This logic is flawed in the sense of completely misunderstanding of "progress".
Sure, the 900sqft home argument might be somewhat valid. But in the majority of the situations I've seen, it's the opposite happening. So I'd challenge this one for sure.
As for the cable TV and phone line... Yea. There is something called technological progress. We have more services today because that's the world we live in, a connected world, where work and personal lives merge and access to the internet is paramount.
Your parents bought used reliable cars, great, people still do. But cars are relatively cheaper/easier to produce as well. Are you going to say the same thing when the next generation "rents" car rides as their monthly expense?
Eating out... yep. People eat out more. It's more efficient and frankly cheaper in some scenarios. That's not always the case, but often is. And in larger cities where kitchens are absolutely tiny, cooking is not only inefficient, but sometimes not even possible. So, I'd challenge this as a misunderstanding of the times - again.
Where money is spent vs how it's earned and the cost of living play into all of this. And just because the allocations aren't the same, the idea that it should be attributed to "entitlement" simply puts you on the "out of touch" spectrum.
The sense of entitlement is a lot higher these days. I grew up in a 900 sqft house with 1 bathroom. Yet all my peers (myself included) seek out homes 2x, 3x or bigger.
Same with cars.... my parents bought used, reliable cars. Today we want fancy things.
Growing up we had cable tv and a phone line. Probably spent $50/month total. The family cellphone bill, home broadband, various tv services easily top out over $300/month.
We went out to eat once a month. Tops. It was a treat. Nowadays people (myself included go out 1, 2 or more times per week.
Earnings aside, current generations are spending way more because they want more.
Yeah you're gonna need to back this one up chief. Not sure about you but I'd rather be living in a 1 bedroom apartment with modern appliances, internet, smartphone, and a laptop than I would in a 8000sqft that had none of these things.
We have a lot more expenses today in large part because standard of living has increased. Certain components, like home affordability and medical, have become much worse than they were. Many other components have improved.
Right, this is a common economic discussion. People under the poverty line today can afford a roof, TV, and a home phone; 70 years ago they would stand in bread lines. Quality of life has definitely improved.
Yes. My very average house today is a huge luxury compared to the very average house my grandparents bought in the 60s.
I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those.
I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air conditioning, a higher health insurance bill to pay for drastically better health care, an extra car insurance policy.
That's in addition to all the extra stuff I have lying around. 2 cars, not one, both of which are vastly superior and more expensive than what my grandparents had. Superior home appliances. And 1 metric tonne of electronics.
I have so much more material wealth than all but the very richest did just 50 years ago. How could I complain that I'm not better off?
But that's the problem, we have more stuff but lower quality of life. And even if you sacrifice the stuff you can't live on 1985 wages.
I'd gladly sacrifice a smart phone and streaming TV to live in a large house with 3 kids on a single working class income like my father did, but the $200 phone and and $10 netflix wouldn't even cover a weeks rent.
It's one of the things that makes it hard to do meaningful standard of living comparisons over time. And it's especially easy to be dismissive of electronics etc. relative to the increase in prices of elite educations and homes in elite cities. And the cost of healthcare (although it's also much better in many respects).
However, I suspect a lot of people on the younger side would be pretty horrified at the level of communications, information access, ability to timeshift, and just the general friction of everything including payments, shopping, and more a few decades ago.
I've said it before only half-jokingly. If I were transported back to my late-eighties job as a product manager, I'd quit in shear frustration after a week or two because of the almost complete lack of information and communications tools.
Fair enough, but every time I see examples like that, I have to ask - are those really standard of living increases, or just technology advances? Yes, electronics have gotten cheaper, but healthcare and education have gotten massively more expensive. More importantly, can the average worker today work less hours than his or her father did in order to live a middle class life? I would argue it's actually the opposite in many cases.
You are not living a 20th century lifestyle. You don't sit in a mostly wooden building with minimal electricity or gas lighting with reading and radio as your primary entertainment.
At the very least you now have a computer that was certainly manufactured and assembled on the other half of the globe and transported to you. You likely have a lot of electrical appliances like ovens, a fridge, AC, and hot water.
You likely don't live 3 or 4 generations to a 1000sq ft house.
That we work the same in general has more to do with (imo positive) lifestyle inflation than some evil banker sitting on their slightly larger boat than the one you own.
The smartphone, value engineered window A/C unit and all manner of other things have given the poor a massively better lifestyle than they did in the 1990s.
Go watch some early 90s movies and look at the kinds of apartments and houses normal "not material to the plot" people live in and how they are furnished and compare to today.
You don't even need to compare to tech that didn't exist.
How many projects apartments from 1970 would you have to combine to assemble a full suite of working appliances and utilities. Now run that same test for the rural shacks and early mobile homes. How many of those people owned cars, a decent set of seasonally appropriate clothing, got their nails done, ate fresh produce out of season, etc. etc. etc?
Now run that comparison for 2021.
We're a fuckton richer. But proportional increases in the amount of our income sapped by shelter, education and medical care have more or less cancelled out all the gains in material wealth.
This isn't true. Since about 1960 productivity has gone up but (middle class) incomes have gone down. The fraction of a family's expenditures have become dominated by the basics, not by the amenities you cite.
I think you're missing his point. Although you can, of course, disagree with it in any case.
Even though people of relatively recent generations were more successful on average, that didn't give them access to many of the services and capabilities that people just take for granted today. Pick your year--1970, 1980, 1990. Plop many people down into those years and they would not be happy even if they had a good job and could buy a nice suburban house. (Middle class people were generally leaving the cities during that period.)
Most, myself included, have a very limited understanding of the economy we are part of, so I'm not surprised by complaints. Every so often, someone making 2 or 3 times the national average income makes an ass of themselves on TV by claiming they're economically disadvantaged.
In some senses, you don't even have to go to the suburbs to be unimaginably better off now than it was possible to be a century ago, because a century it was not possible, at any price, to make a weekend trip between New York and London; to be immune to the common forms of seasonal flu; to have a video call with someone; to get penicillin; 3D printers, and indeed all CNC machines more complicated than a loom controlled by punched cards, would've been fantasy; and so much more besides.
TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones.
Households today spend more on cell phones and communication but also spend less on fine china, dress clothes and food. When you net out all the pluses and minuses households today spend much more on housing, healthcare, daycare, transportation (two cars, for two jobs) and education.
When you look closely the two bed, two bath detached home it’s likely in a school district that is underperforming and while the home may be slightly larger than those in the past it’s 30+ years old.
This is detailed elegantly in the Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren.
The thing that is crazy is that there is any debate in the subject. Real productivity growth has averaged 2% for the last 100 years in the US. Early in the last century they they were speculating that if productivity growth kept up at that rate their grandchildren would only need to work a couple of hours a week and what would they do with all their free time?
1. Human desires increase over time, so virtually nobody is going to accept the lifestyle of a few decades ago as acceptable for their retirement. A few decades ago, people whining that they can no longer afford an international vacation would have been resoundingly mocked. Now people unironically say society is in decline because they cannot afford to travel internationally or cannot afford vacation property (when neither were ever the norm, but have become relatively so). People will get sympathy at the high cost of going to restaurants and bars. My grandparents view complaining about that as ridiculous, as to them, those things are luxury goods, but to our generation, they are just day to day life. Frankly, you will expect a much higher standard of living in retirement than what you have today.
2. Some of our most expensive goods and services really aren't enhanced by technology, at least not in a consume the same for less kind of way. Most notably, housing and healthcare. For these, we want to consume ever more and so much so that the cheaper options tend to simply disappear from the market. Consider that my father as an upper middle class person grew up in a 1200 sqft house. That is what dual income professionals bought back in the day. But you can't really easily buy a 1200 sqft house today (you can in a condo, but that is a very different lifestyle). That house had one bathroom. You would be hard pressed to find a house without a bathroom a person unless it was very old (and those are getting torn down). It used to be that low wage people lived simply in quasi boarding houses/permanent motels. But you cannot build those today or at least virtually nobody does. So rather than having a cheaper 1200 sqft house with one bathroom, we went with 2500 sqft houses with 5 bathrooms, with an increase in the price.
So yes, the future is definitely more prosperous, as 2500 sqft is more than 1200, but it isn't an option to take the 1200 sqft for cheaper unless you go and live in old housing stock in a rural area where it has not been torn down. You can't live simply in a hotel style cheap apartment anymore as those aren't legal in many places and even if they were, people do not tolerate them nearby.
With healthcare, we don't pay less for the same outcomes, but are increasingly paying multiples more for better ones and you get the standard of care, not what was around 20 years ago.
Some things are definitely nicer and some are not. Malls are worse maybe overall but there are some that are also extremely nice now. And is it not also a huge improvement that you can just easily order something from ease at home without having to go to a crowded mall in the first place?
The housing thing though for sure is a problem. Then again we are now concentrating more and more in big cities.
The one thing people always miss with these calculations is food. We think food is expensive now but the cost of chicken or beef is insanely cheap relative to really what it should be (or what it once was). A steak in the 1920s was probably a real treat.
Homes are much larger now than in 1955. Cars are being purchased with far more (expensive) features, and they are driven for fewer miles before being "upgraded". We eat out much more. Even when we eat in, we eat more luxurious meals. We buy Frappuccinos daily, we buy clothing much more frequently, we impulse shop significantly more, we utilize medical services much more frequently, we take far more, and more luxurious vacations, we rack up ludicrous levels of student debt for degrees that have no hope of servicing said debt, etc, etc, etc.
We are wealthier today than at any point in human history. The myth that all homes must be two-income is predicated on the outrageous lifestyles we choose, NOT due to anything inherent in "society" or "the economy".
Our insane consumerist appetite is what's preventing one household member from staying home, nothing else.
Please tell me which point I'm wrong on. Do most people not live in larger houses, enjoy greater automation of housework, enjoy larger and better entertainment technologies, and benefit from medical procedures which did not exist in 1967?
Sure, the 900sqft home argument might be somewhat valid. But in the majority of the situations I've seen, it's the opposite happening. So I'd challenge this one for sure.
As for the cable TV and phone line... Yea. There is something called technological progress. We have more services today because that's the world we live in, a connected world, where work and personal lives merge and access to the internet is paramount.
Your parents bought used reliable cars, great, people still do. But cars are relatively cheaper/easier to produce as well. Are you going to say the same thing when the next generation "rents" car rides as their monthly expense?
Eating out... yep. People eat out more. It's more efficient and frankly cheaper in some scenarios. That's not always the case, but often is. And in larger cities where kitchens are absolutely tiny, cooking is not only inefficient, but sometimes not even possible. So, I'd challenge this as a misunderstanding of the times - again.
Where money is spent vs how it's earned and the cost of living play into all of this. And just because the allocations aren't the same, the idea that it should be attributed to "entitlement" simply puts you on the "out of touch" spectrum.
Good day.
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