce the income of the proletariat under capitalism. The United States has been selected as the object of study as an advanced capitalist country with a relatively weakly developed public sector of the economy compared to other advanced capitalist countries and relatively small social transfers. In this work, by income reduction, we mean a massive phenomenon, involving at least 10% of the population and lasting for at least 10 years. The cyclical nature of the capitalist economy leads to sharp fluctuations in the income of the population, because of which problems arise during data processing: the downward trends can only be detected at sufficiently large intervals of time. Considering this, as research methods were the study of the largest possible amount of heterogeneous data. Direct data on the income of various statistical units, adopted in American statistics families, households, individuals, persons, direct data on wages, as well as indirect data on quality of life – long-term changes in average people height, life expectancy, specific number of prisoners were reviewed in this paper. All studied sources confirm the assumption of a long-term (approximately since 1969) decrease in the income of the majority (> 50%) or at least a significant proportion of the US population. All data presented in the article are the estimates below. In fact, the share of the population subject to a decrease in income is higher, and the depth of the fall in income is greater. The consumer price indices, used in the processing of data do not take into account the greater susceptibility of income of the poor to the influence of inflation; the indices do not take into account the hidden increase in prices for the goods associated with the deterioration of their quality. Externalities, connected with the economic growth are not considered, the poor primarily affect the influence of which. It is shown that the decline in income is deep enough to have negative physiological consequences – the growth of at least 50% of the population is reduced, the life expectancy of at least 15 ... 30% (depending on the source) of the population falls. It is noted that the physiological consequences of a decrease in income have a gender asymmetry – reducing the average median body height and a decrease in life expectancy is more pronounced for women than for men, despite the trend of equalization of incomes/wages for men and women. The decline in income is deep enough to have negative social consequences: in 1969, it led to a transition from a stable number of prisoners for decades to exponential growth; peak values of the specific number of prisoners in the 2000s are seven times higher than the level of 1969. As a reason for the decline in income, the hypothesis about the impact of rising US immigration was presented and rejected.

Keywords

• income decline
• absolute impoverishment
• marx
• usa
• gender disparities
• life expectancy
• systemic crisis