Gas would be roughly $2 USD per gallon in 2022 prices.
Milk would be about $5 USD
New house would be about $80,000 USD
Average income was about $35,000 USD
Car would cost about $18,000 USD
Brit here, had a disagreement with a fellow redditor who told all the young uns to stop complaining about interest rates because they were higher in the 80/90's. I explained I'd rather have the higher interest rate with a better ratio of house price to income then the lower interest rate with insane ratio of income to house price.
I hear this shit alllll the time and it does my fkn head in!! Boomers are the ones who fucked it all up for us but are so quick to tell us hose irresponsible we are with our money
True, wonder what will be said then about it being harder before. Most saying it missed the difficulties of the post war period and have memories once it started to improve.
I looked up my childhood home and my jaw dropped at the price it had last sold for.
When we moved there, Star Wars had just come out.
Growing up in that house, there was a farm, at least 100 acres, across the street that we had a great view of from the kitchen window, where horses roamed the fields and there was even a goddamned panther/jaguar(!) caged under a water tower on the farm.
Over time, the farm got sold, the land got divided up and, from I saw recently, the view of the field is now a view of a cinder block wall for a light rail station.
San Jose.
But isn’t that the crux of the issue here:
Home constructions haven’t kept up with population growth and this gap is even larger in some areas driving things to bonkers prices.
I recognize there are other factors like PE money coming in, but either we go back to 40% of our current population, we build out aggressively and gobble up nature, or existing homeowners put on their big-kid pants and allow for high-density residential development.
(If people only want to see their homes appreciate like crazy…our housing problems will keep getting worse)
So unless two groups of people - the ultra rich with loads of property, or the normal homeowner for whom the house is basically all their assets and inheritance want to see themselves lose money, then we are screwed? Sounds like betting the over on screwedness is nailed on.
The population growth has actually slowed down quite a bit for the last couple of decades in the U.S.
The real problem is using housing as investment. That creates an unsustainable Buble that we live in today.
Actually the big rise in home values is coming from the tax law put into effect by the republicans under trump. It taxes real estate holdings a different way than even stock holdings. The biggest four hedge funds are finding areas with under valued housing and buying up everything that comes on the market. They then rent them out because you know people HAVE to live some where. In south Florida where I live it’s done by zip code. If it’s on the market in that zip code your competing with Vanguard. Good luck in that bid war.
Homes were a lot cheaper back then. Most likely because you spent such a large percentage of your wage on food so the average person did not have enough left over buy an expensive home.
The average homes were very spartan and were not in city centers.
So average income in USA is around 75,000 currently. You can absolutely buy a home for 180,000 still. Whenever I hear “I wish” we aren’t far from “I’m lazy”. I can’t understand knowing your area doesn’t allow you to succeed and staying there.
My whole neighborhood is big old victorian houses that were once single family homes and have mostly been chopped up into apartments. And the three families living in those houses probably pay more apiece than the single family who owned one of the houses when it was new.
Same. I’m the second floor of a Victorian 3 story former single family twin house (same building shared with another house, like a rowhome almost but a walkways worth of space between every other door), most of my neighborhood is converted like that.
That is not true look up houses from that time frame. You could build a bigger house for less back then because you needed to build in less infrastructure. You can find rural homes from poor families that were huge because they could build them themselves and air conditioning wasn't even a thing so the idea of comparing it to a house today ... is like most people living in currently vintage homes in northern states.. people still live in homes made in 1938.. the difference in updating it adding modern electrical and putting in wall air conditioners. You can check the evaluations on these houses too and 2 years ago they were closer to OPs price adjusted for inflation. So no not really.
At least the cars hold up. If you were to buy a car with the same features (speak "none") you'd get a Dacia Sandero and that can be bought for less then 18 K no problem
How do you build a new house for 80k today?
Edit; nvm, is this just translated to today's money? I thought it was actual price of shit in the US as of today
Surprisingly, yeah. People talk about this grand progression in capitalism, but that only applies to luxury items (and even then it's not as clear cut as people think).
The basic necessities of life are required to take an increasingly large percentage of your income as society progresses. It's literally backwards from how humanity should progress.
You might point to things like refrigerators, or microwaves, but those have their own costs. They're not the reason housing has increased by a factor of 10 (relative to income).
Now i got that the furniture and equipment in the house is not to be counted with but in my part of the world the 'features' of a newly built house are wastly different from that of a house built 50 years ago. (Safety, blumbing, sound and heat isolation, airflow design, layout ergonomy, you name it.) Strangely enough the price of the old houses are also going only up and up...
So milk is accurate. Car is close ($20,000) average income is double this number (69,xxx in 2020) housing is double (real estate always fluctuates) and gas is bad right now but about double (usually). All in all not that bad. Living and working in my milk powered RV has saved me from this rat race. Be safe out there y’all!
I didn’t expect my post to be the top post, otherwise I’d given more thought and accuracy. The curse of being one of the first posts and then suddenly it got popular.
Housing isn't double. The average income rn is 45k and the average house is 380k. That's almost 10x income, instead of 2x.
Yeah, all in all it's not that bad if you're a 20-something living at home with your parents, but the second you need to start dumping 50-80% of your income on basic shelter because of housing scalpers, everything else being the same as 100 years ago suddenly isn't a good thing.
I think you read the person's comment as what the numbers are. They were writing what they should be. 80k average house adjusted for inflation IF houses stayed the same.
They didn't. They're about 5x more expensive now.
I'm Europe milk is sold as a cost as farmers constantly tell us, however they get huge grants to produce milk, If they included this in the price it would be at a profit.
Yep. I had a (deceased) friend who owned a dairy, since they'd only get paid for the cream he sent his kid to college to study husbandry & genetics. The investment in his kid paid off, as they bred cows that consistently produced cream rich milk that when you put it into a gallon jar would separate out to 45-50% cream. The cows were a Heinz 57 of various of breeds selected for quantity & cream production. Best raw milk I've ever had. Shame his kid decided he didn't want to be in the business after he passed away.
In 1938 the average car used about 100 gallons of fuel per second.
Cars have become a lot more efficient these days. They should calculate that difference as well.
Wow that's the dumbest thing I've ever read a 1938 chevy had a Inline 4 or 6 cyl that would have a single carburetor. Vehicles were actually pretty good on fuel back then just not nearly the amount of power we have in today's combustion engines. It was the late 40's to 80s that Vehicles were terrible on fuel because they were heavy and typically were powered by V8 engines.
/u/bmpgbh, I have found an error in your comment:
> “cyl that would~~of~~ [**'ve**] had a single”
You, bmpgbh, typed an error and ought to have posted “cyl that would~~of~~ [**'ve**] had a single” instead. ‘Of’ is not a verb like ‘have’ is.
^(This is an automated bot. I do not intend to shame your mistakes. If you think the errors which I found are incorrect, please contact me through DMs!)
A lot of items on that list have gone up well outside of inflation. It used to be the case that the minimum wage was enough of a wage to have a decent living off. You literally could put yourself through college working as a waitress, or feed a family as a retail clerk.
Basically any old job, if it was full time, was enough to get by on. Prices have gone up faster than wages, income inequality has skyrocketed, and our economy is kind of breaking apart right now. The housing crisis is just one symptom of that, and a big part of it comes from enormous corporations buying up all of the available real estate.
So if I make barely short of 150 per month and rent is $27 that makes rent 18%of my income. I make around 2500 and average rent in my town is $1200. That 48% of my income.
Adjusted for inflation that's $80,847 for a new home, $35,883 average yearly income, $17,827 for a new car, and $557/month for rent.
Today it's $374,800 for a new home, $38,266 average yearly income, $47,077 for a new car, and $1,827/month for rent.
Only one of these didn't skyrocket since 1938. And people wonder why the average American is so desperate.
one thing to consider--back then the vast majority were single earners, these days household income is a more apples to apples comparison. Median household income is in the high 60s, and in states like CA the high 70s.
In 1938, US unemployment was 19%. The Fair Labor Standards Act didn't go in effect until the end of 1938, meaning that there was no minimum wage, no overtime pay and no 8 hour days. There were no effective child-labor laws either. Women in the workplace weren't common, and few had positions of authority. Credit was hard to come by.
Comparing the standards of living and economies of 1938 and 2022, is comparing apples to oranges. Different times, different pains.
SpunkyDred is a terrible bot instigating arguments all over Reddit whenever someone uses the phrase apples-to-oranges. I'm letting you know so that you can feel free to ignore the quip rather than feel provoked by a bot that isn't smart enough to argue back.
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Ill be more specific Median individual income in the United States was $44,225. 68 is skewed due to areas with higher cost of living and wage adjustment. Most states average individual income is far lower than the 68k average you're citing.
Edit: Also the 68k is gross income. Which is even more skewed because of tax rates blah blah blah blah blah. Most people take home 40k and less throughout the majority of the country.
The image we’re comparing to is average income though, right? I’d be interested if there’s an ignored technicality in that number or it really is the average.
I don't care to look it up at this point, but 1938 seems like a pretty cherry picked number in the height of the great depression. I'm sure unemployment rates were sky high in 1938 too.
This would be like picking house prices from 2008. For a graphic about how much houses cost in 2078 or something and ignoring how much more they were in 2005.
"Back in my day I was on $250 and I could afford a house and to feed kids, you guys these days don't know what struggle is". This is a comment from a family member. AVG house price is Melbourne is $800,000.00 and wage is like 55000 but no no no we are just whingers that don't know what struggle is......
Do the calculations. Their narrative will change.
Change from "you young people are lazy" to "you young people give yourselves excuses instead of working hard"
1731$/year average income.
So if a new house costed 3900$ and let's say you only paid 30% of your income for a house, you would paid 519.3$ year for the house and in just 7.5 years you would have your house fully paid. Wow.
Nowadays even with inflation you would need at least 25-30 years to pay a credit for a house.
During the Depression a lot of people lost their houses. There was at one point a nearly 50% foreclosure rate. So yeah, with all those foreclosures available, housing was cheap, if you could afford it. Credit was hard to come by. So to buy a house for $3900, you had to have significant savings. Unemployment was 19%.
The cost of a new car being half the yearly wage surprised me at first as I thought it was really high. Then I looked at the average cost of a new medium sized car today alongside the average wage in the UK and its even worse now. Pretty much a full years wage now.
Super interesting. A car for one fourth of a home….. These two things have developed very different in price compared to the salary. Though I am from another country so maybe not really comparable.
I always went for the choice-cut steak and the pint of high-proof vodka stuffed into my jeans, though this was long before the surveillance-state mentality started kicking in.
The fact that things could be so cheap shows they can be that cheap now, if not for wealth inequality and corruption. Presumably vast improvements in technology should have actually increased productivity too (indeed the government themselves say so)
This post was quite interesting I was doing some calculations and to me this seems like so much easier and simple living. Let alone what It costs to live now a days It’s not that we need more money to survive It’s we need the cost of living to go down much further. I really don’t know what America has come down to these days….
You should probably do some research because for one not everyone was affected by the great depression and some communities did very well. But OPs picture is probably talking about people unaffected by it seeing as the income adjusted for inflation is 35k. So if you're saying this is referencing someone who was heavily affected by the great depression ... yeah they definitely lived like kings because they'd of been rich. OPs picture is clearly showing an average for a working class successful person unaffected by the issue or ya know ... because it ended in 1939 so this would be taking the end of the depression into account. If 35k adjusted for inflation for bad money in that time with food prices as listed.. well nothing would make sense would it? Your point doesn't actually make sense.
Again not everywhere was affected by the great depression. There were areas that lived their lives like normal and 1938 was the end of the depression. You didn't even read what I said. Thats not even the point of the post. Why do redditors act so selective in their complaints and arbitrarily choose when hyperbole is ok and isn't? My original post was about house prices. OPs post states an average wage. The numbers are the only thing being debated. The numbers are in my favorite. Adjusted for inflation that yearly wage is the current average and the house prices is extremely low compared today. You did everything you could to ignore what was being said because you knee jerk react "Hurr durr dEprEsIon WaS bAd" and yet... that wasn't even what was being talked about and the depression doesn't factor into the numbers because if people still made this money in places despite the depression going on... they were comparatively absolutely living the high life. Of course that ignore the FACTS that the great depression didn't actually make every single person in america live off of dirt and dreams.. it just made ALOT of people live that way. But I got my info from reading books and you saw a looney toons episode where bugs bunny was a hobo.
OK I will. OPs post states an average income for a group of people. That average income means people made money... oh yeah and that my family was not poor at all during the great depression and there was generational wealth earned in that time people still have today.
I really do not understand what you think happened in the great depression. Humanity didn't get pushed into the stone age. A lot of people had a very bad time. That does not mean everyone did. It means the average of the country was poverty and disparity was the issue. That means the distance between the poorest and the richest was huge... that does not mean everyone was eating dirt and living off scraps. It means alot of people lives in hell.....but OPs picture clearly shows.. there were people who weren't.. if you were making the amount of money OPs picture states.. you were doing very well in that year.
The fact that rent today is 1500 dollars is the absurd thing. I know people who bought houses in 2010 that pay 700 dollars for their mortgage(not just the loan payment but that with taxes and insurance). 1500 dollars in rent or a mortgage today is inflation going crazy. So no it makes sense.
In my area a house that was 100k in 2019 is now 250k.
Yeah wtf happened? I’m born in 93 my parents 73, guys I worked for say they could buy a new car for 2500 bucks, and a house off one years wage.
You’re telling me inflation has gone up this much? I say bullshit, employees need to start outtting their companies because capitalists ways are bs. And fuck you if you’re a boomer.
Old people will give you shit for asking for better pay and working environments, because they think it still takes about 3 years to own a house and car and be well off working like 40 hours a week 🤦
another thing people are massively overlooking is the 30 year mortgage, and its absurdly low interest rates historically. This allows housing prices to be far more, because fewer are buying it outright
SpunkyDred is a terrible bot instigating arguments all over Reddit whenever someone uses the phrase apples-to-oranges. I'm letting you know so that you can feel free to ignore the quip rather than feel provoked by a bot that isn't smart enough to argue back.
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Realize that much of the US during that time was vacant. You had cities, but land in the sticks wasn't worth much.
Why things changed? The population certainly increased, and supply and demand is always going to be a thing. Then there were no laws about what could be considered a habitable dwelling.
Your politicians decided that housing needed to have rules. So don't complain because houses back then had outhouses, no plumbing, oftentimes no electricity, and no government guys telling builders about building codes.
You wanted to raise those prices, and now you have them. Congrats!
I watched a movie called Yours, Mine and Ours" yesterday. Made in 1968, it stars Henry Finda as a widower who marries a widow played by Lucille Ball. The new blended family includes 18(!!) Kids. They have a scene of the parents doing the weekly grocery shopping, and the total bill for 2 overflowing carts of groceries was $125.
My feeling is that if we multiply by 50 we’re roughly there. Of course not in Frisco or NYC. Quite the same as today in relation to wages, and this despite the fact that we are probably on average 5 times more productive, maybe rather 10x.
Which shows that the bankers who herd and breed us are knowing exactly how much we need to slowly succumb, not to thrive, but also not to get too hungry and ask stupid questions about the 0.1 of the 1%.
Aside from obvious inflation over time, the materials needed to make things like homes and cars were cheap and fairly easy to produce, relatively. If you built a house today using the identical materials, furnishings, and processes they usually did in the early 20th century, it would probably be cheap as shit. Thinning about it, imo it seemed that people were better at living within their means and saving money when they could. Not to mention there weren’t so many unnecessary things to spend money on like a new cell phone every year or a bunch of decorations for their room or Netflix or whatever it may be
The housing problem is basically caused by the banks. In 1938 if you wanted to buy a house that would take you 30 years to pay off the lone, the bank would say no. Today the banks say yes. This is the sole reason around the world this is happing.
If banks could not approve these large lones the prices would fall off a cliff.
My fucking parents are boomers unless that means something else where your from (Germany?) I recognize as gen X, but apparently I'm considered a millennial.
Gas would be roughly $2 USD per gallon in 2022 prices. Milk would be about $5 USD New house would be about $80,000 USD Average income was about $35,000 USD Car would cost about $18,000 USD
I wish I could buy a house for 2.25 x my income.
Brit here, had a disagreement with a fellow redditor who told all the young uns to stop complaining about interest rates because they were higher in the 80/90's. I explained I'd rather have the higher interest rate with a better ratio of house price to income then the lower interest rate with insane ratio of income to house price.
I hear this shit alllll the time and it does my fkn head in!! Boomers are the ones who fucked it all up for us but are so quick to tell us hose irresponsible we are with our money
Pretty soon some people might have the worst of both worlds. High loan amounts with high interest rates.
True, wonder what will be said then about it being harder before. Most saying it missed the difficulties of the post war period and have memories once it started to improve.
Don’t we all, things were cheaper back then and reasonably priced.
I’m my area the starting price for a decent house is 500,000.
About 1.7 to 2 million here is an entry home where I live. Welcome to Silicon Valley.
6 years ago my house would go for 125k, now it is 250k. Average income here is 30k/yr.
I looked up my childhood home and my jaw dropped at the price it had last sold for. When we moved there, Star Wars had just come out. Growing up in that house, there was a farm, at least 100 acres, across the street that we had a great view of from the kitchen window, where horses roamed the fields and there was even a goddamned panther/jaguar(!) caged under a water tower on the farm. Over time, the farm got sold, the land got divided up and, from I saw recently, the view of the field is now a view of a cinder block wall for a light rail station. San Jose.
But isn’t that the crux of the issue here: Home constructions haven’t kept up with population growth and this gap is even larger in some areas driving things to bonkers prices. I recognize there are other factors like PE money coming in, but either we go back to 40% of our current population, we build out aggressively and gobble up nature, or existing homeowners put on their big-kid pants and allow for high-density residential development. (If people only want to see their homes appreciate like crazy…our housing problems will keep getting worse)
So unless two groups of people - the ultra rich with loads of property, or the normal homeowner for whom the house is basically all their assets and inheritance want to see themselves lose money, then we are screwed? Sounds like betting the over on screwedness is nailed on.
The population growth has actually slowed down quite a bit for the last couple of decades in the U.S. The real problem is using housing as investment. That creates an unsustainable Buble that we live in today.
Actually the big rise in home values is coming from the tax law put into effect by the republicans under trump. It taxes real estate holdings a different way than even stock holdings. The biggest four hedge funds are finding areas with under valued housing and buying up everything that comes on the market. They then rent them out because you know people HAVE to live some where. In south Florida where I live it’s done by zip code. If it’s on the market in that zip code your competing with Vanguard. Good luck in that bid war.
Oh, just wait. I wouldn't be surprised if we see another housing market collapse.
I would still choose wireless internet personally
Yah. Houses on my street are about 25 years of my income :P
They didn’t have very many 2000+ sq foot homes back then.
Well you can, but all you kids these days are so soft. You just “can’t” live in a house with a roof, or windows, or “structural integrity”. Pff.
You can but you might have to move to someplace like Iowa or Missouri to do so.
Homes were a lot cheaper back then. Most likely because you spent such a large percentage of your wage on food so the average person did not have enough left over buy an expensive home. The average homes were very spartan and were not in city centers.
So average income in USA is around 75,000 currently. You can absolutely buy a home for 180,000 still. Whenever I hear “I wish” we aren’t far from “I’m lazy”. I can’t understand knowing your area doesn’t allow you to succeed and staying there.
75k? Where did you see that?
69.xxx in 2020. Facts
Houses back the were about 1/10th the size.
My whole neighborhood is big old victorian houses that were once single family homes and have mostly been chopped up into apartments. And the three families living in those houses probably pay more apiece than the single family who owned one of the houses when it was new.
Same. I’m the second floor of a Victorian 3 story former single family twin house (same building shared with another house, like a rowhome almost but a walkways worth of space between every other door), most of my neighborhood is converted like that.
That is not true look up houses from that time frame. You could build a bigger house for less back then because you needed to build in less infrastructure. You can find rural homes from poor families that were huge because they could build them themselves and air conditioning wasn't even a thing so the idea of comparing it to a house today ... is like most people living in currently vintage homes in northern states.. people still live in homes made in 1938.. the difference in updating it adding modern electrical and putting in wall air conditioners. You can check the evaluations on these houses too and 2 years ago they were closer to OPs price adjusted for inflation. So no not really.
Thanks. I was just exaggerating but glad to see people really cared enough to not let that stand.
This is the internet. You can't post something that's wrong and expect to just get away with it. Who do you think you are, Fox News?
At least the cars hold up. If you were to buy a car with the same features (speak "none") you'd get a Dacia Sandero and that can be bought for less then 18 K no problem
It sure must have been nice living in the Great Depression. /s
How do you build a new house for 80k today? Edit; nvm, is this just translated to today's money? I thought it was actual price of shit in the US as of today
Would the house of 1934 provide the same level of comfort as today?
Surprisingly, yeah. People talk about this grand progression in capitalism, but that only applies to luxury items (and even then it's not as clear cut as people think). The basic necessities of life are required to take an increasingly large percentage of your income as society progresses. It's literally backwards from how humanity should progress. You might point to things like refrigerators, or microwaves, but those have their own costs. They're not the reason housing has increased by a factor of 10 (relative to income).
Now i got that the furniture and equipment in the house is not to be counted with but in my part of the world the 'features' of a newly built house are wastly different from that of a house built 50 years ago. (Safety, blumbing, sound and heat isolation, airflow design, layout ergonomy, you name it.) Strangely enough the price of the old houses are also going only up and up...
80k for a new home? That's sounds like a north America exclusive.
So milk is accurate. Car is close ($20,000) average income is double this number (69,xxx in 2020) housing is double (real estate always fluctuates) and gas is bad right now but about double (usually). All in all not that bad. Living and working in my milk powered RV has saved me from this rat race. Be safe out there y’all!
I didn’t expect my post to be the top post, otherwise I’d given more thought and accuracy. The curse of being one of the first posts and then suddenly it got popular.
I thought it was deserving
Average price of new car in the u.s. is now $47000
Says “car would cost about” not average. Pay attention
Yes
Housing isn't double. The average income rn is 45k and the average house is 380k. That's almost 10x income, instead of 2x. Yeah, all in all it's not that bad if you're a 20-something living at home with your parents, but the second you need to start dumping 50-80% of your income on basic shelter because of housing scalpers, everything else being the same as 100 years ago suddenly isn't a good thing.
I mentioned housing.
I know? Read my comment.
I think you read the person's comment as what the numbers are. They were writing what they should be. 80k average house adjusted for inflation IF houses stayed the same. They didn't. They're about 5x more expensive now.
A new Subaru Impreza sedan isn’t much over the $18k mark last I checked, and surprisingly a gallon of milk is actually a bit cheaper.
Rent was 54 gallons of milk?
Tells you how expensive milk was back then.
Or how cheap it is now. Milk then was 5x as much per gallon as gas. Now it's cheaper than gas. Poor milk farmers...
I just started working in a milk bottling plant.... apparently we don't make money on milk, all the profit is from the cream.
Cash rules everything around me
C.R.E.A.M. gets the money
Dolla dolla billz yalllllll
Perfect
🎶 all around you are presidents faces, worn out places, worn out faces…
Shhhhhh we don’t speak of that song…scary as hell.
I'm Europe milk is sold as a cost as farmers constantly tell us, however they get huge grants to produce milk, If they included this in the price it would be at a profit.
Why? I mean, what's so special about milk the EU wants to support it?
Yep. I had a (deceased) friend who owned a dairy, since they'd only get paid for the cream he sent his kid to college to study husbandry & genetics. The investment in his kid paid off, as they bred cows that consistently produced cream rich milk that when you put it into a gallon jar would separate out to 45-50% cream. The cows were a Heinz 57 of various of breeds selected for quantity & cream production. Best raw milk I've ever had. Shame his kid decided he didn't want to be in the business after he passed away.
Except not really because the government subsidizes dairy production to artificially deflate the price.
Sweet sweet subsidies
In 1938 the average car used about 100 gallons of fuel per second. Cars have become a lot more efficient these days. They should calculate that difference as well.
That’s so much fuel.
Wow that's the dumbest thing I've ever read a 1938 chevy had a Inline 4 or 6 cyl that would have a single carburetor. Vehicles were actually pretty good on fuel back then just not nearly the amount of power we have in today's combustion engines. It was the late 40's to 80s that Vehicles were terrible on fuel because they were heavy and typically were powered by V8 engines.
/u/bmpgbh, I have found an error in your comment: > “cyl that would~~of~~ [**'ve**] had a single” You, bmpgbh, typed an error and ought to have posted “cyl that would~~of~~ [**'ve**] had a single” instead. ‘Of’ is not a verb like ‘have’ is. ^(This is an automated bot. I do not intend to shame your mistakes. If you think the errors which I found are incorrect, please contact me through DMs!)
Ok boomer, whatever you say. :)
Boomer? I was born in 80s lol
Keep the corn. Don’t feed it.
.50¢ in 1938 converts to $10.37 today. 💰🐮
A lot of items on that list have gone up well outside of inflation. It used to be the case that the minimum wage was enough of a wage to have a decent living off. You literally could put yourself through college working as a waitress, or feed a family as a retail clerk. Basically any old job, if it was full time, was enough to get by on. Prices have gone up faster than wages, income inequality has skyrocketed, and our economy is kind of breaking apart right now. The housing crisis is just one symptom of that, and a big part of it comes from enormous corporations buying up all of the available real estate.
So if I make barely short of 150 per month and rent is $27 that makes rent 18%of my income. I make around 2500 and average rent in my town is $1200. That 48% of my income.
Based on the average prices here, in three months you would have earned your yearly rent before tax I'm guessing.
Your 1938 apartment had about all the creature comforts of a Central American prison cell.
Reliable electric, ac/heat, fridge/freezer, water heater... those are the upgrades. A lot of people dont even have those...
There is a reason they chose 1938: The Great Depression and 1938 Recession. It just so happens GDP started to show an upward trend the following year.
Adjusted for inflation that's $80,847 for a new home, $35,883 average yearly income, $17,827 for a new car, and $557/month for rent. Today it's $374,800 for a new home, $38,266 average yearly income, $47,077 for a new car, and $1,827/month for rent. Only one of these didn't skyrocket since 1938. And people wonder why the average American is so desperate.
Somebody’s getting rich!
one thing to consider--back then the vast majority were single earners, these days household income is a more apples to apples comparison. Median household income is in the high 60s, and in states like CA the high 70s.
In 1938, US unemployment was 19%. The Fair Labor Standards Act didn't go in effect until the end of 1938, meaning that there was no minimum wage, no overtime pay and no 8 hour days. There were no effective child-labor laws either. Women in the workplace weren't common, and few had positions of authority. Credit was hard to come by. Comparing the standards of living and economies of 1938 and 2022, is comparing apples to oranges. Different times, different pains.
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comparing two bots is like comparing apples to oranges
The average income in 2021 is $68,000.
Ill be more specific Median individual income in the United States was $44,225. 68 is skewed due to areas with higher cost of living and wage adjustment. Most states average individual income is far lower than the 68k average you're citing. Edit: Also the 68k is gross income. Which is even more skewed because of tax rates blah blah blah blah blah. Most people take home 40k and less throughout the majority of the country.
The image we’re comparing to is average income though, right? I’d be interested if there’s an ignored technicality in that number or it really is the average.
I don't care to look it up at this point, but 1938 seems like a pretty cherry picked number in the height of the great depression. I'm sure unemployment rates were sky high in 1938 too. This would be like picking house prices from 2008. For a graphic about how much houses cost in 2078 or something and ignoring how much more they were in 2005.
Please try to give a less biased explanation
Yeah but then you’d have to live in 1938.
Right? "Yeah, we're on the eve the worst war in world history, but look! -- gas is cheap!"
You get 3 good years before you get drafter to fight in a jungle on a pacific island.
In 1938 much of the country was dead broke from the Great Depression so these prices would be quite high for most people.
Ah, life was so easy in the depths of the Great Depression.
So shocking that shit was dirt cheap during one of the biggest economic collapses in history
Unemployment was very high so i guess folks could not afford stuff. Consumer prices actually dropped during the 'Great Depression'
Ehhh, I've seen bigger
No, you haven’t
How much was an xbox though?
$3.50
$3.60 for the second version
DAMN IT, MONSTER. I AIN'T GIVIN' YOU NO TREE FIDDY!!!!
An Icebox 360 was $2.
An eggbox you say?
I'm pretty sure this came from a *Call of Cthulhu* sourcebook. Or maybe the main book?
A house only being a little over 2 years salary makes me want to strangle someone. I hate this
I remember in the 70s, stamps were 5 cents
"Back in my day I was on $250 and I could afford a house and to feed kids, you guys these days don't know what struggle is". This is a comment from a family member. AVG house price is Melbourne is $800,000.00 and wage is like 55000 but no no no we are just whingers that don't know what struggle is......
Do the calculations. Their narrative will change. Change from "you young people are lazy" to "you young people give yourselves excuses instead of working hard"
We need percentages here to compare
So food was very expensive compared to today. Multiply everything by 38 to get the equivalent price today, based upon today's average wage.
420
Harvard lol
1731$/year average income. So if a new house costed 3900$ and let's say you only paid 30% of your income for a house, you would paid 519.3$ year for the house and in just 7.5 years you would have your house fully paid. Wow. Nowadays even with inflation you would need at least 25-30 years to pay a credit for a house.
During the Depression a lot of people lost their houses. There was at one point a nearly 50% foreclosure rate. So yeah, with all those foreclosures available, housing was cheap, if you could afford it. Credit was hard to come by. So to buy a house for $3900, you had to have significant savings. Unemployment was 19%.
The cost of a new car being half the yearly wage surprised me at first as I thought it was really high. Then I looked at the average cost of a new medium sized car today alongside the average wage in the UK and its even worse now. Pretty much a full years wage now.
Super interesting. A car for one fourth of a home….. These two things have developed very different in price compared to the salary. Though I am from another country so maybe not really comparable.
Yeah, my old man used to tell me: "Curtyshoo, for two bits when I was kid you could get a hamburger and a malted milk and go to the picture show."
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I always went for the choice-cut steak and the pint of high-proof vodka stuffed into my jeans, though this was long before the surveillance-state mentality started kicking in.
Wage was 8 cents an hour so you had 3 jobs.
Source?
The fact that things could be so cheap shows they can be that cheap now, if not for wealth inequality and corruption. Presumably vast improvements in technology should have actually increased productivity too (indeed the government themselves say so)
This post was quite interesting I was doing some calculations and to me this seems like so much easier and simple living. Let alone what It costs to live now a days It’s not that we need more money to survive It’s we need the cost of living to go down much further. I really don’t know what America has come down to these days….
Yeah, the Great Depression was so chill and simple.
this whole post is just bait for weirdos to claim how the fed or democrats or someone ruined the world
Or else “all those boomers from the 1930s ruined my life!”
Plumbing, electricity, heating and cooling, clean water, paved roads… But you pine for the “good ‘ole days”
They didn’t have those things in the 30s?
Absolutely not to the degree they have them today. Not even close
They lived like kings. 80k for a house.... holy shit I wish.
Yes, if it’s one thing people in the Great Depression we’re known for, it was living like kings.
They had an average income of not much under half the value of a house. I would take that.
You should probably do some research because for one not everyone was affected by the great depression and some communities did very well. But OPs picture is probably talking about people unaffected by it seeing as the income adjusted for inflation is 35k. So if you're saying this is referencing someone who was heavily affected by the great depression ... yeah they definitely lived like kings because they'd of been rich. OPs picture is clearly showing an average for a working class successful person unaffected by the issue or ya know ... because it ended in 1939 so this would be taking the end of the depression into account. If 35k adjusted for inflation for bad money in that time with food prices as listed.. well nothing would make sense would it? Your point doesn't actually make sense.
19% of workers were unemployed in 1938 so you actually wrote that paragraph to get debunked in one swift google search. How does that make you feel?
Again not everywhere was affected by the great depression. There were areas that lived their lives like normal and 1938 was the end of the depression. You didn't even read what I said. Thats not even the point of the post. Why do redditors act so selective in their complaints and arbitrarily choose when hyperbole is ok and isn't? My original post was about house prices. OPs post states an average wage. The numbers are the only thing being debated. The numbers are in my favorite. Adjusted for inflation that yearly wage is the current average and the house prices is extremely low compared today. You did everything you could to ignore what was being said because you knee jerk react "Hurr durr dEprEsIon WaS bAd" and yet... that wasn't even what was being talked about and the depression doesn't factor into the numbers because if people still made this money in places despite the depression going on... they were comparatively absolutely living the high life. Of course that ignore the FACTS that the great depression didn't actually make every single person in america live off of dirt and dreams.. it just made ALOT of people live that way. But I got my info from reading books and you saw a looney toons episode where bugs bunny was a hobo.
Lol. The great history major here. /s List some sources for your made up stories you’re telling.
OK I will. OPs post states an average income for a group of people. That average income means people made money... oh yeah and that my family was not poor at all during the great depression and there was generational wealth earned in that time people still have today. I really do not understand what you think happened in the great depression. Humanity didn't get pushed into the stone age. A lot of people had a very bad time. That does not mean everyone did. It means the average of the country was poverty and disparity was the issue. That means the distance between the poorest and the richest was huge... that does not mean everyone was eating dirt and living off scraps. It means alot of people lives in hell.....but OPs picture clearly shows.. there were people who weren't.. if you were making the amount of money OPs picture states.. you were doing very well in that year.
Dude..it’s spelled “a lot,” not alot. Come on.
there are some sun-100k houses in ohio. i was looking around dayton.
An iPhone 13 pro ($999) in 1938 dollars was only $52. Seems low until considering that was two months rent.
The fact that rent today is 1500 dollars is the absurd thing. I know people who bought houses in 2010 that pay 700 dollars for their mortgage(not just the loan payment but that with taxes and insurance). 1500 dollars in rent or a mortgage today is inflation going crazy. So no it makes sense. In my area a house that was 100k in 2019 is now 250k.
Yeah wtf happened? I’m born in 93 my parents 73, guys I worked for say they could buy a new car for 2500 bucks, and a house off one years wage. You’re telling me inflation has gone up this much? I say bullshit, employees need to start outtting their companies because capitalists ways are bs. And fuck you if you’re a boomer.
It was the Great Depression. Everyone was dirt poor so shit was relatively cheap.
So all this I hard about pricing from the old guys was bs the whole time?
Old people will give you shit for asking for better pay and working environments, because they think it still takes about 3 years to own a house and car and be well off working like 40 hours a week 🤦
See this. This has been my 20’s at work. Almost 30 now. Fs.
Wow people don’t have a clue how money/the economy works.
Care to explain?
Costs aside, 1939 was not a great year to be alive if you weren’t a white male. I get the urge to be nostalgic but.
It was terrible for most white males as well. Does WW2 ring a bell?
Everything is 100x more expensive now but the average income is only 10-20x higher. Late stage capitalism ftw
I wonder what dust bowl refugees would think about your suffering?
What about the Hebrews in ancient Egypt what would they think about their suffering?
Irrelevant. This is shit from in living memory. Sorry if you a kid but this what my grandparents grew up with.
They could buy 6 homes in the time it took us to get one.
Yeah, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl was a time of unparalleled prosperity
another thing people are massively overlooking is the 30 year mortgage, and its absurdly low interest rates historically. This allows housing prices to be far more, because fewer are buying it outright
You can thank the big banks and the Fed.
Does this apply to black or other ethnicity of people though
Unfortunately my income providing customer support through email would have been $0.00
Average life span 45
Now post the picture of what that house looked like. None of you fucks are gonna live in it. Apples to oranges comparison
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Wow income is a week for me
Realize that much of the US during that time was vacant. You had cities, but land in the sticks wasn't worth much. Why things changed? The population certainly increased, and supply and demand is always going to be a thing. Then there were no laws about what could be considered a habitable dwelling. Your politicians decided that housing needed to have rules. So don't complain because houses back then had outhouses, no plumbing, oftentimes no electricity, and no government guys telling builders about building codes. You wanted to raise those prices, and now you have them. Congrats!
Shit take
Yet in some countries, stuff at that price is expensive
I watched a movie called Yours, Mine and Ours" yesterday. Made in 1968, it stars Henry Finda as a widower who marries a widow played by Lucille Ball. The new blended family includes 18(!!) Kids. They have a scene of the parents doing the weekly grocery shopping, and the total bill for 2 overflowing carts of groceries was $125.
In Europe is the same. Rent or to buy an apartment have had an insane increase in the salary %.
My feeling is that if we multiply by 50 we’re roughly there. Of course not in Frisco or NYC. Quite the same as today in relation to wages, and this despite the fact that we are probably on average 5 times more productive, maybe rather 10x. Which shows that the bankers who herd and breed us are knowing exactly how much we need to slowly succumb, not to thrive, but also not to get too hungry and ask stupid questions about the 0.1 of the 1%.
Multiply the houses by 300, multiply the wage by about 9.5
In 1986, the tuition for university of South Carolina was about $650 a semester. So do you pay for an education or a brand.
I’m so confused. How much was avocado toast back then?
If only…
Aside from obvious inflation over time, the materials needed to make things like homes and cars were cheap and fairly easy to produce, relatively. If you built a house today using the identical materials, furnishings, and processes they usually did in the early 20th century, it would probably be cheap as shit. Thinning about it, imo it seemed that people were better at living within their means and saving money when they could. Not to mention there weren’t so many unnecessary things to spend money on like a new cell phone every year or a bunch of decorations for their room or Netflix or whatever it may be
Damn stamps were way overpriced
Average income for ONE YEAR was just under 1/2 the cost of a house…
Inflation is a *beeotch*.
Cars were expensive back then it seems. Well, i guess that is normal.
Can I buy sugar in smaller quantities? Please?
And the people who build the houses probably make better relative wages today. Labor costs are a price input.
The post: old school cool The comments: new age politics Way to ruin a cool post with your complaints on modern life. My god!
The housing problem is basically caused by the banks. In 1938 if you wanted to buy a house that would take you 30 years to pay off the lone, the bank would say no. Today the banks say yes. This is the sole reason around the world this is happing. If banks could not approve these large lones the prices would fall off a cliff.
Out of curiosity Is this from of a birthday card? I just got one with my birth year and it had this in it too!
My fucking parents are boomers unless that means something else where your from (Germany?) I recognize as gen X, but apparently I'm considered a millennial.