@everittdmickey - I see your point and agree, it is better if you have money.... But if you talk with Uber drivers in London, those from Eastern Europe, they all want to go back to Soviet Union.
WHy?
The great answer I got last week: "It is was bad when you had money and you had to queue 1 hour in order to get 500 gramms of meet or 300 gramms of cheese. But it is much better than when you see nowadays a great variety of meet, cheese, and other products in the shops, but you can't buy them just because you don't have monney"
Oddly enough. The data does not agree.
Most of the time, for most of the people, it's better now than it ever has been in the past, on average.
@everittdmickey - several points here:
Is this a real or nominal? If the last one, then it should be divided by the accumulated inflation.
US statistics is a separate great thing... i think i need to write a separate article on that one. You may know that over the past decades, when you see this growth, they were constantly changing the definition of GDP: adding there Goodwill, Intelectual Property rights which no one knows how to appraise etc etc... If you calculate it based on 1960's GDP definition you will get the piicture that GDP is already falling for several years.
And last thing, who is getting all money? Here is a nice graph - Gini Index measures level of inequality in the economy. The higher it is, the poorests become even more poorer....