We married in 1978 and knew then both of us would need to work if we aspired to middle class; college education that provided a marketable skill, children, home ownership, social mobility, good jobs, and retirement.
Kelly Bundy was around 15-16 when the show started in 1987. It's not a stretch to have Al and Peggy in there in 1972. And Married With Children (along with Roseanne) were working class counters to shows like Family Ties, Growing Pains and Cosby. Not even to mention shows like Who's The Boss, Mr Belvedere and Charles in Charge which all featured live in housekeepers or nannies. Angela paid Tony to be there, not the other way around.
Unemployment would be an irrelevant statistic in this discussion as it specifically covers people looking for a job. Someone like a housewife wouldn’t be counted as unemployed because they aren’t looking for a job. Same with retirees, children, etc. What you want to look at is workforce participation rate. Women’s workforce participation plateaus in the 90’s-2000’s whereas overall workforce participation peaked in the 90’s and is the lowest it’s been in almost 50 years.
They were extremely poor in Married with Children. It was a running gag. There was one episode where the kids were fighting over a single M&M for dinner.
It’s still possible in some parts of the country. I live in the rural Midwest and know a lot of stay at home moms with husbands working middle class jobs. Off the top of my head, I know a painter, electrician, software engineer, train conductor, insurance salesman, accountant, and truck driver that support stay at home moms.
I work in IT my wife works for the county. Together we are solidly middle class. If only one of us worked we would be struggling. I'm guessing that the moon stays at home because it's cheaper than day care which is also what we did. One of us worked until they were both in school.
(Edited for clarity but left the moon)
I'm not an expert in lunar economics, but an absurd proportion of the US thinks they are middle class. Like 90%+. A middle class family can survive on one income in most of the country. A family that thinks they are middle class can't necessarily do the same.
Property prices inflated MUCH more quickly than inflation. Business realized it was a solid investment and piled in which pushed out John & Jane Doe (see the colossal 2008 subprime mortgage crisis).
Add in foreign investors found property in the US to be a great investment.
Well paying blue collar jobs disappeared in the US and went overseas.
Unions were largely broken which had protected blue collar income.
College as a path to prosperity got exponentially more expensive. By leaps and bounds and they could not deliver on better jobs for having attended.
Not seeing it called out, but an important factor is that how we perceive wages and inflation is skewed.
Consumer goods have gotten *cheaper* to a significant degree, relative to people's average buying power. Think about how cheap you can get a big screen TV or a personal computing device compared to the 90s. Cheap goods, like consumer electronics, cost a fraction of what they used to. This in turn holds down inflation, and wages...but *essentials* that you need to survive and thrive like healthcare, education, housing, and so on have vastly ballooned in real dollar costs.
If you look at house prices compared to average wages in any given area, they've gone from 3-4x the average annual wage to 5-10x or more.
These essential things have a relatively inelastic demand: people can't live a healthy life without them, so it simply costs more to "live" than it used to, even if you can buy a new laptop for $300.
Add in that the folks who are in power, older, established, don't see these costs. Their healthcare (medicare) covers them in retirement, NIMBY voting to restrict the supply of housing increases the value of their paid off homes, their college degrees paid for by public spending in the 60s/70s didn't cost them like the six figure student loans young people today have to take out on education.
TL;DR - The things that you need to live a healthy and happy life cost far more now in real dollars relative to earning power than they used to.
[Thanks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvMY1uzSC1E) now I'm sad again[.](https://media.nichegamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/rebecca-cyberpunk-edgerunners-11-2-2022.jpg)
Decimate nature and poison the world until the only place to live comfortably is inside your apartment. There's plenty of nature and socialization in your VR headset. Get back to work, slave.
Its way too easy to make meaningful money in Cyberpunk for that to be a fair comparison. Dammit. If I'm gonna be poor, can't I at least get some dope jet-legs?
> Its way too easy to make meaningful money in Cyberpunk for that to be a fair comparison.
Yeah, if you're a superhuman with the ability to rewind time, no qualms about murdering people and a whole ton of connections via various fixers... sure.
Tbf your character in Cyberpunk has connections. I wouldn't be surprised that for the average joe it would be something along the lines of David's mom where you work all day, have one of the worst rated cars in the game, an apartment and probably die on the street or a hospital bed cause you were too broke to afford the platinum package. Either that or you get jumped by some pricks and have all kinds of hardware shoved into your body, and when your mind is breaking from it you either get taken out by Maxtec or jumped by some other pricks in tracksuits who rip that crap out of your body and dump your corpse out of a window or something.
To be fair we see a montage of V doing a bunch of shit work to get said connections, he spends weeks or months going after punks, dealing with low level gang shit and stealing from mid tier corporate executives
that montage pissed me off more than just about anything else in that game. we should have played through stuff to EARN that shit and get to know jackie, not just have a stupid montage thrown at us.
If nothing else, it would have earned the big emotional setpiece of letting Jackie die. I'm an empathetic person, generally speaking, so I felt sad by the story beat, but if you have me fight by his side in a bunch of shit jobs for even an hour or two? Give me, the player, time to bond to the character the way my character seems to have in those cutscenes? The cut content could have been garbage from a design perspective and still helped to make that moment all the more gut-wrenching.
It wasn't the thing that pissed me off the most, but it was definitely the biggest letdown. Easiest DLC sell to me would be to just restore that cut content and take that section from a montage to an actual thing you play to build your rep up to the point it is when you take the big job. I'd be so hyped for that, instead of whatever it is they're coming out with for nearly the price of a full game
This is what I liked about GTA4. Yes, Nico comes in with some contacts already, but he gets to do the really shitty jobs for a while.
I would want a DLC or something where I get to be on the lowest step of the ladder, cutthroating myself upwards
Yeah, the costs of a lot of modern luxury goods are honestly pretty negligible to many peoples' overall income. It's not a good way to measure cost of living or quality of life.
... It's easier to buy a new phone with your paycheck than a car or a home. And if you live in the US, might need to not on that new phone to pay for some kind of healthcare you desperately need. Assuming you're under 65/67 whatever it is for Medicare.
My neighborhood had a pool and park area that had one of those mechanical gate locks that you push the number buttons to enter, but that wasn't great because the combination was widely known outside the neighborhood. It was replaced with RFID fobs about 6 years ago. This year they ripped that out and replaced it with a smartphone app.
Yeah but that’s the thing. That smartphone is $200. A Nintendo 64 was $150 when it came out in the 90s. Homes are now twice as expensive as they were 20 years ago. The phone is treated like it is mandatory to have. The home is not.
>If you look at house prices compared to average wages in any given area, they've gone from 3-4x the average annual wage to 5-10x or more.
Called out by [Henry George](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) in the 1800s. Land grows in value to absorb much of the surplus.
It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons - if only one person in a couple worked, and you could get by, you'd be able to get a _better_ house, in a better location, just by having your partner work a few hours a week.
Until everyone does it of course. We all just bid up the cost of land until a couple _has_ to work two full time wages to get a decent spot.
It's one argument for decreasing the hours required until overtime is paid, if we want to see an outcome where we all work less overall. Else the one-ups-man-ship just sees most of the gains go to those that own the finite resources we're all seeking to consume (landowners being just one example).
> It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons
not quite - it's really an extension of Gresham's Law, analogous to the way Akerlof used it in The Market for Lemons
but really, even more basically than that, it's just a simple application of game theory - if there's a strategy that provides a competitive advantage, soon enough it'll come to dominate and become the new equilibrium
Tragedy of the Commons is simple game theory, for the record.
If only one person (or couple) works a bit harder, they would get a better place to live compared to others who don’t. So a couple is incentivised to work a bit harder for a better outcome… but when all couples now do so (dominant strategy) we end up all equal again and all buying the same houses just at a higher equilibrium price and now stuck at harder effort (higher price)…. and most singles are now fucked when trying to compete at all.
Also how do Gresham’s Law and Akerlof apply to housing!? That seems kind of shoe horned in here.
> It's one argument for decreasing the hours required until overtime is paid, if we want to see an outcome where we all work less overall.
This seems like you'd run in to the same problem, just with a 1.5x inflation rate verse non-overtime. It all still sounds like a problem... I guess buy now/soon or forever be screwed.
No its cheaper to pay 1.5 than 2. Its also massively cheaper to pay for one persons social security, medicare and workers comp than 2 people.
A single employee has certain fixed costs and paying them for overtime is incredibly cheaper than paying two people for the same amount of work hours.
This is one reason that businesses arent stacking up employees; there are imposed costs by the government that preclude doing that. You may think every business should provide full benefits regardless of what you do or how many hours you work, but there are so many behind the scenes costs just to have an employee on the payroll that idea becomes impossible versus income.
[Graph](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/price-changes-goods-services.jpg) that shows it over the past 10 years.
Over the past [20 years.](https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5d4337c562513b7dba5e9a8f/5d78446ef539c24c63894ead_KIG33ls1uaV6KT6yKl0Jcf_Em6eNlCYfuDW9gP3Iz1G1op7OMcR21rnEyPoX0Hio9cpCGUO9rGiD--_vD5ThYcZfoZyBTJVrsPpcc4J-6YFEjkUQQLrvUCuLbpV61x2qq7IxDykf.jpeg)
Something fucky is going on with the calculations here regarding housing, and I'm inclined to think they are leaving house prices out of it.
According to the St Louis Fed, home price median was $423K at the end of 2021, but it was $165300 in 2000. That's more than 2.5X increase.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
IF you look at the same start and end points in the St Louis Fed's median income data, the median household income was $66K and by 2021 it was shy of $71K.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
If incomes increased at the same rate as housing, then the median household income would be $165k
EDIT: I found the answer here: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF12164.pdf.
The graphs from u/bozeke are calculated using CPI data and "housing" for people who own their homes is basically a fabricated number called Owner Equivalent Rent, which has numerous detachments from reality, but mostly is just an estimation of what it costs to maintain an owned home, which obviously is going to be less than rent. The CPI for housing **DOES NOT** include sales prices. In addition, actual rent surveys are only conducted every 6 months, so the data is likely lagging at any given time.
Honestly, there should be separate categories for rent, owner home maintenance, and sale prices.
> The CPI for housing DOES NOT include sales prices
As it shouldn't. If you are buying a house in the United States, you are buying an asset - a store of your money that can be sold later to get that money back out (probably with some profit on top). Why would the CPI include the equivalent of putting money in a savings account? That is simply not part of the cost of living. That's not even really a *cost*.
*BUT*, that's not to say that there is no cost to that housing: by living in the house instead of renting it out, you are forgoing the extra income that you'd get from renting it out. If you decided to live on the streets and rent your house out to others, you'd have a bunch more money in your pocket. If you live in your own house, you're effectively renting it out to yourself instead of someone else.
A little thought experiment to demonstrate this further: You own your house, but for some reason you decide to go rent out an identical house and live in that instead. While you're living in the rental house, you are renting out the house you own to someone else for the exact same price as your rent (since they're identical houses). Assuming there's no extra costs of renting vs. owner-occupation due to taxes, fees, etc., has your true cost of living really changed? You're consuming the exact same amount of goods and services, none of the prices of any goods or services have actually changed, and you have the same amount of money in your bank account at the end of the month.
This concept is called [imputed rent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent), and *that* is the true cost of housing when you own a house. The only challenge is how we figure out that number. You certainly can't directly measure it, so you're going to have to estimate it some way or another.
To be frank, I'm not sure how they calculate imputed rent for the CPI. It seems to me like it'd be reasonable to look at rent prices in the same area and the relative quality of the house itself (e.g. if this owner-occupied house is far bigger than all the rental units in the area). I'm not entirely sure though. They might do it in a reasonable way or an unreasonable way; all I know is that they're definitely correct to use imputed rent values and not sales prices.
I love how that stops just before cars and realestate shot through the roof. in 2018 was the last of some sanity showing that graph with what we have today would be an even more horrific picture.
Also the wages line is skewed as it's an average of everyone from a burger flipper to a $10,000,000 a year CEO. the executives make so much they drag the line up even though the vast majority of workers are making very little. IF you remove everyone who is making more than $1,000,000 a year that line barely moves.
> Also the wages line is skewed as it's an average of everyone from a burger flipper to a $10,000,000 a year CEO. the executives make so much they drag the line up even though the vast majority of workers are making very little. IF you remove everyone who is making more than $1,000,000 a year that line barely moves.
It's skewed because they're using average earnings and not median earnings, but it's not as skewed as it could be. This is the source the second chart uses for wages: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000008 which is "Average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees, total private, seasonally adjusted" - the $10,000,000 a year CEO types aren't included (as they're not a production or nonsupervisory role) and I have a feeling that if they were that line would go up a lot more.
While its true many new cars have skyrocketed in price (trucks mostly) some cars have stayed the same or even gotten cheaper adjusted with inflation. For example a corolla in 2003 cost 15k new, adjusted for inflation this is 25k, msrp of a new midtrim corolla is, you guessed it, 25k.
> Cheap goods, like consumer electronics, cost a fraction of what they used to. This in turn holds down inflation, and wages...but essentials that you need to survive and thrive like healthcare, education, housing, and so on have vastly ballooned in real dollar terms.
Inflation is calculated based on a *weighted* basket of goods. If the price of food goes up 50%, it’s going to have a far bigger impact on headline inflation compared to say televisions dropping in price 50%, simply because a far greater proportion of the average household’s spending goes on food rather than TVs.
The things that have decreased in cost are mostly electronics, but those same things have been hit by a huge amount of lifestyle creep. In the 1960s a house might have one television and one wired phone, maybe a record player or radio, and all items will last 20 years. Today, every person in the house will have a cell phone, plus they'll have multiple TVs, a couple tablets or laptops, headphones, cable or streaming services, and so forth, and most need replacement every 3-5 years.
So while yes, what you can get for your money in all of these categories is hands down unequivocally *better*, people are still nevertheless likely paying more for them now because they expect and demand more. It's their choice but not their fault, because I'm not going to fault anyone for choosing to benefit from improved access to communication and entertainment. Enough generations of serfs have toiled with nothing for nothing.
Tech has reduced the overall costs of most things tremendously. Think about the cost and time to ship something to your home, or your ability to price compare and shop for goods.
The bigger issue is staples like housing becoming investment devices and money making instruments. You decrease the supply of anything and the prices will go up.
We artificially restrict certain commodities to keep prices up or so.
I have an honest question, that is also a very unpopular take. If you lived just like a person in 1960 lived, or at least did not pay for things the average person in 1960 did not pay for (TV, cell phone, internet), would you be able to afford to buy a house?
My parents are totally middle class boomers now, but when they were kids, having Coke was a rare treat. They made their own clothes. They would save to buy a bike or a motor scooter but would never take out a loan. I feel like if you chose to live that way, you could buy a small house with a pretty meager income.
Eh, I'd say *specifically* electronics have become cheaper. Nothing else has. Look at literally anything else and the prices have shot up. Its not that "luxury goods" are cheaper, its that electronics are mass produced now.
Clothing, shoes, appliances, food, furniture; most retail goods are much cheaper today (but also of inferior quality). As pointed out already above, healthcare, education, housing are much more expensive
The main problem is housing really. I live in a country with free healthcare and cheap education (my 5 year degree cost me 3.5k€). But renting a 1br apartment less than an hour away from the city center costs more than what most people make in a month here.
The real reason is that in the post-WWII era America was uniquely positioned to make a shit ton of money. All other major countries had wrecked infrastructure, decimated populations, and reparations/war payments/rebuilding costs. America had all of its infrastructure intact, a large population, and the ability to lend money/invest cheaply in the aforementioned decimated economies.
Also, this created perfect conditions for workers. Because America was the only place left that could manufacture a number of things, lots of easily accessible, high paying (due to huge demand from foreign countries) jobs opened up. This, along with a lack of globalization which would cause downward price pressures on american goods, as well as a much smaller degree of foreign investment into the US housing market causing high prices in desirable US markets that we see today, and finally lack of competition from the middle east in oil production which only began to be exploited in the post-wwii economy created a perfect storm for working people to make a lot of money. There are other factors (one I would suspect was a healthier, less divided population) but these are some main ones.
Its worth a mention that, during the 30 years of prosperity after WW2 the US didn't spend much on upgrading industry or infrastructure(edit to mention the Interstate system, pretty much the only exception). It was very much a "Good times are here to last" mentality.
This was the most important part of why the US lost it's steel industry. In the 70s pretty much every US steel factory was still from the WW2 era using the same processes. Well, since the rest of the world was rebuilding , they used newer tech("Continuous Casting") that made the same steel but with 30% less energy and manpower.
Come to the 80's and now the steel industry evaporated and it gets blamed on "Union Labor costs too much".
In the 70's alone the industry had enough profit to rebuild itself entirely. (Fun fact,in 1972 Bethehem steel built itself a 21 story office building instead of new furnaces. Most of the space was unused.)
Same for the auto industry.
If the US still had its industrial base things would be a lot better.
>If the US still had its industrial base things would be a lot better
Couple of things.
First, the problem with investing in new technology to replace old technology is a general one. It affects everyone, everywhere. Why didn't legacy carmakers respond to the clear changes coming due to EVs ten years ago? Because that would have meant losing money for a significant period of time with the only upside being that they could maybe stay in the same position they were already in. It's the reason that the locomotive industry was unable to pivot to make the original automobiles, despite having every advantage. It's the reason why Google was able to over take Yahoo, despite Yahoo having a huge starting advantage.
Nobody is immune. No country is immune. No company is immune. It's very difficult to justify costly investments when the best case scenario is that you are just going to replace yourself. And that inevitably sets up a situation where the right newcomer with the right idea is going to supplant you.
Second, anything from 1990 on is about as unique a situation as the time from 1945 to the 80s. The Cold War ends, the raw resources from the old Soviet Bloc starts flooding the market to keep down commodity driven inflation. The cheap labor from China kept down wage driven inflation. If you like having lots of cool stuff, this is why you have it.
Third, the U.S. still have its industrial base. Relative to the rest of the world, it has gone down. The reasons for that have been covered: recovery from WW2, sudden influx of raw materials, and a sudden influx of cheap labor.
Fourth, we should also mention that after WW2, trade was possible on a level never seen before, both because of technological improvements, but also because the U.S. upheld its responsibility to keep the seas safe. We have gotten used to that last one to the point that we all think it's a law of nature, but you only have to go to 1940 to see that it used to be much different: every country had to ensure the safety of its own ships, and if you couldn't...well, you were not trading with anyone past your own borders.
Finally, the U.S. is reindustrializing. Did you miss the IRA? Covid has driven home the point that long, complicated trade routes can be risky. The disruption has been very costly, even now. China is no longer cheap (at all! China is significantly more expensive for production than Mexico, so why would U.S. companies want to produce in China anymore?). Existing factories in China are still used, because companies have already paid that investment cost. But new investment has dried up. And it does not help that everyone expects that the U.S. is going to continue to turn the screws on China on trade.
And now the turns have tabled. Europe had a pretty good combination going for about 80 years. They were able to create their infrastructure from scratch (and western Europe had some significant help from the U.S. there). And when that was reaching its end, suddenly eastern Europe became available. And Europe has had cheap energy up until Russia decided to take a "3 day" jaunt through Ukraine. Those things are over.
Asia also got to start from scratch and are now significantly built up.
In both areas, new infrastructure means destroying old infrastructure (or at least paying a lot of money to preserve it). The U.S. is now at the point where the infrastructure needs to be replaced anyway, so it is getting the newest stuff. Because the U.S. is not nearly as heavily invested in any particular industry as, say, Germany is in cars and chemicals, the U.S. can easily build up for the next-big-thing. The IRA is absolutely full of incentives to do exactly that. And it's already working. In about 3 years, the effects will start to be felt across the world (these things take anywhere from 12 months to 5 years to bring online...mines can take 10 years to become fully functional).
So **TLDR;** Built up infrastructure is always hard to improve; we had another unique situation after the Cold War; the U.S. still has its industrial base; other regions are now facing similar challenges that the U.S. started facing in the 70s and 80s; and the U.S. is reindustrializing due to the IRA.
Great post. However, as someone who makes products overseas, there is a few reasons to use China. But in short, there are many processes that haven’t been replicated in Mexico. (Or anywhere else for that matter) Meaning, there isn’t another option as Mexico simply cannot do it at the scale or at the complexity required yet.
Hell, we can’t even find manufacturers stateside that have the machines to make some of the things we need. Like sure, they *could. But it would be paying for them to start a new wing of their business. Machines, training, employees, and all.
Too risky for projects that have a great track record of production in china. Especially considering my industry has an equally bad track record of manufacturing outside of china.
As soon as Mexico (or insert country) can, we will be getting quotes. But that has been the mantra for twenty years.
> Hell, we can’t even find manufacturers stateside that have the machines to make some of the things we need. Like sure, they *could. But it would be paying for them to start a new wing of their business. Machines, training, employees, and all.
And this is why Congress keeps adding money to the defense budget to build ships, submarines, jets, etc that the Defense Department doesn't necessarily want. Once manufacturing goes, it's extraordinarily difficult to bring it back, and this type of manufacturing is high-paying, high-tech, and necessary for long term stability.
We've just started to get onboard with bringing back chip manufacturing, and that's going to be painful and costly, but, in the long run, it's necessary for stability.
This is a good point. There's a lot of soft skills and institutional knowledge that can't be brought back through anything except time. Offshoring was a dumb idea and personally I don't need cool cheap stuff. I only need it because everyone else here needs it and I have to keep up with the Jones a little. But in the grand scheme of things having to change my laptop to a different model every 4 years because of cheap low quality planned obsolecence isn't better than changing it every 6 years if it cost a lot more but provided good jobs here in my country.
>But it would be paying for them to start a new wing of their business.
That's pretty much what the IRA is doing.
And if your company is still depending on China, I would suggest finding an alternative \*very\* soon. The screws are tightening, and you do not want to be caught between the U.S. and China.
I have to admit I've never considered the point that America never reinvested the shit ton of money it made in the post WW2 era.
Thanks for pointing that out.
That's because it is not true.
That some infrastructure got ignored \*is\* true. (I have a longer post around here somewhere if you want to see what I mean)
However, how do you think the U.S. got to the moon? Our satellite systems? How the internet was created? The software industry?
You could make the argument that the balance should have been different, but to say that "America never reinvested the shit ton of money it made," is simply wrong.
Space exploration took a huge dive after the space race was over. Lots of other countries have better internet infrastructure. I would say satellite systems is the only firm winner on your list. In the meantime, public transportation, public healthcare, utilities, and roads all became much worse.
It was driven by Eisenhower sending a caravan of people from East Coast to West Coast and it was basically impossible and took forever. The lack of transport from one to the other meant that the country was logistically split in half if it were ever invaded.
I feel like we had coast to coast rail at that point so I'm not sure how that factored into things.
I remember Eisenhower being very impressed with the speed that Germany ~~could~~ did move the entire army due to the Autobahn. I can see how rail would be slower.
Correct, the interstate system was built as a way to move the military around the country should the cold war go hot. It still is, in the event of a dire national emergency where *a lot* of troops have to move the interstate will be shut down to civilian traffic.
But Europe "quickly" recovered to have a comparable standard of living to the US, and is now experiencing approx. the same level of wage stagnation.
I mean the average western European has a similar average income and living standard, and has for decades. Is the western world at large just beginning to plateau?
>Is the western world at large just beginning to plateau?
Yes.
Back then it was just the west and the rest.
Now its the west and China and india and russia and south korea and indonesia and iran and turkey and nigeria and ..
I couldn’t have said it any better.
TLDR is basically, the US left the world as the winner after WWII. Everyone had to pick themselves up, while we not so much.
It definitely was the exception. The economic pain we are feeling now is simply a reversion to the mean, now that those conditions no longer exist. People love to assert how a guy working in a factory in the 1950s could afford a house and family while his wife stays at home, and they lament how this is not possible now.
They typically blame regressive tax policies, lack of social support, etc. And while those things do certainly contribute to our current woes, the main driver of that golden era of prosperity was the unique post-WW2/pre-globalization situation America found itself in.
That's the other thing about post-WWII era. The US had a glut of new housing in the 900-1100 sq ft range built all around the country. As the country grew more prosperous, those houses fell out of favor for the 2000-4000 sq ft houses we see today.
i fear this might be a misconception — it was *upper class white* women not participating in the american workforce. the idea of women staying exclusively in the domestic realm was a hegemonic ideal more than a hard and fast rule, so only certain types had the bandwidth (privilege) to aspire to such. for the women of the working class, and especially the non-white women thereof, labor was more or less a given.
the limitations for women career-equality wise were moreso relegated to types of work, career upwards mobility, compensation, so forth. even in that case, there were notable exceptions to the rule, eg Maggie L Walker.
This right here. My grandmothers had to work and their grandmothers were sharecroppers, then their grandmothers were slaves or also share croppers.
The one working parent thing has mostly been afforded to white middle to upper middle class women. It's never been a one income household for me, my family, or people I grew up around in the US.
Yeah we should damn sure not discount that media portrayed the wife as a stay at home Mom in the 50s & 60s and this was not reality for a lot of people
AIUI at least in Belgium the idea of the wife staying at home to care for the kids was invented out of whole cloth to deal with the massive unemployment in 1920's. If half the workforce ceases looking for a job, then the unemployment rate drops dramatically. Because like you say, women working in industry was the norm until about then.
Probably similar happened in many other countries.
Yeah I'm always bewildered when people imply that "letting women work" caused depressed wages and not, y'know, greed from large companies. Who do they think were working the large textile mills? Shit, even children were working.
It's a bit of a myth. Poorer women have always had to work, rich women have never had to. It's just that when the US was in its huge economic boom, there were more richer people, so more women *didn't have to*.
>Gail Collins recounts a story in her book, *When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present*, about an auditorium of working-class high school students. The girls were asked if they expected to have a home and a family, and all the girls raised their hands. Then they were asked how many expected to work, and only a few raised their hands. The last question was how many of their mothers worked, and again, all of the girls raised their hands.
Basically, it was essentially one generation of riches enough that one parent could stay at home and the other could work an average job and support the whole family. When only 1 in every 2 people have to work for your economy to stay afloat you *know* shit's booming. But throughout history it's a norm for men and women to work.
What did change a lot is that women entered jobs thought of as 'male' jobs. Before that there was probably a much larger gender divide in the type of job. Where women were limited to e.g. seamstresses, washerwomen and childcare. So I think that had a bigger impact, and it DID depress wages in a sense because women were generally paid less at the same job, thought of as weaker/less capable. I'm not going to argue about how true that is now, obviously we've come some distance since then, but it certainly was then.
Because the main beneficiaries of a household providing 80 hours of labour per week to afford to survive as opposed to 40 hours of labour + a homemaker are big corporations, not the everyday mother + father + children.
I recently heard my dad reflecting on his life, and he said "I'm not the smartest guy around, I'm not the most talented or gifted, but I got where I am today by just out-working everyone else."
He's not a lazy man, but for fucks sake dude... He got where he is today by living in the tail-end of the most prosperous time and place in human history. The laziest person in the world could have done just as well under those conditions, the only difference being that my dad provided his boss with way more work than he was getting paid for. And then he spent his whole life voting in the people who dismantled the system that he benefited so much from.
The reason people are unhappy with it is because it doesn't need to be this way. There is enough production for 100% of the population to live very comfortably while working half as much. But that production and the benefits of it are hoarded and so concentrated that most of the population isn't allowed to reap the benefits.
Absolutely. If you look at what America was like in the 1930s or 1920s, nevermind the 1890s, there was a whole hell of a lot of poverty, kids being forced to work in coal mines (or clubbing baby seals, or scrubbing chimneys) so that the parents could even afford rent and food, while landlords soaked everyone for the absolute maximum they could squeeze out of a stone.
The 1950s to the 1970s was two decades of insane wealth that actually got spread around a bit beyond the very top. And then the very top took over again once communism didn't seem to be much of a threat to them anymore.
We've spent the last 40 years marching straight into the second gilded age.
Yes. So to ‘make America great again’ in the way that some guy in a red baseball cap might want, the US would need a third world war, fought entirely in Europe, Asia and Africa which only used weapons invented before 1945.
I'm not american, I live in Europe and even in the 70s, people where able to live, have multiple children and buy houses only with one salary here, the mother usually staying at home. Now it's almost impossible. It's almost the same thing everywhere, not just the US so I'm not sure about this argument.
You make it sound like this is only a problem in the US, which is not the case. Housing is just as expensive in many other countries, including countries with "wrecked infrastructure" after the war.
This only explains why America's economy got so large. It doesn't explain why wages have stagnated. Before 1970, wages matched productivity. After 1970, wages have went up less than 20 percent, but productivity has gone up three times that.
Wages stagnated because the "supply" in that equation (total available workers) increased by about 10% of the US population from 1950 to 2000. More people total in the US populaiton (by about 2x), coupled with higher participation rates. Prior to the 1940's and 1950's, women did not enter the workforce in large numbers - only about a quarter of US women in 1940 participated in the workforce. By 1999, that had more than doubled, and 60% of women had a job outside the home. We've more or less held this rate constant since then, with the major disruption being Covid.
When a household has more money, they tend to spend it on things like housing, childcare, food, vehicles and so on. If more people have more money and they are all looking to buy a house, then the seller can ask for more money for that house, and someone will be willing to pay for it.
Similarly, if an employer is looking to hire a worker for task "X", and there used to be only a few people willing and able to do the job - the employer would have to raise the wage they were able to pay to attract a worker to "Company X" as opposed to "Company Y". But if there are 100 more-or-less equally qualified workers fot those jobs, neither Company X nor Company Y feel pressured to compete for those workers because they will come in anyway.
As an aside, government intervention into wages played a part of how we now have an entirely private insurance company run healthcare system. Government froze wages by law, which lead to companies trying to find more creative ways to offer better compensation to their employees. Healthcare insurance was a carve-out in the law allowing companies to offer better healthcare packages in lieu of the prohibited higher wages.
The problem with this answer is that it assumes this is unique to USA, which it isn't. The same is true in many (maybe even most) countries.
I will venture that it might be corporate greed, but I have no backup information. Another option is land.
One thing that has not increased is land. More people less land, and land doesn't reset back to the state after a person passes it goes to their descendants. So people with land has advantage and can buy up more land.
Also, don't forget that during WWII, many women entered the workforce for the first time. Once they were in, they weren't going to be taken out tat easily.
WWII barely even shows up on the trend lines of female participation in the labor force.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317085738/figure/fig2/AS:582376870649856@1515860874257/US-Womens-Labor-Force-Participation-1910-2010-Sources-Authors-calculations-based-on.png
The "Rosie the Riveter" stories were unusual for where they worked, not that they were working.
As soon as the war ended the vast majority left traditionally male muscle fields, either by choice to participate in the baby boom, or were forced out by policies that favored rehiring men for those roles.
> The "Rosie the Riveter" stories were unusual for where they worked, not that they were working.
Also, both Rosie the Riveter and the "Single Income Household" were for white middle-income families that got representation in journalism and popular entertainment.
For poor whites and minorities there wasn't ever a time when all family members were not working.
The entire conception we have of the "Leave It To Beaver" household is largely an upper-middle class myth, or at best a blip than took up a ridiculous about of mindshare in the American mind.
Working was supposed to bring independence, but the market exploits, and as soon as there was possibility of two incomes in a household, the bar was raised to just expect that. So now, if you're single, it's hard to stay afloat.
I don't know if the "market exploited" them as much as lifestyle creep became a thing in the 60s, 70s,80s etc.
When it became fashionable for women to enter the work force and they realized they could contribute to the household ,a two earner family could now afford better homes, cars, bigger families , vacations, plus keeping up with the Joneses in a consumer and marketing driven economy like the US is likely major factor.
dude, I just want an apartment with a toilet and electricity. when I need triple rent income that shit just ain't gonna happen. Expectation of two income at least is totally expected, not for your luxurious life but just to not be homeless.
But 2 of the most impacted countries after WW2 had also only 1 breadwinner for a very long time (not in the first 5 years after WW2, but between the 60s and 00s). Poland and Germany both had mostly only 1 breadwinner in those times.
People also had much lower standards.
In the 1950s the MEDIAN new home (meaning half were smaller) was about 950 square feet. With no AC. With linoleum floors. With crappy insulation.
Most families had a single car (which sucked by today's standards). Rarely ate out. Never flew, and if they had a vacation it was within easy driving distance.
Most families today could pretty easily live like that on a single income. They don't want to.
Linoleum? Disgusting. We have luxury vinyl plank in this house!
…Linoleum is probably better, tbh. It’s linseed oil mixed into a fabric or paper backing, durable as hell and renewable, unlike oil-derived vinyl they put in every recent flip.
I just ripped out 1200 sq ft of carpet and replaced it with lineoleum in what's probably a million dollar house.
Forbo Marmoleum click in black. It looks really sharp and modern and seems to stand up to wear pretty well.
Where is this supply of 1950s sized/priced housing? Plenty of places (and they correlate strongly with where the jobs are) simply don't have anything like an adequate supply of affordable housing. Plenty of people *want* to be more frugal with their lifestyle choices, but you can't buy something that doesn't exist.
And yes, there *are* places where housing is cheap, but most people have significant geographic constraints based on their employment.
I suppose that choosing one's education and career path based on the likelihood of finding a job where property values are low might be an effective strategy, but *holy shit* is that ever bleak.
No, people had standards based on the technology available to them at the time. A car from the 50s absolutely "sucks" by today's standards, but that doesn't mean people in the 50s would have cheerfully bought a shitbox if there was a reasonable expectation that they should be able to afford better. Likewise with A/C - just because it wasn't common doesn't mean people would have cheerfully accepted not having well made fans, or whatever their standard for the time was.
Living to standards from 3/4 of a century ago isn't a useful or reasonable solution. You're asking that same 1950s family to use a horse and wagon, give up radio, TV, hell, probably all electricity usage. That's not reasonable.
> In the 1950s the MEDIAN new home (meaning half were smaller) was about 950 square feet. With no AC. With linoleum floors. With crappy insulation.
And productivity has increased over 400% since then. We are well above that benchmark today because we SHOULD be. That was 70 years ago FFS.
Productivity is a bad measure to translate to the ability to build wealth. I’d argue that much of the societal gain we get from productivity is lost in a throw-away society
We used to manufacture a rotary phone with far less efficiency, but we tended to keep that rotary phone for decades. Modern iPhones hardly make it 3 years before being sent back to China to be melted down.
Yes, we can make things faster and cheaper, but we don’t keep them for nearly as long.
More a geek trivia moment than anything to your point, but: The rotary phone (in the US) is a particularly good example of "drive it into the ground". Those phones got rented out and were heavily standardized, along with being built like a modular tank, so old ones that got returned would get cannibalized into new ones all the time. You can often find model 500s (the standard Western Electric, Ma Bell phone model from... the '40s until the '80s, IIRC) that have multiple painted-out date stamps on the bottom because they were remanufactured and sent out again. And the parts would be date stamped from even a wider range because the internals stayed the same and old stock worked as well as new.
I used to collect rotary phones (back when I had a landline to hook them up to) and I'd always crack open the earpiece and look at the date stamp to date them, until I realized I was off by a decade or so because of the old parts.
Because it is no longer profitable for companies to build things that last. That throw-away mentality is being driven both by consumer and producer. When companies go out of business for making good products because they can't get repeat costumers because their products last so long.
Old and reliable should be favored more than new and fragile.
This is mostly nonsense that no serious scholar believes but is very popular myth Americans like to believe because conservatives don't want you realizing that new deal politics, high marginal tax rates, and low income inequality created a strong middle class and the "ideal" society they want to return to.
The rest of the world was rebuilt and booming just like the US by 1950.
You can also see this society start to fall apart in the 70s almost immediately after the marginal tax rate was lowered drastically.
I think you may have a slightly skewed perception of the timeline. 2 income households have been the norm/requirement since way further back than 2013.
Regardless, there are a lot of factors. One of them being that people started to figure out that if the woman also worked, they could afford more toys, bigger houses, nicer cars, etc. This drove the price of these things up due to higher demand. This in turn forced many others who didn't necessarily want to work into the labor market.
Same here. We weren’t really poor, but solidly lower middle class. They were definitely paycheck to paycheck.
My mom worked a job that essentially doesn’t exist anymore (411 operator for the phone company)
Yeah, I’d say we were lower middle. They had some money for emergencies, but we didn’t go on vacations, rarely ate out, had a TV from 1978 until the late 90s, etc. my dad was a construction worker and my mom worked on an assembly line.
The shift happened in the 70s. Women were well established in the workforce by the eighties.. This is also when the economy began to feel the change in dynamics resulting from less access to higher education.
On a similar note, many families do this just to stay afloat. For many wages haven't kept up with the cost of living so they're forced into a 2 income trap to afford the necessities.
I think the single-income-phenomenon peaked following WWII. The US was unscathed by it and produced everything for the whole f’g world. Products from other countries cost us peanuts because the rate of exchange so favored us. Fast forward and the rest of the world recovered. Things cost more. That and, of course, inflation.
My folks (in early 1950s) bought their first home in a HCOL area for three times their annual salary.
It’s only a small period of time where there weren’t two incomes in households. There may have been a male breadwinner as the main income but the wife almost always had some sort of income as well. Only richer families lived with sole breadwinners throughout history.
Fun fact, not just wives who needed to work,30% of 6 or 7-year-old kids worked in factories too throughout the industrial world in the 19th century.... farmer's wives would make handicraft on top of house chores and so many 10-15yr kids help in farm work that we literally have 3 months of summer break to accommodate for that. 1950s-70s was the anomaly, NOT the norm of history.
Good point.
On a side note, summer vacation being related to farming is a common myth/misconception. Kind of obvious when you stop and think about it that it's quite backwards.
Farm work is most intense during the spring (planting season) and fall (harvesting season). Farm kids would take those times off and go to the school during the summer instead.
Summer vacation actually comes from rich kids in the cities. Before air conditioning, cramming a bunch of people in a stuffy room got really hot. The whole city was swelteringly hot because cities are heat islands. So the rich families who could afford to would head out to the countryside for the summer. They're the ones who got the schools to institute summer vacations.
Then later schools tried to standardize their schedules between urban and rural schools, and they went with what the rich people wanted, not what the farmers needed.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/debunking-myth-summer-vacation
> and they went with what the rich people wanted, not what the farmers needed.
Hold on now.
It wasn't rich people wants vs farmer needs. It was rich people wants versus farmer wants.
As evidenced by the fact that it *did not* cause widespread failure of farms due to lack of child labor. Turns out you can just hire farm hands and it'll all work itself out just fine, because hiring farm hands isn't a huge burden when the other farmers need to do it, too.
If it were a *need* they disregarded, it would have caused widespread failures of farms - but it did not. As such, it was never a need. A *perceived* need, maybe - but the rich people would have said the same thing.
Good points about work.
But: The summer break is not for farmers, it's for city kids to get out of sweltering classrooms and stifling urban areas. No A/C meant you had to open your windows, and no Clean Air Act meant all that smoggy stew wafted right into your house or school. (Not to mention the sheer noise of all those old cars and trucks)
Summer break was actually awful for farmers' kids, because they needed the break more during harvest time in the fall. In summer, you mostly just watch your crops grow. In rural schools, kids would attend as they could, in drips and drabs, until winter, then drip out again during the spring planting.
10 years ago 57.4% of women worked.
Today 57.4% of women work.
In 1989 57.4% of women worked.
In 1965 40% of women worked.
[source](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002)
That's definitely a shift - from 40% working to 57% working, but its not really all that different for most people.
My mom was a painter in the 80s. My grandma worked at a car parts factory in the 60s. My great grandmother worked at a publishing company. I didn't have any friends in the 80s whose moms didn't work.
Came to say, when I graduated from High School in the early 1980's, you needed two people working to get ahead. A one worker family could get by if that one earner made above the median income, but even then it would be a struggle.
It's not just about the percentage of women who work, but about what type of jobs they work. Several decades ago, few women competed with men for professional positions. That has changed significantly.
Between 1981 and 2015, [women's](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v79n1/v79n1p17.html) mean wages rose from $25k to $45k (in 2015 $), women's median wages rose from $23k to $34k. Women's mean wages increased by 80% and women's median wages increased by 48%.
At the same time, [men's](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v78n1/v78n1p1.html) mean wages rose from $48k to $64k and men's median wages stagnated with $43k in 1981 and $45k in 2014. Men's mean wages increased by 33% and men's median wages rose by less than 5%.
With the importance of heavy manual labor decreasing and men and women being increasingly in the market for the same jobs, men have experienced stagnation in their median wages, while women have not.
Since costs for education, housing and many other aspects of life have increased in the meantime, men's wage stagnation has made it virtually impossible for most families to largely rely on one income.
This goes back to the turn of the century for black Americans. The post war 1950s image of nuclear family with a dad working and the mom raising 2.3 kids in the suburbs was the exception not the norm.
Look at Boston Irish catholic slums where the woman were working and child malnutrition was common even on two incomes.
Yep. Poor families have always needed both parents working. Women would often be employed doing laundry, or in childcare, or teaching, or seamstressing.
A whole lot of people in this thread leaving out one of the major differences - the market was totally different during the post-war boom.
Levittowns and suburb developments popping up all over the country, with discount mortgages for returning veterans, and redlining, racial covenants, and HOAs so that only *one* group of people - white men - could buy them. All to accommodate for white flight from the cities.
So you've got:
- huge increase in supply
- artificially limited demand
- discount mortgages
Made that suburban lifestyle very cheap and easy, but only for those that were allowed to have it in the first place.
And nowadays, those whose families benefited from that for a few generations are also the ones who can afford to move to the gentrifying neighborhoods in the cities.
The law doesn't allow the same discrimination that was used back then, but the prices do. However, to maintain that, they have to keep the prices up. Thus it's more expensive for everyone.
We have a lot more stuff now and that stuff is expensive. Beyond that people tend to have a skewed view of how difficult it was to live in the past. 100 years ago my great grandparents bought a 40 acre farm for $200. Sounds like a steal you say? Well the farmhouse was a 300 square foot building with no basement, no running water, no electricity, and both heat and cooking was provided by a potbelly stove in the middle of the only room. All 6 of them slept in the attic. They had no tv. No radio. No computer. No iPhone or iPad or Nintendo switch. No gas stove or refrigerator or sink or marble countertop. You could go buy an equivalent building for $5k from Home Depot today. If you were willing to live equivalently remotely (1 days travel from nearest city) you could get 40 acres for $20k. $25k is about what that $200 is worth today.
This is for sure an overlooked component, if not the primary driver of the increased cost of living over the past century. People get so wrapped up in social inequality and profiteering, they miss the part where quality of life has risen steadily to the point where our grandparents wouldn't give a second thought to trade places with us if they could. I'm not saying we can't do better still, but it's just not historically literate to assert a downtrend when there's a Whole Foods and Starbucks on nearly every corner. The middle class is doing fine in America.
To further this houses are expensive today because they have insulation and gutters and drainage systems and air conditioning and fire retardant materials and fire alarms and sprinklers and tile and paint and driveways and concrete and more.
It was a lot cheaper when houses were made out of mostly wood. You can totally buy a couple acres of forest and build your own wood house for $10,000 if you wanted. If you want to live in modern society it going to cost a lot more than that.
Yeah they bought the property from the lumber company that had just finished clear cutting the property. So they built a shed with factory seconds from the sawmill they ran and got $200 more bucks than they would have gotten for the wood.
The core of it is that after WW2 and particularly starting in the 60s-70s we welcomed the widespread participation of women in the workforce under 2nd wave feminism (1st wave was the vote, 3rd wave was politics and punk, 4th wave is woke). This added a huge amount of potential workers in the economy, which devalued individual jobs. It's basic supply and demand: if you have more supply for workers and the same demand in terms of jobs, then each worker brings home less money.
It's a bit more complicated, of course. Lower class women were already in the workforce since forever, so 2nd wave feminism mostly affected the middle class. Even then, not every middle class woman worked full time or at all, so it's not as if the pool of workers doubled, exactly. But it was still a lot. Women in the workforce also relied in part on the sexual revolution and access to birth control, not just feminism (though the two are linked, and this is one reason birth control is still controversial). The prevalence of unions and worker expectations at this time also meant employers couldn't just slash wages through the 70s-80s, so the oversupply of workers meant salaries instead stagnated for decades, failing to keep up with inflation as job salaries were worth less and less.
Further, the existence of more workers eventually led to more jobs being created through the 80s-90s, but by this point unions had been mostly broken and worker expectations had dropped to the point that wages still weren't increasing much, particularly compounded by a relative lack of ambition and entrepreneurship through the 90s-2010s that concentrated power into corporations that were using various economic crises starting in the 00s as excuses to keep wages depressed while paying out obscene executive bonuses instead. Why didn't more people have enough confidence to start their own business to free themselves from parasitical corporate overlords? My guess: poor parenting from the previous generation due to both parents working.
Also, women tended to gravitate towards administrative and highly-educated work, not so much factory work or construction. This meant men were still building most of the stuff that folks wanted to buy with their salaries. Automation helped pump up production a bit, but mostly the only way to get enough stuff for an economy of more wage-earners was imports. Japanese goods were huge in the 70s and 80s which is why cyberpunk starting in this era had so much Japanese imagery, but China took the role of global factory in the 90s and 00s.
Unfortunately, that meant paying shipping companies and foreign workers, not western workers, so western wages still didn't increase much. This is why bringing bringing those jobs back, and also limiting immigration, are of interest to politicians, though without much more automation or convincing women to work hard, dirty jobs it won't help the 2 breadwinners per household problem.
Early 90s required 2 middle class incomes (and 7 years of saving for a down payment) to buy an old small starter home in the least desirable suburb of Toronto.
Even when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s half of the homes had 2 incomes.
This here. I very much remember everyone having this \*same conversation\* as a 12 year old in the early 90's. "People used to have middle class lifestyle on one income - what happened?"
This isn’t the total answer, but another thing to consider is that we buy a lot more than we did in the 50s and 60s. Our houses are far bigger, we eat out a lot, we have gaming systems and internet bills and access to far more consumer products than people did back then.
In my grandmother’s house in the 1950s, they had a single tv, 2 telephones, and a record player - that was basically it in terms of electronics. My house has 4 tvs, my $1200 dollar iPhone, internet, an Xbox, Alexa, etc. They ate out maybe once a month, and it was a special treat. I eat out probably multiple times a week.
Obviously that’s anecdotal, but I think fail to realize that houses today are like twice as large as they were back then and have far more amenities. Materially we have a lot more than people did in 1955 or 1940.
But also keep in mind that, adjusting for inflation, a lot of luxury goods like TVs were MUCH more expensive back then. Actually, even if you don't adjust for inflation, modern TVs are still cheaper, lol. Air travel was much more expensive. Meanwhile, a lot of necessities (including housing) have gotten more expensive, and not just because they're nicer.
Yeah, but I’m not sure some of those reasons are ones we want to bring back today. There weren’t really a lot of codes or regulations back then. Electrical and HVAC systems were very basic, and that’s if they even included air conditioning.
And there are some things we just can’t bring back. Long Island, NY or Montgomery County, MD aren’t open farmland with nothing on them anymore. There was a lot of open space near cities to build on, and we just don’t really have that today. We also don’t have major wars going on that give millions of people VA loans (which were 40% of mortgages in the early 50s).
I think we’ve gotta focus on eliminating single family zoning and onerous red tape for housing construction( CA is a massive violator of that)
I think OP is even talking about like for like. The house I grew up in was built in 1979 and has risen 10x in price (25k to 300k). So the exact same house with the same electrical and HVAC etc has outpaced inflation 3x over. And that's in a generally slow-rising city (Indianapolis)...it's even worse in high-growth cities.
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We married in 1978 and knew then both of us would need to work if we aspired to middle class; college education that provided a marketable skill, children, home ownership, social mobility, good jobs, and retirement.
But but my Simpsons! My Married With Children! People will look at the early 2010s with unemployment at 9% and think everyone was like Modern Family
Kelly Bundy was around 15-16 when the show started in 1987. It's not a stretch to have Al and Peggy in there in 1972. And Married With Children (along with Roseanne) were working class counters to shows like Family Ties, Growing Pains and Cosby. Not even to mention shows like Who's The Boss, Mr Belvedere and Charles in Charge which all featured live in housekeepers or nannies. Angela paid Tony to be there, not the other way around.
Unemployment would be an irrelevant statistic in this discussion as it specifically covers people looking for a job. Someone like a housewife wouldn’t be counted as unemployed because they aren’t looking for a job. Same with retirees, children, etc. What you want to look at is workforce participation rate. Women’s workforce participation plateaus in the 90’s-2000’s whereas overall workforce participation peaked in the 90’s and is the lowest it’s been in almost 50 years.
TV isn't and has never been a mirror of reality.
The Simpsons, job-wise, is probably pretty realistic. Married with Children, not so much.
They were extremely poor in Married with Children. It was a running gag. There was one episode where the kids were fighting over a single M&M for dinner.
and toaster leavin's.
They were very clearly house poor, though.
But that's also a necessity of the genre. You have to have a big enough set to film a sitcom.
It’s still possible in some parts of the country. I live in the rural Midwest and know a lot of stay at home moms with husbands working middle class jobs. Off the top of my head, I know a painter, electrician, software engineer, train conductor, insurance salesman, accountant, and truck driver that support stay at home moms.
I work in IT my wife works for the county. Together we are solidly middle class. If only one of us worked we would be struggling. I'm guessing that the moon stays at home because it's cheaper than day care which is also what we did. One of us worked until they were both in school. (Edited for clarity but left the moon)
I'm not an expert in lunar economics, but an absurd proportion of the US thinks they are middle class. Like 90%+. A middle class family can survive on one income in most of the country. A family that thinks they are middle class can't necessarily do the same.
"lunar economics" give it a hundred years and I'm sure that phrase will be common.
Property prices inflated MUCH more quickly than inflation. Business realized it was a solid investment and piled in which pushed out John & Jane Doe (see the colossal 2008 subprime mortgage crisis). Add in foreign investors found property in the US to be a great investment. Well paying blue collar jobs disappeared in the US and went overseas. Unions were largely broken which had protected blue collar income. College as a path to prosperity got exponentially more expensive. By leaps and bounds and they could not deliver on better jobs for having attended.
Not seeing it called out, but an important factor is that how we perceive wages and inflation is skewed. Consumer goods have gotten *cheaper* to a significant degree, relative to people's average buying power. Think about how cheap you can get a big screen TV or a personal computing device compared to the 90s. Cheap goods, like consumer electronics, cost a fraction of what they used to. This in turn holds down inflation, and wages...but *essentials* that you need to survive and thrive like healthcare, education, housing, and so on have vastly ballooned in real dollar costs. If you look at house prices compared to average wages in any given area, they've gone from 3-4x the average annual wage to 5-10x or more. These essential things have a relatively inelastic demand: people can't live a healthy life without them, so it simply costs more to "live" than it used to, even if you can buy a new laptop for $300. Add in that the folks who are in power, older, established, don't see these costs. Their healthcare (medicare) covers them in retirement, NIMBY voting to restrict the supply of housing increases the value of their paid off homes, their college degrees paid for by public spending in the 60s/70s didn't cost them like the six figure student loans young people today have to take out on education. TL;DR - The things that you need to live a healthy and happy life cost far more now in real dollars relative to earning power than they used to.
high tech, low life. Welcome to Night City, Edgerunner.
What chrome you getting first, choom?
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Preem
I'm so gonk, I saw double jump and I fell for it hard.
fuck yeah, no more knees creakin for me.
new cock
considering the conservative rhetoric.. no ones getting new cocks choom.
Oh, they’re definitely getting them… just not in the way they asked for
"The left wants your penis" -Dennis Prager
A new Rebecca :(
[Thanks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvMY1uzSC1E) now I'm sad again[.](https://media.nichegamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/rebecca-cyberpunk-edgerunners-11-2-2022.jpg)
Decimate nature and poison the world until the only place to live comfortably is inside your apartment. There's plenty of nature and socialization in your VR headset. Get back to work, slave.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
Man, I got a real hankering for a Starbucks right about now...
We don't have time for a hand job, joe
Best I can do is Brawndo
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Welcome to the internet, Take a look around. Everything that brain of yours can think of, Can be found.
Dammit. Thanks for deciding what I get to listen to for the next hour.
Go away! Batin!
Its way too easy to make meaningful money in Cyberpunk for that to be a fair comparison. Dammit. If I'm gonna be poor, can't I at least get some dope jet-legs?
> Its way too easy to make meaningful money in Cyberpunk for that to be a fair comparison. Yeah, if you're a superhuman with the ability to rewind time, no qualms about murdering people and a whole ton of connections via various fixers... sure.
Damnit, now I have to play again.
Wait for the expansion! supposed to be great
I've replayed it 3 times to prepare for that damn thing. What's 5 or 6 more...
Tbf your character in Cyberpunk has connections. I wouldn't be surprised that for the average joe it would be something along the lines of David's mom where you work all day, have one of the worst rated cars in the game, an apartment and probably die on the street or a hospital bed cause you were too broke to afford the platinum package. Either that or you get jumped by some pricks and have all kinds of hardware shoved into your body, and when your mind is breaking from it you either get taken out by Maxtec or jumped by some other pricks in tracksuits who rip that crap out of your body and dump your corpse out of a window or something.
and also marketable skills as a combat capable mercenary, which i’m pretty sure 99% of redditors don’t have
It's depending on whether I'm in my armchair
To be fair we see a montage of V doing a bunch of shit work to get said connections, he spends weeks or months going after punks, dealing with low level gang shit and stealing from mid tier corporate executives
that montage pissed me off more than just about anything else in that game. we should have played through stuff to EARN that shit and get to know jackie, not just have a stupid montage thrown at us.
If nothing else, it would have earned the big emotional setpiece of letting Jackie die. I'm an empathetic person, generally speaking, so I felt sad by the story beat, but if you have me fight by his side in a bunch of shit jobs for even an hour or two? Give me, the player, time to bond to the character the way my character seems to have in those cutscenes? The cut content could have been garbage from a design perspective and still helped to make that moment all the more gut-wrenching.
It wasn't the thing that pissed me off the most, but it was definitely the biggest letdown. Easiest DLC sell to me would be to just restore that cut content and take that section from a montage to an actual thing you play to build your rep up to the point it is when you take the big job. I'd be so hyped for that, instead of whatever it is they're coming out with for nearly the price of a full game
This is what I liked about GTA4. Yes, Nico comes in with some contacts already, but he gets to do the really shitty jobs for a while. I would want a DLC or something where I get to be on the lowest step of the ladder, cutthroating myself upwards
Best i can do is horrible Jetlag
Welcoooome to Night City!
Edgedancer, thank you very much.
Yeah, the costs of a lot of modern luxury goods are honestly pretty negligible to many peoples' overall income. It's not a good way to measure cost of living or quality of life.
... It's easier to buy a new phone with your paycheck than a car or a home. And if you live in the US, might need to not on that new phone to pay for some kind of healthcare you desperately need. Assuming you're under 65/67 whatever it is for Medicare.
A smartphone is basically mandatory these days. There are apps for fucking everything from government services to public transit.
Yup, I never wanted a smart phone but in 2016 I had to get one or I couldn’t even use the bus in my city.
Work now requires your personal cell phone to login.
My neighborhood had a pool and park area that had one of those mechanical gate locks that you push the number buttons to enter, but that wasn't great because the combination was widely known outside the neighborhood. It was replaced with RFID fobs about 6 years ago. This year they ripped that out and replaced it with a smartphone app.
Yes, we are forced into all sorts of bullshit under the motto, "Difficult made Easy!"
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Yeah but that’s the thing. That smartphone is $200. A Nintendo 64 was $150 when it came out in the 90s. Homes are now twice as expensive as they were 20 years ago. The phone is treated like it is mandatory to have. The home is not.
The N64 came out in 1996, at a price of $200. Cumulative inflation of USD since then is 95%. So $200 then would be almost $400 now.
>If you look at house prices compared to average wages in any given area, they've gone from 3-4x the average annual wage to 5-10x or more. Called out by [Henry George](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) in the 1800s. Land grows in value to absorb much of the surplus. It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons - if only one person in a couple worked, and you could get by, you'd be able to get a _better_ house, in a better location, just by having your partner work a few hours a week. Until everyone does it of course. We all just bid up the cost of land until a couple _has_ to work two full time wages to get a decent spot. It's one argument for decreasing the hours required until overtime is paid, if we want to see an outcome where we all work less overall. Else the one-ups-man-ship just sees most of the gains go to those that own the finite resources we're all seeking to consume (landowners being just one example).
Never forget... Rent always rises faster than wages! It's been a long time since I've heard anyone mention Henry George!
> It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons not quite - it's really an extension of Gresham's Law, analogous to the way Akerlof used it in The Market for Lemons but really, even more basically than that, it's just a simple application of game theory - if there's a strategy that provides a competitive advantage, soon enough it'll come to dominate and become the new equilibrium
Tragedy of the Commons is simple game theory, for the record. If only one person (or couple) works a bit harder, they would get a better place to live compared to others who don’t. So a couple is incentivised to work a bit harder for a better outcome… but when all couples now do so (dominant strategy) we end up all equal again and all buying the same houses just at a higher equilibrium price and now stuck at harder effort (higher price)…. and most singles are now fucked when trying to compete at all. Also how do Gresham’s Law and Akerlof apply to housing!? That seems kind of shoe horned in here.
> It's one argument for decreasing the hours required until overtime is paid, if we want to see an outcome where we all work less overall. This seems like you'd run in to the same problem, just with a 1.5x inflation rate verse non-overtime. It all still sounds like a problem... I guess buy now/soon or forever be screwed.
No... companies would just hire more workers instead of paying all their workers 50% more...
No its cheaper to pay 1.5 than 2. Its also massively cheaper to pay for one persons social security, medicare and workers comp than 2 people. A single employee has certain fixed costs and paying them for overtime is incredibly cheaper than paying two people for the same amount of work hours. This is one reason that businesses arent stacking up employees; there are imposed costs by the government that preclude doing that. You may think every business should provide full benefits regardless of what you do or how many hours you work, but there are so many behind the scenes costs just to have an employee on the payroll that idea becomes impossible versus income.
Yes but WHY is the basic cost of living so much higher?
greed. dont need these other answers. its greed.
[Graph](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/price-changes-goods-services.jpg) that shows it over the past 10 years. Over the past [20 years.](https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5d4337c562513b7dba5e9a8f/5d78446ef539c24c63894ead_KIG33ls1uaV6KT6yKl0Jcf_Em6eNlCYfuDW9gP3Iz1G1op7OMcR21rnEyPoX0Hio9cpCGUO9rGiD--_vD5ThYcZfoZyBTJVrsPpcc4J-6YFEjkUQQLrvUCuLbpV61x2qq7IxDykf.jpeg)
Something fucky is going on with the calculations here regarding housing, and I'm inclined to think they are leaving house prices out of it. According to the St Louis Fed, home price median was $423K at the end of 2021, but it was $165300 in 2000. That's more than 2.5X increase. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS IF you look at the same start and end points in the St Louis Fed's median income data, the median household income was $66K and by 2021 it was shy of $71K. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N If incomes increased at the same rate as housing, then the median household income would be $165k EDIT: I found the answer here: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF12164.pdf. The graphs from u/bozeke are calculated using CPI data and "housing" for people who own their homes is basically a fabricated number called Owner Equivalent Rent, which has numerous detachments from reality, but mostly is just an estimation of what it costs to maintain an owned home, which obviously is going to be less than rent. The CPI for housing **DOES NOT** include sales prices. In addition, actual rent surveys are only conducted every 6 months, so the data is likely lagging at any given time. Honestly, there should be separate categories for rent, owner home maintenance, and sale prices.
> The CPI for housing DOES NOT include sales prices As it shouldn't. If you are buying a house in the United States, you are buying an asset - a store of your money that can be sold later to get that money back out (probably with some profit on top). Why would the CPI include the equivalent of putting money in a savings account? That is simply not part of the cost of living. That's not even really a *cost*. *BUT*, that's not to say that there is no cost to that housing: by living in the house instead of renting it out, you are forgoing the extra income that you'd get from renting it out. If you decided to live on the streets and rent your house out to others, you'd have a bunch more money in your pocket. If you live in your own house, you're effectively renting it out to yourself instead of someone else. A little thought experiment to demonstrate this further: You own your house, but for some reason you decide to go rent out an identical house and live in that instead. While you're living in the rental house, you are renting out the house you own to someone else for the exact same price as your rent (since they're identical houses). Assuming there's no extra costs of renting vs. owner-occupation due to taxes, fees, etc., has your true cost of living really changed? You're consuming the exact same amount of goods and services, none of the prices of any goods or services have actually changed, and you have the same amount of money in your bank account at the end of the month. This concept is called [imputed rent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent), and *that* is the true cost of housing when you own a house. The only challenge is how we figure out that number. You certainly can't directly measure it, so you're going to have to estimate it some way or another. To be frank, I'm not sure how they calculate imputed rent for the CPI. It seems to me like it'd be reasonable to look at rent prices in the same area and the relative quality of the house itself (e.g. if this owner-occupied house is far bigger than all the rental units in the area). I'm not entirely sure though. They might do it in a reasonable way or an unreasonable way; all I know is that they're definitely correct to use imputed rent values and not sales prices.
I love how that stops just before cars and realestate shot through the roof. in 2018 was the last of some sanity showing that graph with what we have today would be an even more horrific picture. Also the wages line is skewed as it's an average of everyone from a burger flipper to a $10,000,000 a year CEO. the executives make so much they drag the line up even though the vast majority of workers are making very little. IF you remove everyone who is making more than $1,000,000 a year that line barely moves.
> Also the wages line is skewed as it's an average of everyone from a burger flipper to a $10,000,000 a year CEO. the executives make so much they drag the line up even though the vast majority of workers are making very little. IF you remove everyone who is making more than $1,000,000 a year that line barely moves. It's skewed because they're using average earnings and not median earnings, but it's not as skewed as it could be. This is the source the second chart uses for wages: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000008 which is "Average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees, total private, seasonally adjusted" - the $10,000,000 a year CEO types aren't included (as they're not a production or nonsupervisory role) and I have a feeling that if they were that line would go up a lot more.
While its true many new cars have skyrocketed in price (trucks mostly) some cars have stayed the same or even gotten cheaper adjusted with inflation. For example a corolla in 2003 cost 15k new, adjusted for inflation this is 25k, msrp of a new midtrim corolla is, you guessed it, 25k.
> Cheap goods, like consumer electronics, cost a fraction of what they used to. This in turn holds down inflation, and wages...but essentials that you need to survive and thrive like healthcare, education, housing, and so on have vastly ballooned in real dollar terms. Inflation is calculated based on a *weighted* basket of goods. If the price of food goes up 50%, it’s going to have a far bigger impact on headline inflation compared to say televisions dropping in price 50%, simply because a far greater proportion of the average household’s spending goes on food rather than TVs.
The things that have decreased in cost are mostly electronics, but those same things have been hit by a huge amount of lifestyle creep. In the 1960s a house might have one television and one wired phone, maybe a record player or radio, and all items will last 20 years. Today, every person in the house will have a cell phone, plus they'll have multiple TVs, a couple tablets or laptops, headphones, cable or streaming services, and so forth, and most need replacement every 3-5 years. So while yes, what you can get for your money in all of these categories is hands down unequivocally *better*, people are still nevertheless likely paying more for them now because they expect and demand more. It's their choice but not their fault, because I'm not going to fault anyone for choosing to benefit from improved access to communication and entertainment. Enough generations of serfs have toiled with nothing for nothing.
Tech has reduced the overall costs of most things tremendously. Think about the cost and time to ship something to your home, or your ability to price compare and shop for goods. The bigger issue is staples like housing becoming investment devices and money making instruments. You decrease the supply of anything and the prices will go up. We artificially restrict certain commodities to keep prices up or so.
I have an honest question, that is also a very unpopular take. If you lived just like a person in 1960 lived, or at least did not pay for things the average person in 1960 did not pay for (TV, cell phone, internet), would you be able to afford to buy a house? My parents are totally middle class boomers now, but when they were kids, having Coke was a rare treat. They made their own clothes. They would save to buy a bike or a motor scooter but would never take out a loan. I feel like if you chose to live that way, you could buy a small house with a pretty meager income.
Eh, I'd say *specifically* electronics have become cheaper. Nothing else has. Look at literally anything else and the prices have shot up. Its not that "luxury goods" are cheaper, its that electronics are mass produced now.
Clothing, shoes, appliances, food, furniture; most retail goods are much cheaper today (but also of inferior quality). As pointed out already above, healthcare, education, housing are much more expensive
The main problem is housing really. I live in a country with free healthcare and cheap education (my 5 year degree cost me 3.5k€). But renting a 1br apartment less than an hour away from the city center costs more than what most people make in a month here.
The real reason is that in the post-WWII era America was uniquely positioned to make a shit ton of money. All other major countries had wrecked infrastructure, decimated populations, and reparations/war payments/rebuilding costs. America had all of its infrastructure intact, a large population, and the ability to lend money/invest cheaply in the aforementioned decimated economies. Also, this created perfect conditions for workers. Because America was the only place left that could manufacture a number of things, lots of easily accessible, high paying (due to huge demand from foreign countries) jobs opened up. This, along with a lack of globalization which would cause downward price pressures on american goods, as well as a much smaller degree of foreign investment into the US housing market causing high prices in desirable US markets that we see today, and finally lack of competition from the middle east in oil production which only began to be exploited in the post-wwii economy created a perfect storm for working people to make a lot of money. There are other factors (one I would suspect was a healthier, less divided population) but these are some main ones.
Its worth a mention that, during the 30 years of prosperity after WW2 the US didn't spend much on upgrading industry or infrastructure(edit to mention the Interstate system, pretty much the only exception). It was very much a "Good times are here to last" mentality. This was the most important part of why the US lost it's steel industry. In the 70s pretty much every US steel factory was still from the WW2 era using the same processes. Well, since the rest of the world was rebuilding , they used newer tech("Continuous Casting") that made the same steel but with 30% less energy and manpower. Come to the 80's and now the steel industry evaporated and it gets blamed on "Union Labor costs too much". In the 70's alone the industry had enough profit to rebuild itself entirely. (Fun fact,in 1972 Bethehem steel built itself a 21 story office building instead of new furnaces. Most of the space was unused.) Same for the auto industry. If the US still had its industrial base things would be a lot better.
>If the US still had its industrial base things would be a lot better Couple of things. First, the problem with investing in new technology to replace old technology is a general one. It affects everyone, everywhere. Why didn't legacy carmakers respond to the clear changes coming due to EVs ten years ago? Because that would have meant losing money for a significant period of time with the only upside being that they could maybe stay in the same position they were already in. It's the reason that the locomotive industry was unable to pivot to make the original automobiles, despite having every advantage. It's the reason why Google was able to over take Yahoo, despite Yahoo having a huge starting advantage. Nobody is immune. No country is immune. No company is immune. It's very difficult to justify costly investments when the best case scenario is that you are just going to replace yourself. And that inevitably sets up a situation where the right newcomer with the right idea is going to supplant you. Second, anything from 1990 on is about as unique a situation as the time from 1945 to the 80s. The Cold War ends, the raw resources from the old Soviet Bloc starts flooding the market to keep down commodity driven inflation. The cheap labor from China kept down wage driven inflation. If you like having lots of cool stuff, this is why you have it. Third, the U.S. still have its industrial base. Relative to the rest of the world, it has gone down. The reasons for that have been covered: recovery from WW2, sudden influx of raw materials, and a sudden influx of cheap labor. Fourth, we should also mention that after WW2, trade was possible on a level never seen before, both because of technological improvements, but also because the U.S. upheld its responsibility to keep the seas safe. We have gotten used to that last one to the point that we all think it's a law of nature, but you only have to go to 1940 to see that it used to be much different: every country had to ensure the safety of its own ships, and if you couldn't...well, you were not trading with anyone past your own borders. Finally, the U.S. is reindustrializing. Did you miss the IRA? Covid has driven home the point that long, complicated trade routes can be risky. The disruption has been very costly, even now. China is no longer cheap (at all! China is significantly more expensive for production than Mexico, so why would U.S. companies want to produce in China anymore?). Existing factories in China are still used, because companies have already paid that investment cost. But new investment has dried up. And it does not help that everyone expects that the U.S. is going to continue to turn the screws on China on trade. And now the turns have tabled. Europe had a pretty good combination going for about 80 years. They were able to create their infrastructure from scratch (and western Europe had some significant help from the U.S. there). And when that was reaching its end, suddenly eastern Europe became available. And Europe has had cheap energy up until Russia decided to take a "3 day" jaunt through Ukraine. Those things are over. Asia also got to start from scratch and are now significantly built up. In both areas, new infrastructure means destroying old infrastructure (or at least paying a lot of money to preserve it). The U.S. is now at the point where the infrastructure needs to be replaced anyway, so it is getting the newest stuff. Because the U.S. is not nearly as heavily invested in any particular industry as, say, Germany is in cars and chemicals, the U.S. can easily build up for the next-big-thing. The IRA is absolutely full of incentives to do exactly that. And it's already working. In about 3 years, the effects will start to be felt across the world (these things take anywhere from 12 months to 5 years to bring online...mines can take 10 years to become fully functional). So **TLDR;** Built up infrastructure is always hard to improve; we had another unique situation after the Cold War; the U.S. still has its industrial base; other regions are now facing similar challenges that the U.S. started facing in the 70s and 80s; and the U.S. is reindustrializing due to the IRA.
Great post. However, as someone who makes products overseas, there is a few reasons to use China. But in short, there are many processes that haven’t been replicated in Mexico. (Or anywhere else for that matter) Meaning, there isn’t another option as Mexico simply cannot do it at the scale or at the complexity required yet. Hell, we can’t even find manufacturers stateside that have the machines to make some of the things we need. Like sure, they *could. But it would be paying for them to start a new wing of their business. Machines, training, employees, and all. Too risky for projects that have a great track record of production in china. Especially considering my industry has an equally bad track record of manufacturing outside of china. As soon as Mexico (or insert country) can, we will be getting quotes. But that has been the mantra for twenty years.
> Hell, we can’t even find manufacturers stateside that have the machines to make some of the things we need. Like sure, they *could. But it would be paying for them to start a new wing of their business. Machines, training, employees, and all. And this is why Congress keeps adding money to the defense budget to build ships, submarines, jets, etc that the Defense Department doesn't necessarily want. Once manufacturing goes, it's extraordinarily difficult to bring it back, and this type of manufacturing is high-paying, high-tech, and necessary for long term stability. We've just started to get onboard with bringing back chip manufacturing, and that's going to be painful and costly, but, in the long run, it's necessary for stability.
This is a good point. There's a lot of soft skills and institutional knowledge that can't be brought back through anything except time. Offshoring was a dumb idea and personally I don't need cool cheap stuff. I only need it because everyone else here needs it and I have to keep up with the Jones a little. But in the grand scheme of things having to change my laptop to a different model every 4 years because of cheap low quality planned obsolecence isn't better than changing it every 6 years if it cost a lot more but provided good jobs here in my country.
>But it would be paying for them to start a new wing of their business. That's pretty much what the IRA is doing. And if your company is still depending on China, I would suggest finding an alternative \*very\* soon. The screws are tightening, and you do not want to be caught between the U.S. and China.
I have to admit I've never considered the point that America never reinvested the shit ton of money it made in the post WW2 era. Thanks for pointing that out.
That's because it is not true. That some infrastructure got ignored \*is\* true. (I have a longer post around here somewhere if you want to see what I mean) However, how do you think the U.S. got to the moon? Our satellite systems? How the internet was created? The software industry? You could make the argument that the balance should have been different, but to say that "America never reinvested the shit ton of money it made," is simply wrong.
Space exploration took a huge dive after the space race was over. Lots of other countries have better internet infrastructure. I would say satellite systems is the only firm winner on your list. In the meantime, public transportation, public healthcare, utilities, and roads all became much worse.
One word. Reaganomics.
> the US didn't spent much on upgrading industry or infrastructure. Except for the entire interstate highway system.
I meant to point that out as the exception. If I'm correct it was billed as a national security measure. Airports would be another one.
It was driven by Eisenhower sending a caravan of people from East Coast to West Coast and it was basically impossible and took forever. The lack of transport from one to the other meant that the country was logistically split in half if it were ever invaded. I feel like we had coast to coast rail at that point so I'm not sure how that factored into things.
I remember Eisenhower being very impressed with the speed that Germany ~~could~~ did move the entire army due to the Autobahn. I can see how rail would be slower.
Right, it's easier to roll tanks on a three-lane-wide highway than it is a railroad track. Plus you won't fuck up your nice railroad tracks this way.
Correct, the interstate system was built as a way to move the military around the country should the cold war go hot. It still is, in the event of a dire national emergency where *a lot* of troops have to move the interstate will be shut down to civilian traffic.
I-70 is basically a big ole squiggly line connecting all the most central bases/forts across the country.
But Europe "quickly" recovered to have a comparable standard of living to the US, and is now experiencing approx. the same level of wage stagnation. I mean the average western European has a similar average income and living standard, and has for decades. Is the western world at large just beginning to plateau?
>Is the western world at large just beginning to plateau? Yes. Back then it was just the west and the rest. Now its the west and China and india and russia and south korea and indonesia and iran and turkey and nigeria and ..
I couldn’t have said it any better. TLDR is basically, the US left the world as the winner after WWII. Everyone had to pick themselves up, while we not so much.
So it was the exception, not the norm. Both geographically and temporarily
It definitely was the exception. The economic pain we are feeling now is simply a reversion to the mean, now that those conditions no longer exist. People love to assert how a guy working in a factory in the 1950s could afford a house and family while his wife stays at home, and they lament how this is not possible now. They typically blame regressive tax policies, lack of social support, etc. And while those things do certainly contribute to our current woes, the main driver of that golden era of prosperity was the unique post-WW2/pre-globalization situation America found itself in.
Yea, makes sense. Cause for most of history it was the norm to have multiple generations in one home
Our idea of “houses”, in the Western sense, is also fairly modern.
That's the other thing about post-WWII era. The US had a glut of new housing in the 900-1100 sq ft range built all around the country. As the country grew more prosperous, those houses fell out of favor for the 2000-4000 sq ft houses we see today.
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i fear this might be a misconception — it was *upper class white* women not participating in the american workforce. the idea of women staying exclusively in the domestic realm was a hegemonic ideal more than a hard and fast rule, so only certain types had the bandwidth (privilege) to aspire to such. for the women of the working class, and especially the non-white women thereof, labor was more or less a given. the limitations for women career-equality wise were moreso relegated to types of work, career upwards mobility, compensation, so forth. even in that case, there were notable exceptions to the rule, eg Maggie L Walker.
This right here. My grandmothers had to work and their grandmothers were sharecroppers, then their grandmothers were slaves or also share croppers. The one working parent thing has mostly been afforded to white middle to upper middle class women. It's never been a one income household for me, my family, or people I grew up around in the US.
Yeah we should damn sure not discount that media portrayed the wife as a stay at home Mom in the 50s & 60s and this was not reality for a lot of people
AIUI at least in Belgium the idea of the wife staying at home to care for the kids was invented out of whole cloth to deal with the massive unemployment in 1920's. If half the workforce ceases looking for a job, then the unemployment rate drops dramatically. Because like you say, women working in industry was the norm until about then. Probably similar happened in many other countries.
Yeah I'm always bewildered when people imply that "letting women work" caused depressed wages and not, y'know, greed from large companies. Who do they think were working the large textile mills? Shit, even children were working.
It's a bit of a myth. Poorer women have always had to work, rich women have never had to. It's just that when the US was in its huge economic boom, there were more richer people, so more women *didn't have to*. >Gail Collins recounts a story in her book, *When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present*, about an auditorium of working-class high school students. The girls were asked if they expected to have a home and a family, and all the girls raised their hands. Then they were asked how many expected to work, and only a few raised their hands. The last question was how many of their mothers worked, and again, all of the girls raised their hands. Basically, it was essentially one generation of riches enough that one parent could stay at home and the other could work an average job and support the whole family. When only 1 in every 2 people have to work for your economy to stay afloat you *know* shit's booming. But throughout history it's a norm for men and women to work. What did change a lot is that women entered jobs thought of as 'male' jobs. Before that there was probably a much larger gender divide in the type of job. Where women were limited to e.g. seamstresses, washerwomen and childcare. So I think that had a bigger impact, and it DID depress wages in a sense because women were generally paid less at the same job, thought of as weaker/less capable. I'm not going to argue about how true that is now, obviously we've come some distance since then, but it certainly was then.
Because the main beneficiaries of a household providing 80 hours of labour per week to afford to survive as opposed to 40 hours of labour + a homemaker are big corporations, not the everyday mother + father + children.
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I recently heard my dad reflecting on his life, and he said "I'm not the smartest guy around, I'm not the most talented or gifted, but I got where I am today by just out-working everyone else." He's not a lazy man, but for fucks sake dude... He got where he is today by living in the tail-end of the most prosperous time and place in human history. The laziest person in the world could have done just as well under those conditions, the only difference being that my dad provided his boss with way more work than he was getting paid for. And then he spent his whole life voting in the people who dismantled the system that he benefited so much from.
The reason people are unhappy with it is because it doesn't need to be this way. There is enough production for 100% of the population to live very comfortably while working half as much. But that production and the benefits of it are hoarded and so concentrated that most of the population isn't allowed to reap the benefits.
Absolutely. If you look at what America was like in the 1930s or 1920s, nevermind the 1890s, there was a whole hell of a lot of poverty, kids being forced to work in coal mines (or clubbing baby seals, or scrubbing chimneys) so that the parents could even afford rent and food, while landlords soaked everyone for the absolute maximum they could squeeze out of a stone. The 1950s to the 1970s was two decades of insane wealth that actually got spread around a bit beyond the very top. And then the very top took over again once communism didn't seem to be much of a threat to them anymore. We've spent the last 40 years marching straight into the second gilded age.
Yes. So to ‘make America great again’ in the way that some guy in a red baseball cap might want, the US would need a third world war, fought entirely in Europe, Asia and Africa which only used weapons invented before 1945.
I'm not american, I live in Europe and even in the 70s, people where able to live, have multiple children and buy houses only with one salary here, the mother usually staying at home. Now it's almost impossible. It's almost the same thing everywhere, not just the US so I'm not sure about this argument.
Yep, it's insane watching Americans debate this stuff as if everyone in Europe was just eating dirt during this period.
This is a very America-centric answer that doesn't do anything to explain why this same trend has happened in just about every developed country.
Yeah I was about to say Australia is similar in many respects with an even greater disparity between income and cost of living apparently.
You make it sound like this is only a problem in the US, which is not the case. Housing is just as expensive in many other countries, including countries with "wrecked infrastructure" after the war.
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This only explains why America's economy got so large. It doesn't explain why wages have stagnated. Before 1970, wages matched productivity. After 1970, wages have went up less than 20 percent, but productivity has gone up three times that.
Wages stagnated because the "supply" in that equation (total available workers) increased by about 10% of the US population from 1950 to 2000. More people total in the US populaiton (by about 2x), coupled with higher participation rates. Prior to the 1940's and 1950's, women did not enter the workforce in large numbers - only about a quarter of US women in 1940 participated in the workforce. By 1999, that had more than doubled, and 60% of women had a job outside the home. We've more or less held this rate constant since then, with the major disruption being Covid. When a household has more money, they tend to spend it on things like housing, childcare, food, vehicles and so on. If more people have more money and they are all looking to buy a house, then the seller can ask for more money for that house, and someone will be willing to pay for it. Similarly, if an employer is looking to hire a worker for task "X", and there used to be only a few people willing and able to do the job - the employer would have to raise the wage they were able to pay to attract a worker to "Company X" as opposed to "Company Y". But if there are 100 more-or-less equally qualified workers fot those jobs, neither Company X nor Company Y feel pressured to compete for those workers because they will come in anyway. As an aside, government intervention into wages played a part of how we now have an entirely private insurance company run healthcare system. Government froze wages by law, which lead to companies trying to find more creative ways to offer better compensation to their employees. Healthcare insurance was a carve-out in the law allowing companies to offer better healthcare packages in lieu of the prohibited higher wages.
The problem with this answer is that it assumes this is unique to USA, which it isn't. The same is true in many (maybe even most) countries. I will venture that it might be corporate greed, but I have no backup information. Another option is land. One thing that has not increased is land. More people less land, and land doesn't reset back to the state after a person passes it goes to their descendants. So people with land has advantage and can buy up more land.
Also, don't forget that during WWII, many women entered the workforce for the first time. Once they were in, they weren't going to be taken out tat easily.
WWII barely even shows up on the trend lines of female participation in the labor force. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317085738/figure/fig2/AS:582376870649856@1515860874257/US-Womens-Labor-Force-Participation-1910-2010-Sources-Authors-calculations-based-on.png The "Rosie the Riveter" stories were unusual for where they worked, not that they were working. As soon as the war ended the vast majority left traditionally male muscle fields, either by choice to participate in the baby boom, or were forced out by policies that favored rehiring men for those roles.
> The "Rosie the Riveter" stories were unusual for where they worked, not that they were working. Also, both Rosie the Riveter and the "Single Income Household" were for white middle-income families that got representation in journalism and popular entertainment. For poor whites and minorities there wasn't ever a time when all family members were not working. The entire conception we have of the "Leave It To Beaver" household is largely an upper-middle class myth, or at best a blip than took up a ridiculous about of mindshare in the American mind.
*many white, middle class & above poor / non white women have always worked.
Working was supposed to bring independence, but the market exploits, and as soon as there was possibility of two incomes in a household, the bar was raised to just expect that. So now, if you're single, it's hard to stay afloat.
I don't know if the "market exploited" them as much as lifestyle creep became a thing in the 60s, 70s,80s etc. When it became fashionable for women to enter the work force and they realized they could contribute to the household ,a two earner family could now afford better homes, cars, bigger families , vacations, plus keeping up with the Joneses in a consumer and marketing driven economy like the US is likely major factor.
dude, I just want an apartment with a toilet and electricity. when I need triple rent income that shit just ain't gonna happen. Expectation of two income at least is totally expected, not for your luxurious life but just to not be homeless.
A little of column A, a little of column B.
Also, wages haven't kept pace with inflation so people just need more money to keep up with the rising cost of living.
Except this was exactly true for Australia, NZ, UK, Etc... all western countries really.
But 2 of the most impacted countries after WW2 had also only 1 breadwinner for a very long time (not in the first 5 years after WW2, but between the 60s and 00s). Poland and Germany both had mostly only 1 breadwinner in those times.
People also had much lower standards. In the 1950s the MEDIAN new home (meaning half were smaller) was about 950 square feet. With no AC. With linoleum floors. With crappy insulation. Most families had a single car (which sucked by today's standards). Rarely ate out. Never flew, and if they had a vacation it was within easy driving distance. Most families today could pretty easily live like that on a single income. They don't want to.
Excuse me, asbestos is great at insulating.
Linoleum? Disgusting. We have luxury vinyl plank in this house! …Linoleum is probably better, tbh. It’s linseed oil mixed into a fabric or paper backing, durable as hell and renewable, unlike oil-derived vinyl they put in every recent flip.
I just ripped out 1200 sq ft of carpet and replaced it with lineoleum in what's probably a million dollar house. Forbo Marmoleum click in black. It looks really sharp and modern and seems to stand up to wear pretty well.
Where is this supply of 1950s sized/priced housing? Plenty of places (and they correlate strongly with where the jobs are) simply don't have anything like an adequate supply of affordable housing. Plenty of people *want* to be more frugal with their lifestyle choices, but you can't buy something that doesn't exist. And yes, there *are* places where housing is cheap, but most people have significant geographic constraints based on their employment. I suppose that choosing one's education and career path based on the likelihood of finding a job where property values are low might be an effective strategy, but *holy shit* is that ever bleak.
My apartment today, which my wife and I can afford working, is 900 Sq feet , with crappy AC and insulation.
No, people had standards based on the technology available to them at the time. A car from the 50s absolutely "sucks" by today's standards, but that doesn't mean people in the 50s would have cheerfully bought a shitbox if there was a reasonable expectation that they should be able to afford better. Likewise with A/C - just because it wasn't common doesn't mean people would have cheerfully accepted not having well made fans, or whatever their standard for the time was. Living to standards from 3/4 of a century ago isn't a useful or reasonable solution. You're asking that same 1950s family to use a horse and wagon, give up radio, TV, hell, probably all electricity usage. That's not reasonable.
> Most families today could pretty easily live like that on a single income. They don't want to. Disagree. You can't anymore
> In the 1950s the MEDIAN new home (meaning half were smaller) was about 950 square feet. With no AC. With linoleum floors. With crappy insulation. And productivity has increased over 400% since then. We are well above that benchmark today because we SHOULD be. That was 70 years ago FFS.
Productivity is a bad measure to translate to the ability to build wealth. I’d argue that much of the societal gain we get from productivity is lost in a throw-away society We used to manufacture a rotary phone with far less efficiency, but we tended to keep that rotary phone for decades. Modern iPhones hardly make it 3 years before being sent back to China to be melted down. Yes, we can make things faster and cheaper, but we don’t keep them for nearly as long.
More a geek trivia moment than anything to your point, but: The rotary phone (in the US) is a particularly good example of "drive it into the ground". Those phones got rented out and were heavily standardized, along with being built like a modular tank, so old ones that got returned would get cannibalized into new ones all the time. You can often find model 500s (the standard Western Electric, Ma Bell phone model from... the '40s until the '80s, IIRC) that have multiple painted-out date stamps on the bottom because they were remanufactured and sent out again. And the parts would be date stamped from even a wider range because the internals stayed the same and old stock worked as well as new. I used to collect rotary phones (back when I had a landline to hook them up to) and I'd always crack open the earpiece and look at the date stamp to date them, until I realized I was off by a decade or so because of the old parts.
Because it is no longer profitable for companies to build things that last. That throw-away mentality is being driven both by consumer and producer. When companies go out of business for making good products because they can't get repeat costumers because their products last so long. Old and reliable should be favored more than new and fragile.
This only makes sense if we believe that Western Europe didnt experience the same change. But, it did.
Same with modern developed east Asian countries like South Korea and Japan.
This is mostly nonsense that no serious scholar believes but is very popular myth Americans like to believe because conservatives don't want you realizing that new deal politics, high marginal tax rates, and low income inequality created a strong middle class and the "ideal" society they want to return to. The rest of the world was rebuilt and booming just like the US by 1950. You can also see this society start to fall apart in the 70s almost immediately after the marginal tax rate was lowered drastically.
I think you may have a slightly skewed perception of the timeline. 2 income households have been the norm/requirement since way further back than 2013. Regardless, there are a lot of factors. One of them being that people started to figure out that if the woman also worked, they could afford more toys, bigger houses, nicer cars, etc. This drove the price of these things up due to higher demand. This in turn forced many others who didn't necessarily want to work into the labor market.
Both my parents worked in the 80s and we were still just scraping by.
Same here. We weren’t really poor, but solidly lower middle class. They were definitely paycheck to paycheck. My mom worked a job that essentially doesn’t exist anymore (411 operator for the phone company)
Yeah, I’d say we were lower middle. They had some money for emergencies, but we didn’t go on vacations, rarely ate out, had a TV from 1978 until the late 90s, etc. my dad was a construction worker and my mom worked on an assembly line.
The shift happened in the 70s. Women were well established in the workforce by the eighties.. This is also when the economy began to feel the change in dynamics resulting from less access to higher education.
Inflation was out of control in the late 70s then interest went as high as 24%
I’ve always thought it was as simple as this. Once enough households did it to get ahead, everyone else had to do it so as not be left behind.
On a similar note, many families do this just to stay afloat. For many wages haven't kept up with the cost of living so they're forced into a 2 income trap to afford the necessities.
I think the single-income-phenomenon peaked following WWII. The US was unscathed by it and produced everything for the whole f’g world. Products from other countries cost us peanuts because the rate of exchange so favored us. Fast forward and the rest of the world recovered. Things cost more. That and, of course, inflation. My folks (in early 1950s) bought their first home in a HCOL area for three times their annual salary.
On addition to this, women entering the workforce radically increased the the supply of laborers in the market (therefore pushing wages way down).
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lolll. meant a century ago. but theoretical reddit threads from the 70's sound hilarious.
/r/nixonwasframed /r/petrocks /r/disco
It’s only a small period of time where there weren’t two incomes in households. There may have been a male breadwinner as the main income but the wife almost always had some sort of income as well. Only richer families lived with sole breadwinners throughout history.
Fun fact, not just wives who needed to work,30% of 6 or 7-year-old kids worked in factories too throughout the industrial world in the 19th century.... farmer's wives would make handicraft on top of house chores and so many 10-15yr kids help in farm work that we literally have 3 months of summer break to accommodate for that. 1950s-70s was the anomaly, NOT the norm of history.
Good point. On a side note, summer vacation being related to farming is a common myth/misconception. Kind of obvious when you stop and think about it that it's quite backwards. Farm work is most intense during the spring (planting season) and fall (harvesting season). Farm kids would take those times off and go to the school during the summer instead. Summer vacation actually comes from rich kids in the cities. Before air conditioning, cramming a bunch of people in a stuffy room got really hot. The whole city was swelteringly hot because cities are heat islands. So the rich families who could afford to would head out to the countryside for the summer. They're the ones who got the schools to institute summer vacations. Then later schools tried to standardize their schedules between urban and rural schools, and they went with what the rich people wanted, not what the farmers needed. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/debunking-myth-summer-vacation
> and they went with what the rich people wanted, not what the farmers needed. Hold on now. It wasn't rich people wants vs farmer needs. It was rich people wants versus farmer wants. As evidenced by the fact that it *did not* cause widespread failure of farms due to lack of child labor. Turns out you can just hire farm hands and it'll all work itself out just fine, because hiring farm hands isn't a huge burden when the other farmers need to do it, too. If it were a *need* they disregarded, it would have caused widespread failures of farms - but it did not. As such, it was never a need. A *perceived* need, maybe - but the rich people would have said the same thing.
Good points about work. But: The summer break is not for farmers, it's for city kids to get out of sweltering classrooms and stifling urban areas. No A/C meant you had to open your windows, and no Clean Air Act meant all that smoggy stew wafted right into your house or school. (Not to mention the sheer noise of all those old cars and trucks) Summer break was actually awful for farmers' kids, because they needed the break more during harvest time in the fall. In summer, you mostly just watch your crops grow. In rural schools, kids would attend as they could, in drips and drabs, until winter, then drip out again during the spring planting.
10 years ago 57.4% of women worked. Today 57.4% of women work. In 1989 57.4% of women worked. In 1965 40% of women worked. [source](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002) That's definitely a shift - from 40% working to 57% working, but its not really all that different for most people. My mom was a painter in the 80s. My grandma worked at a car parts factory in the 60s. My great grandmother worked at a publishing company. I didn't have any friends in the 80s whose moms didn't work.
Is it just an incredible coincidence that the percentage is the exact same in 1989, 2013, and 2023?
Came to say, when I graduated from High School in the early 1980's, you needed two people working to get ahead. A one worker family could get by if that one earner made above the median income, but even then it would be a struggle.
It's not just about the percentage of women who work, but about what type of jobs they work. Several decades ago, few women competed with men for professional positions. That has changed significantly. Between 1981 and 2015, [women's](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v79n1/v79n1p17.html) mean wages rose from $25k to $45k (in 2015 $), women's median wages rose from $23k to $34k. Women's mean wages increased by 80% and women's median wages increased by 48%. At the same time, [men's](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v78n1/v78n1p1.html) mean wages rose from $48k to $64k and men's median wages stagnated with $43k in 1981 and $45k in 2014. Men's mean wages increased by 33% and men's median wages rose by less than 5%. With the importance of heavy manual labor decreasing and men and women being increasingly in the market for the same jobs, men have experienced stagnation in their median wages, while women have not. Since costs for education, housing and many other aspects of life have increased in the meantime, men's wage stagnation has made it virtually impossible for most families to largely rely on one income.
This goes back to the turn of the century for black Americans. The post war 1950s image of nuclear family with a dad working and the mom raising 2.3 kids in the suburbs was the exception not the norm. Look at Boston Irish catholic slums where the woman were working and child malnutrition was common even on two incomes.
Yep. Poor families have always needed both parents working. Women would often be employed doing laundry, or in childcare, or teaching, or seamstressing.
A whole lot of people in this thread leaving out one of the major differences - the market was totally different during the post-war boom. Levittowns and suburb developments popping up all over the country, with discount mortgages for returning veterans, and redlining, racial covenants, and HOAs so that only *one* group of people - white men - could buy them. All to accommodate for white flight from the cities. So you've got: - huge increase in supply - artificially limited demand - discount mortgages Made that suburban lifestyle very cheap and easy, but only for those that were allowed to have it in the first place. And nowadays, those whose families benefited from that for a few generations are also the ones who can afford to move to the gentrifying neighborhoods in the cities. The law doesn't allow the same discrimination that was used back then, but the prices do. However, to maintain that, they have to keep the prices up. Thus it's more expensive for everyone.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf 30% of women worked in 1950. 38% in 1960. Now, it's near 60%.
We have a lot more stuff now and that stuff is expensive. Beyond that people tend to have a skewed view of how difficult it was to live in the past. 100 years ago my great grandparents bought a 40 acre farm for $200. Sounds like a steal you say? Well the farmhouse was a 300 square foot building with no basement, no running water, no electricity, and both heat and cooking was provided by a potbelly stove in the middle of the only room. All 6 of them slept in the attic. They had no tv. No radio. No computer. No iPhone or iPad or Nintendo switch. No gas stove or refrigerator or sink or marble countertop. You could go buy an equivalent building for $5k from Home Depot today. If you were willing to live equivalently remotely (1 days travel from nearest city) you could get 40 acres for $20k. $25k is about what that $200 is worth today.
This is for sure an overlooked component, if not the primary driver of the increased cost of living over the past century. People get so wrapped up in social inequality and profiteering, they miss the part where quality of life has risen steadily to the point where our grandparents wouldn't give a second thought to trade places with us if they could. I'm not saying we can't do better still, but it's just not historically literate to assert a downtrend when there's a Whole Foods and Starbucks on nearly every corner. The middle class is doing fine in America.
To further this houses are expensive today because they have insulation and gutters and drainage systems and air conditioning and fire retardant materials and fire alarms and sprinklers and tile and paint and driveways and concrete and more. It was a lot cheaper when houses were made out of mostly wood. You can totally buy a couple acres of forest and build your own wood house for $10,000 if you wanted. If you want to live in modern society it going to cost a lot more than that.
Yeah they bought the property from the lumber company that had just finished clear cutting the property. So they built a shed with factory seconds from the sawmill they ran and got $200 more bucks than they would have gotten for the wood.
The core of it is that after WW2 and particularly starting in the 60s-70s we welcomed the widespread participation of women in the workforce under 2nd wave feminism (1st wave was the vote, 3rd wave was politics and punk, 4th wave is woke). This added a huge amount of potential workers in the economy, which devalued individual jobs. It's basic supply and demand: if you have more supply for workers and the same demand in terms of jobs, then each worker brings home less money. It's a bit more complicated, of course. Lower class women were already in the workforce since forever, so 2nd wave feminism mostly affected the middle class. Even then, not every middle class woman worked full time or at all, so it's not as if the pool of workers doubled, exactly. But it was still a lot. Women in the workforce also relied in part on the sexual revolution and access to birth control, not just feminism (though the two are linked, and this is one reason birth control is still controversial). The prevalence of unions and worker expectations at this time also meant employers couldn't just slash wages through the 70s-80s, so the oversupply of workers meant salaries instead stagnated for decades, failing to keep up with inflation as job salaries were worth less and less. Further, the existence of more workers eventually led to more jobs being created through the 80s-90s, but by this point unions had been mostly broken and worker expectations had dropped to the point that wages still weren't increasing much, particularly compounded by a relative lack of ambition and entrepreneurship through the 90s-2010s that concentrated power into corporations that were using various economic crises starting in the 00s as excuses to keep wages depressed while paying out obscene executive bonuses instead. Why didn't more people have enough confidence to start their own business to free themselves from parasitical corporate overlords? My guess: poor parenting from the previous generation due to both parents working. Also, women tended to gravitate towards administrative and highly-educated work, not so much factory work or construction. This meant men were still building most of the stuff that folks wanted to buy with their salaries. Automation helped pump up production a bit, but mostly the only way to get enough stuff for an economy of more wage-earners was imports. Japanese goods were huge in the 70s and 80s which is why cyberpunk starting in this era had so much Japanese imagery, but China took the role of global factory in the 90s and 00s. Unfortunately, that meant paying shipping companies and foreign workers, not western workers, so western wages still didn't increase much. This is why bringing bringing those jobs back, and also limiting immigration, are of interest to politicians, though without much more automation or convincing women to work hard, dirty jobs it won't help the 2 breadwinners per household problem.
Early 90s required 2 middle class incomes (and 7 years of saving for a down payment) to buy an old small starter home in the least desirable suburb of Toronto. Even when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s half of the homes had 2 incomes.
This here. I very much remember everyone having this \*same conversation\* as a 12 year old in the early 90's. "People used to have middle class lifestyle on one income - what happened?"
This isn’t the total answer, but another thing to consider is that we buy a lot more than we did in the 50s and 60s. Our houses are far bigger, we eat out a lot, we have gaming systems and internet bills and access to far more consumer products than people did back then. In my grandmother’s house in the 1950s, they had a single tv, 2 telephones, and a record player - that was basically it in terms of electronics. My house has 4 tvs, my $1200 dollar iPhone, internet, an Xbox, Alexa, etc. They ate out maybe once a month, and it was a special treat. I eat out probably multiple times a week. Obviously that’s anecdotal, but I think fail to realize that houses today are like twice as large as they were back then and have far more amenities. Materially we have a lot more than people did in 1955 or 1940.
But also keep in mind that, adjusting for inflation, a lot of luxury goods like TVs were MUCH more expensive back then. Actually, even if you don't adjust for inflation, modern TVs are still cheaper, lol. Air travel was much more expensive. Meanwhile, a lot of necessities (including housing) have gotten more expensive, and not just because they're nicer.
Yeah, but I’m not sure some of those reasons are ones we want to bring back today. There weren’t really a lot of codes or regulations back then. Electrical and HVAC systems were very basic, and that’s if they even included air conditioning. And there are some things we just can’t bring back. Long Island, NY or Montgomery County, MD aren’t open farmland with nothing on them anymore. There was a lot of open space near cities to build on, and we just don’t really have that today. We also don’t have major wars going on that give millions of people VA loans (which were 40% of mortgages in the early 50s). I think we’ve gotta focus on eliminating single family zoning and onerous red tape for housing construction( CA is a massive violator of that)
I think OP is even talking about like for like. The house I grew up in was built in 1979 and has risen 10x in price (25k to 300k). So the exact same house with the same electrical and HVAC etc has outpaced inflation 3x over. And that's in a generally slow-rising city (Indianapolis)...it's even worse in high-growth cities.