And if you consider that modern times has far more necessary expenses that often involve rent (internet, computing devices, etc) then it's quite likely that real median wages are down since 1979 in terms of how much money the average person has left to themselves at the end of each month. Even without these adjustments it's likely that real wages today are lower in absolute terms than they were in the 50s as by 1979 inflation had already started getting out of control.
The point of this all is that I don't think the numbers mean much of anything. And that's assuming you could even reliably measure them - you cannot. Go back into reconstructing 19th century data and earlier and you're going to rely on assumptions where the degree of uncertainty is much higher than the differences over time you're trying to assess. So I think far more informative than numbers are personal accounts. How did people live? Of course there's a literacy bias there, but even such accounts will shed light on the illiterate.
You can avoid this problem, by plotting nominal values and looking at their ratios. The price level will naturally cancel out.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QI7c is a graph of the ratio of your two deflators (arbitrarily normalised to 1980 Jan 1 equal 100.)
As you can see, it trends up over time. Meaning that CPI grows faster than the GDP price deflator.
The growth of this ratio explains some of the widening gap between your two graphs over time.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QJtv is my attempt at putting both time series on the same measure of inflation. Some gap remains.
Btw, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG# is what you might actually be interested in: it's the labour share of GDP. As you can see it's rather stable. Most of the action is in the difference between mean vs median labour compensation.
The reason your graph of labor compensation is stable is because it includes all forms of compensation for all 'workers'. So for instance Elon hitting his milestones will result in direct stock compensation in the ballpark of $1 trillion - those 22 million years of median income (not even wages) are then counted as 'labor compensation.' That's obviously an extreme example, but there are countless smaller scale examples that collectively distort the figure even more than Elon. Compensation, and even direct wages, at the top have skyrocketed while the majority of society has stagnated or declined. So we are set to become the first country with a trillionaire, and a country with 42 million people who can't afford food without government handouts. A tale of two cities?
In any case this is a big part of the reason why I think lifestyle descriptions are so much more useful than numbers. The stories of the boomer generation sound like fairy tales now a days - somebody putting themselves through college, buying the first car, and even having enough squirreled away for the down payment on their first house - all on the back of a part time job that didn't even require a college degree. It simply doesn't sound real, yet you can verify that it was fully viable by looking at wage and cost data at the time - it's real. But the fact that it doesn't sound real, even from a relatively very recent perspective - our own, rather emphasizes the point of stories being more useful than numbers.
To give a really silly example to explain: just because I can scale f(n) = n^2 and g(n) = n^3 to give the same value at n=1 (or any other arbitrary n), doesn't mean they will forever grow at the same rate.
You are weakening your own point by screwing up the stats: even after we correct for the difference in inflation measures, there _is_ a widening gap between mean and median worker income. (Where, yes, worker includes Elon Musk as CEO of Tesla.)
> This is a big part of the reason why I think lifestyle descriptions are so much more useful than numbers. The stories of the boomer generation sound like fairy tales now a days - somebody putting themselves through college, buying the first car, and even having enough squirreled away for the down payment on their first house - all on the back of a part time job that didn't even require a college degree.
Well, see Caplan's Case Against Education (https://www.amazon.sg/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp...).
Of course, the kind of crappy cars that boomers were driving aren't legal to buy anymore. Their houses were also much smaller, etc. It's a separate discussion of whether we should legalise crappy cars and small houses again. (I'm against the former but in favour of the latter.)
You'd want to correct for these quality differences to make your point stronger.
Also keep in mind that the boomer's "Golden Age" was the pinnacle of inequality. In the decades since, inequality has drastically shrunken. Mostly thanks to people in India and China moving from dirt poor and starving to merely poor (for India) and medium income (for China).
I would not want to go back to that supposed Golden Age, just because super-rich Americans were slightly less well off comparatively than today. Median and average Americans are still better off in absolute terms; and approximately everyone else on the globe is massively better off in absolute terms today.
Boomers weren't driving crappy cars. Even today things like the classic Dodge Charger is a car enthusiast favorite. It's a beast of a muscle car, and retailed for about as much as you pay for a Honda Civic now a days. Similarly the stuff about smaller houses is misleading. Lot sizes over time have actually decreased. In the past you might have had a larger yard, gazebo, shed, and outdoor work area - now you have some walk in closets primarily motivated by selling the house for more, based on square footage, than meaningful utility. And of course now far more people now live in apartments and other non-housing domiciles than in the past.
And yes, obviously education is completely broken. America's greatest intellectual achievement was likely putting men in the Moon that happened, unsurprisingly, in the 60s - as we now struggle to try to just send a man around the Moon. And they did this on the back of a far more limited educational system, with costs a small fraction of what they are today. We pay far more, and get far less, in just about every single way.
> The reason that graph is so stable is because labor compensation includes all forms of compensation for all 'workers'. So for instance Elon hitting his milestones will result in direct stock compensation in the ballpark of $1 trillion - those 22 million years of median income (not even wages) are then counted as 'labor compensation.' That's obviously an extreme example, but there are countless smaller scale examples that collectively distort the figure even more than Elon.
> This is a big part of the reason why I think lifestyle descriptions are so much more useful than numbers. The stories of the boomer generation sound like fairy tales now a days - somebody putting themselves through college, buying the first car, and even having enough squirreled away for the down payment on their first house - all on the back of a part time job that didn't even require a college degree. It sounds impossible, but you can indeed work out the math from wage and cost data at the time (okay kind of backtracking on the numbers don't matter aren't I?). It's real. But the fact it sounds impossible goes a long way towards demonstrating the soundness of the data I've shown.
If you use price levels measures that grow at different rates, indexing to set them equal at one point in time doesn't save you.
You are weakening your own point by screwing up the stats: even after we correct for the difference in inflation measures, there _is_ a widening gap between mean and median worker income. (Where, yes, worker includes Elon Musk as CEO of Tesla.)
> This is a big part of the reason why I think lifestyle descriptions are so much more useful than numbers. The stories of the boomer generation sound like fairy tales now a days - somebody putting themselves through college, buying the first car, and even having enough squirreled away for the down payment on their first house - all on the back of a part time job that didn't even require a college degree.
Well, see Caplan's Case Against Education (https://www.amazon.sg/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp...).
Of course, the kind of crappy cars that boomers were driving aren't legal to buy anymore. Their houses were also much smaller, etc. It's a separate discussion of whether we should legalise crappy cars and small houses again. (I'm against the former but in favour of the latter.)
You'd want to correct for these quality differences to make your point stronger.
Also keep in mind that the boomer's "Golden Age" was the pinnacle of inequality. In the decades since, inequality has drastically shrunken. Mostly thanks to people in India and China moving from dirt poor and starving to merely poor (for India) and medium income (for China).
I would not want to go back to that supposed Golden Age, just because super-rich Americans were slightly less well off comparatively than today. Median and average Americans are still better off in absolute terms; and approximately everyone else on the globe is massively better off in absolute terms today.
If a historian is going to uncover personal accounts from 2026, then they’ll be full of people who are struggling to make ends meet but are still drowning in a sea of inexpensive consumer electronics.
Of course inflation measurements are also flawed but that once again gets back into the broad point about how the reality of people is so much more relevant than any given number, especially once those numbers become seen as a goal to maximize, at any cost.
A while ago the Economist pointed out that one of the Rothschilds died of an illness that would today be easily curable with antibiotics, but at that time the cure could not be bought at any price.
TB is "just" a bacterial infection. Today, in a wealthy industrialized country with universal healthcare, if I caught TB they'd "just" cure it here. Cures are possible, often even relatively easy.
But all three of the famous Bronte sisters probably died from it (TB == "consumption"), not far from where my mother lives today in that same industrialized country. And most years today it is still the leading cause of infectious disease deaths because even though we could cure it we just leave poor people to die instead.
No offense intended but The Economist is very low-quality.
*edited year of death
I do not agree with their political views, but I can say the same about most papers. To a large degree this site is also beginning to be troublesome politically.
No offence intended but wavefunction is very low-quality.
Even in very cheap local housing you usually still have heating, a fridge and more then enough food (to much more often then to little even for the poorest people).
You imply there some something different around that date, but only show data prior to that date for one of those lines. WTF.
Dig a little deeper and the median wage is calculated by literally asking people roughly what they make and changing the methodology in 1994. Health insurance alone is a big difference in the ratio of people’s nominal wages and their actual incomes between those dates.
Real wages started becoming grossly detached from other metrics in society once inflation started going wild, and I don't think it's just a coincidence. In any case this is why it's very reasonable to think that real wages were even higher prior to 1979.
Making it at best absolutely worthless for your argument which I used to think was accurate. Congrats you helped change my mind.
> just give people a 2% 'raise' and they're content enough.
2% annual wage growth is well below average. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FRBATLWGTUMHWG83O
Looking for the actual causes after seeing your post the death of the US union had an incredibly strong effect on median wages. The wage distribution vs 20th or 80th percentile is quite different, plus a much larger percentage of median wage earners shows up as heath insurance. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1986/09/art1full.pdf
Also, 1979 isn’t the inflection point on the graph on that page instead 1970 is. Worse inflation slowed down in 1979.
It was extremely unevenly distributed though.
I got the impression from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that English workhouses near the end of their life were basically the predecessor of the modern homeless shelter, where visitors would get a single night of accommodation by law. The conditions a century earlier seem to have been truly hellish and tantamount to slavery. I have no idea whether either was better or worse than the rest of the world at the time.
All of which to say, is while you raise an excellent point all the evidence i've seen suggests the two are entirely unrelated projects. If anything increasing globalisation in the long term increased prosperity for everyone involved (just not necessarily by equal amounts) and vastly improved conditions.
If anyone has a counterpoint, by which i mean historical complaints or serious academic analysis, i'm happy to hear. None of this is a moral judgement on the relative evils and merits of empires and Victorian England, which is not the topic, just my opinion of why from a practical standpoint one has very little to do with the other.
“The book highlights that most of Britain’s economic growth in the imperial period did not come from its colonies. Trade only accounted for about a quarter of economic output, and most of that trade was with Western Europe and North America — not the Empire. For that reason alone, the Empire cannot have been the decisive factor explaining domestic investment and later wealth.”
Colonies were not originally intended to be profitable, they were way points for ships to stock up on goods, water, men, etc. Leaders in those colonies on their own initiatives then looked to expand the colonies to make themselves a big name.
Thing is, though... even the parts of Western history that aren't remembered as atrocities by modern standards were pretty thick with them. For example, thousands of homeless London orphans were enslaved and sent to the early American colonies for the crime of being homeless orphans, and very few of their names are recorded in subsequent colonial documents, so the assumption is that almost all of them died before reaching adulthood. Adult convict slaves commanded very low prices relative to African slaves, and children that weren't as effective laborers, and with fewer rights, were likely seen as burdens.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs and source https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3231742601...
Britain controlled the largest empire in history, yet most of its own population lived in dire poverty. I don’t believe this was accidental.
Imperial profits flowed almost entirely to a small propertied class (the landed gentry). The working classes.. who provided the soldiers, sailors, and labour.. saw virtually none of it whilst living in squalor. Before 1918, most British men couldn’t vote at all; franchise was tied to property ownership.
When we discuss ‘the British Empire,’ we’re largely describing the actions and enrichment of perhaps 3-5% of the British population. Most Britons today can trace their ancestry back through generations of poverty and disenfranchisement, not imperial beneficiaries. It’s an important distinction that’s often lost in broader discussions of imperial responsibility, as if those who are generationally impoverished should share guilt.
It is simultaneously true that the average Briton (arguably wealthy Britons, too) in 1900 lived in abject poverty compared to 2025, and the 19th century saw one of the fastest rises in living standards in Britain even among average Britons.
Wealthiest countries in Europe: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, San Marino, Sweden...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
Largest European colonial empires: Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Empire...
Some historians believe that once you account for the costs of subjugation and development, empire is not usually net profitable for the sovereign. Basically just a gigantic monument to the ruler's ego.
As Carl Sagan put it: Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
At their peak, virtually all of the aforementioned empires brought enormous wealth to the homeland. It might not be profitable in the long run, but the long run can mean centuries before it becomes a net negative.
Also, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were part of a Danish empire at one point.
The Dutch East Indies weren't returning home with spices of greater value than gold?
Spain didn't plunder so much gold and silver it devalued to the floor?
Belgium went broke under the crushing cost of exploiting the Congo?
I'll go with all empires eventually fall - but many grow on the inflow of wealth from their colonies.
Perhaps you mean "true" accounting - no resources are created, they just move from those that have them to the seat of Empire which wanted them - no net gain, just added costs of transport and military forces.
Historically, though, that's never been how wealth was counted by those that ran ledgers on everything they wanted.
Microstates and tax havens account for half that list, which grossly distorts wealth measurements. Such as Apple Europe being accounted for in Ireland.
The rest: (Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden); former kingdom of Denmark, also Hanseatic League? Apart from the brief period around 1700 at the height of the Swedish Empire, none of these count as imperial powers and did not have overseas empires.
Netherlands: had a substantial navy and overseas trading empire, although not as big area-wise as the UK. Probably more cost-effective as a result.
> Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium
What happened here is that all the great empires spent all their money and a vast quantity of human lives fighting each other to the death. Twice. I suppose Spain and Portugal collapsed on their own to ineffective dictators.
(special "fuck Belgium" entry here for just how brutal the small Belgian empire was; Belgian occupation of the Congo cost more lives than the Holocaust)
50% wage growth over fifty years whilst Britain’s running the largest empire in history? Compare that to the United States over the same period. The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever. If imperial profits were trickling down, you’d expect Britain to outpace non-imperial industrialising nations. It didn’t, if anything it was worse.
The literacy and life expectancy gains you’re citing came from industrialisation and public health reforms, not imperial dividends. Meanwhile the landed gentry who actually controlled the imperial trade were getting obscenely wealthy.
Life expectancy of 50 in 1900 still meant working-class Londoners in overcrowded tenements with open sewers, whilst their supposed countrymen lived in townhouses with servants. The Victorian poor saw industrial revolution gains, not imperial ones.
So just for additional context on how wage growth compares across different periods (I’ve average across decades):
Victorian Britain (with empire):
- 50% real wage growth over 50 years (1800-1850)
Modern Britain (post-empire):
- 1970s-1980s: 2.9% annual real wage growth
- 1990s: 1.5% annual growth
- 2000s: 1.2% annual growth
- 2010s-2020s: essentially zero growth
Real wages grew by roughly 33% per decade from 1970 to 2007, then completely stagnated. By 2020, median disposable income was only 1% higher than in 2007; less than 1% growth over 13 years.
The really depressing bit? Workers actually did far better in the post-imperial period (1970-2005) than they ever did during the height of empire.
Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits.
And the post-2008 wage stagnation shows the same pattern's still alive and well, just without colonies to extract from. Capital finds new ways to capture the gains; financialisation, asset inflation, whatever: whilst labour still gets the scraps.
Different methods, same fucking result.
The Victorian poor weren't sharing in empire's spoils, and modern workers aren't sharing in productivity gains either. I guess mechanisms change, but the outcome doesn't.
Most loans are for land, which mean your banking system isn't directing loans toward productive assets which increase economic activity.
So, no, the mechanism didn't change FMPOV.
No, not really. Britain did not exist in isolation. Economic growth was generally very slow in the 1800s.
So you need to compare Britain with its peers like France or Germany in both periods.
Yes, having infinite farmland in a still mostly agrarian economy gives you a massive head start.
Before the 20th century the link between the population and the amount of productive land was very direct.
I thought people would be able to “get” it on their own so I didn’t bother replying but you’re the fourth person, so let me help you understand.
Britain had 1/3rd of the fucking planet, including an active workforce and their accumulated generational assets.
The US had: barely arable farmland, the trials and tribulations of european settlers are well documented.
Yet wages went up more in one of these, and not the one that was controlling 1/3rd of the planet.
Yet it was already the richest place per capita in the 1700s. At least in the Northeast the average British colonist was earned more money, was healthier, lived significantly longer and was even actually taller than the average person who remained in Britain.
All because they had more land per capita.
> active workforce and their accumulated generational assets
Yes, its just that per capita (across the entire empire) that workforce wasn’t very productive.
I understand what you mean. But also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
You are right that common people in Britain didn't get as much out of Pax Brittanica as America's did during its own period of expansion.
Yes, that’s exactly the situation that results in highest income/wealth per capita. As long as that land can be utilized productively.
After they crossed the Bering Strait they also didn't receive any of the subsequent Old World advances in metallurgy, agriculture, chemistry, societal organization and so forth.
It's asking quite a lot of a relatively small population base to invent all those things independently while also lacking everything necessary to have comparable agricultural yields.
There was no Silk Road bringing gunpowder and paper and the Black Death to these societies. That means the native populations colonists encountered were the survivors of utterly cataclysmic epidemics. It's like if aliens brought a virus to Earth that killed 95% of the population and then they went "Hmm...these earthlings, they're not terribly productive are they?"
I'm not an anthropologist or an economist or a historian so there are many other factors I missed.
If you're calling them poor because they didn't have as much as the colonists, and that was bad, then perhaps income and wealth inequality today is just as problematic.
What does this remind you of?
Um. Weren't they carving one out of the American West? I mean, there were people there beforehand... it feels like a not-dissimilar situation.
But the important thing is, the 1900 Britain's male literacy rate was 97%. Illiteracy went from something that was fairly common to exceptionally rare.
(I'm not a historian, I've no idea how well this idea would stand up to scrutiny).
You see the exact same patterns in India and China today.
I picked a rich person in the Americas with hundreds of slaves, many houses, considerable land, a thriving business delivering returns, political connections, and frequently holiday on another continent.
This is well above the standard of living of a poor person in contemporary America.
Who now needs dozens of personal physicians (practicing 19thC medicine!), prostitutes, cooks, maids, messenger boys and musicians?
My home is currently unheated thanks to high utility costs and taxes.
The last three times I was on antibiotics they did almost nothing for me.
AI?
Just curious
I sweated over the opening for 5 minutes because I didn’t want to go in really hard with “don’t you know most brits had it bad ackshulee!”- because I’m one of those generationally poverty-stricken brits and it hits a bit too close to home to sound neutral.
Removed it; I’m getting flagged regardless, I might as well own it.
I’ve always assumed that this is why tax cuts for the rich are acceptable to voters.
‘I’m not defective and lazy like those poors. I’m going to be rich soon and don’t want high taxes when I get there.’
The article is describing an "early" veteran's struggle to deal with being disabled in a war and how society treats them. London isn't mentioned at all.
You might like to ask this chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Weston about being burned on a ship as a soldier many 1000 miles away from home.
The thing about history is that it is remote until it is personal.
My dad was a soldier (so was mum but she left to marry dad, because that was an "option" in the '60s). We lived in West Germany quite a lot and the LSLs (Landing Ship Logistic): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFA_Sir_Galahad_(1966) were an option for travel to and fro' the UK. Me and my brother were teenagers at the time. The cooks on the LSLs were Chinese (Honkers - Hong Kong) and inveterate gamblers. I don't recall all the crew being Chinese as the wiki article says.
After dinner, "pud" (sweet/pudding) was often apple fritters with syrup. Me and my brother had quite an appetite and my mum told me later that the cooks would bet on how many bowls of apple fritters we would demolish.
Another thing I remember from the LSLs is that the tables had a ring around the edge about 1" high and very sticky table mats. They were flat bottomed, being designed to run up a beach, which had no chance because they were pretty old by the '80s. In any sort of a sea they pitched and yawed and made you wish you were a better person!
Despite all that, one made it to the Falklands and died horribly along with a fair few soldiers. Galahad was actually one of the later ones. Lancelot was an old one and would never have managed the journey.
They weren't being imperial for their people.
It was so they could brag to other royals and rulers that their kingdom was bigger.
The people were resources and toys for the rulers' entertainment.
>Great powers are forced to manage the international system, or become a client of a great power. There are benefits to being a great power.
>When 1 great power builds weapons, everyone else is forced to too. This is called the Arms Race.
>Colonialism is one example of the Arms Race. If you didn't join the party, you were going to lose.
>Great powers put international politics above domestic politics. Its why we see the US do things like spend heavily on the military and get involved in unpopular wars.
The British empire was an aftereffect of a long power struggle of several European countries, which was, for its participants, way more existential than you admit it to be. Look at the Seven Year War, the first truly global war in history. France, England, Prussia, Russia, Austria etc. stood to lose a lot if they lost decisively, and were strongly incentivized to improve their militaries and navies to prevent precisely that.
The same scenario was replayed during the Napoleonic wars. One power eventually emerged victorious, it now had the best navy in the world and no peer competitor left. (It was also gripped by dangerous internal struggles, google "Peterloo".) That is a situation with a single person having a lot of hammers and the rest of the world looking like a nail park.
Obviously I'm making a vastly reductionist statement, but I don't think I'm wrong.
End of the day, an ego's purpose is to brag. Otherwise what is the point of having an ego? That's why wise people try to shed their ego lol
Empires have always had poor people in their capitals. I guess the effect was more pronounced back then because the industrial revolution was also happening.
Plenty of poor people in the US yet people still go there.
I hate to be obnoxious, but what O'Keeffe did was happen upon a rare book in a small library the he recognized had been written by a semi-famous author. Instead of scanning it (or having it scanned) and putting it on archive.org, then writing his article, he's actively concealing these "new chapters" from the world. My assumption is that he's planning to put it into print in order to make a few bucks.
According to the Google Books entry (which I don't quite trust, because why would there be a Google Books entry?), it's 80 pages, so he'll either have to write a hefty introduction of what seems to be a story about a disabled vet talking about Jesus, or he'll combine the war narrative and the post-war narrative (both obviously long out of copyright) into a single volume and hawk that, and the article he's written will be the introduction.
I guess I advise him to self-publish and to make sure to also target Christian bookstores rather than just academic libraries? Survey a brick and mortar Christian bookstore of possible and get an idea about what covers sell?
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/61f15583-612e-4ea5-aa...
Probably not as bad as Byfield, but compared to the standard of living now to back then, probably not that different when matched against the general population.
I’d say America is taking care of them pretty well compared to Dickensian conditions.
Disability can be easy or hard to get, depending on which generation you got injured in and whether or not they think you're playing it up. I've heard both people saying that they were pushed to claim disability when they didn't actually need it, as well as men who definitely needed it getting turned down.
Actual health care at the VA can be really uneven too. A friend of mine got a knee injury and was basically given a three month supply of an addictive painkiller and told to go sit at home and take however much he wanted.
What do you think happens to a young man in his prime who is stuck glued to a couch other than sit around playing video games drunk all day addicted to painkillers?
Well, in his case at least, he managed to get off of them and turn himself around before it became too destructive, but the lack of care he was shown by the doctors put him at significant risk for permanent harm.
I've heard other horror stories, and stories of nothing but praise as well. YMMV.
He has no combat deployments. He has a home gym, rolls BJJ 6 days a week. Has a government (tax payer) paid Bachelor’s and Master’s in Comp. Sci. and makes 6-figures working as a civilian DOD employee.
So I’m not sure in what meaningful sense of the term he’s “100% disabled” but he’s enjoying his salary so good for him?
After all, it’s not as if normal people in normal society lack these conditions as they age. Connecting them to the service is spurious and often fraudulent. By all means, let’s take care of the folks with serious physical and mental injury that cannot provide for themselves, but let’s be real our system is heavily gamed and abused.
Counselling? Therapy? Provided.
Community based support?
Money?
College education? Vocational training?
I hear about the great experiences less often, though that's to be expected since unhappy people tend to share more.
Even this bullshit response is exactly what the author discussed
Disdain and contempt for servicemembers who fought, were hurt or maimed in wars
So again, ironic, given the topic context
I believe that the people on his show are real and have the money issues they claim. But I also believe that his crew select for sensationalism. You aren't ever going to see someone who the system is genuinely fucking over on his show. They will not invite that guest on. They only invite people on who have done colossally stupid shit and could be getting their shit together if they weren't complete fucking doorknobs.
There are more than enough idiots in the world to keep his channel going for at least a couple of years.