>>> average net worth increase for different brackets
>>> the normal people are faring compared to other/previous years.
The economic disparity is gross, you can't argue excess.
Comparing to the past is isn't going to play out the way you think. What time period do you want to compare to? Is that a period where "better off" was for a narrow segment of the population, where "better off" was robbing tomorrow?
The problem is that life looks a lot like the classic game design dilemma of "power creep".
If it was 1950, no cell phone (1 house phone bill), no internet, no cable, no streaming, no Spotify, no computer... You might have a tv (one, singular), radio, those are one time costs. Power, water, phone, food, house/transport (and likely 1 car for many family's). My neighborhood grocery story is a gym... so we traded a close by place to shop for more travel for food, and a place you pay to go exercise.
People ate canned and frozen veg, not fresh trucked in from everywhere items. And before you make the argument for health, go look at the nutrient content of a flash frozen green bean vs one that sat in a box for a week to get to your plate, the frozen wins.
Guess what, all of what we have, unsustainable. 8 billion people can't live like middle class Americans! As more of the globe wants in on the action things are only going to get HARDER for people, unless we make some drastic lifestyle changes.
>> In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined
> I would like to see some citations for this because there are many things that make up quality of life, and many ways to measure them.
There's that famous graph that shows flat real wages from the 70s onward for most people, and very well-known problems with extremely important goods like healthcare access and housing.
Sure, most Americans (even poor ones) have gotten significantly larger and higher-resolution televisions and gizmos like cell phones during that time, but I think those things are actually pretty marginal (and perhaps even negative), from a quality of life perspective.
> Income inequality is what a failing society does to motivate people by meeting their greed rather than meeting their needs.
Workers are not greedy for simply needing enough money to rent or own a home! In the same time frame, average US-wide rent has gone up from ~200$ to 1100$ [1] - that's a 450% increase. In "hot" areas such as SF, the development has been even worse [2]. On top of that, other necessities of life such as groceries have also continuously gotten more and more expensive [3], not to mention more expensive to obtain as neighborhood grocery stores closed down in favor of large malls.
We're talking about bare survival here. The costs of living have exploded for decades, while wages have been stagnant. People couldn't set aside money as a result, and now we have over half the US population unable to cover a 1000$ emergency without going into (even more) debt [4]. Wanting more money is not greed in these conditions.
> And when we look back at our history, we see that in the 1950s and 1960s — the glorious postwar years of rapid and equitable growth and plentiful jobs — we spent far more on our military than we do now.
Yeah, but two important words in this sentence are no longer true today: equitable growth.
We taxed the ultra wealthy at a much, much higher rate than we do today and individual purchasing power was much higher.
The household median income in the U.S. in 1950 was $2,990 — roughly 40% of the median home value of $7,354 at the time, according to census data. This is no longer true as a median income doesn’t even qualify for 80% of purchasable homes today[0]
> Rising median household income is very relevant to the average person. Decline in the amount the average American spends on food, clothing, and debt is also very relevant. And I think increasing lifespans are quite relevant to the average person as well.
There's been a 20x increase in diabetes over the past 70 years. Suicide rates are the highest since WWII, and on par with Great Depression rates. Let's not mention climate change and inequality because that's cliche.
These are things that we do measure. What about the percentage of one's time spent in a car? Spent sitting down? Spent in anxiety? Every thing you point out is a justification for an overscaled system IMO.
> I waited tables in a country club, worked in a cafe for a few years, and I worked at a terrible rental car company for awhile. I once saw my assistant manager throw someone through a plate glass window while shouting a slur I wouldn't type.
Then you should know that if you worked those jobs forever, you'd feel pretty shitty. Both you and the beggar could be staring at the same logos all day, seeing the same people, even be living on the same street, all while worrying that you might be next. Like I said - perhaps we can practice reading this time - it's not worse, it's just better by a much smaller amount than the typical SV techbro probably imagines.
> People want the standard of living everyone had in the US decades ago, it costs much more now.
I think you are right. But all the CPI data and real income data says people are much richer than 40 years ago. And as someone who has spent a lot of time digging through the methodology of these time series, I don't see any bias or obvious error that should make me suspect the government data.
Then the next step is to say "yes, a car of today is much better than a car sold in 1980, so in real terms, maybe cars are cheaper but you can't buy those cheap cars now." But if you really think about it, that's not true, either. You can still buy cheap cars, for example used cars, that will last longer as they are better built. You can still buy cheap housing, just in a different location. Remember there were no mobile phones in the 1980s, no internet, no personal computers, etc. But if you want to live like someone in the 1980s, you can do that and have more money left over than someone would have in the 1980s.
So you point me to one thing and I will show you how, with today's income, you can get it at same or better quality and have more money left over than if it was 1980. Except healthcare, you can't get the cheaper version of healthcare from the 1980s (since that would be illegal). But other than that, you really can, and you can't pin the entire difference on healthcare.
The best I can think of is a vague notion that people have lost the skills to be able to live like they did 40 years ago, possibly because being able to live like that requires some community support, and we don't have that support anymore. As one data point, take the Amish, who live like they did 200 years ago. And they are not poorer. But they make sacrifices to live like that as an entire community. If an individual tried to do it on their own, they would fail. For one thing, no one would marry them once they found out about the lack of electricity and 18th Century amenities.
But I'm not too happy with this characterization, either. It's something that still puzzles me.
>The rich people of the past had no internet, cars, air travel, or much health care by modern standards. The average 2022 American is vastly better off materially.
No, while rich people in the past had no iPhones or internet, they had something far more valuable than that: income generating businesses and appreciable assets like land, housing, gold, fine art, jewelery, etc.
And no, the average American is vastly poorer now as housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education, are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago. Having iPhones and internet doesn't make up for these.
>I agree that the aggregate standards and quality of life are much improved over 20, 40, or 60 years ago
Over 100 years ago sure. Over 40 or 60 has it really? People usually consider more stuff (access to cheaper and more gadgets, the internet, etc) as an improved standard of living or quality of life. In other words they conflate technology making some products cheaper for a better standard of living.
But even more important factors, for a large part of society is access to healthcare, education, house, etc -- all of which have gotten more expensive. There was a time when a single earner could buy a house at 25 or 35 and get their kids to college. Now two earner families often struggle.
Middle class jobs have also become more stressful and pressing, while many middle and working class wages, inflation adjusted, have stagnated for decades, despite the increased stress, working hours, and productivity gains.
> You have swallowed the American dream / fairly tail! Inequality growing.
Growing inequality does not mean quality of life is decreasing (the point you are disputing).
> More and more people (in the UK) relying on food banks.
Has general standard of living decreased? By most any measure it has not. People have vastly more resources than their ancestors did, but if you make poor choices yes you may have a visit to a food bank in your future. And there is a food bank to visit.
> Falling real wages, with increased rents.
This part I can agree with in many cases. But, let's not forget the vast improvement in affordable entertainment options available now compared to the past.
You would have us believe everything is worse. This is not true.
> It doesn’t make sense for every level of American to be meaningfully wealthier and higher income than 20 years ago and yet also be suffering (in multiple ways!) more as well.
In what sense is every level of American meaningfully wealthier? Only the top quintile has higher income than they did 50 years ago, middle and lower income people have all stayed stagnant in both income and wealth.
> It’s also true that an average wage earner today enjoys a higher standard of living than at any point in history - bigger house, more cars, tvs, and luxury items.
I really disagree with that. I'm a 35 year old single man with no kids and a well payed software developer, better paid than 90% of the population. At this point in life my father had a stay at home wife, 2 kids and was working for near minimum wage as a cleaner.
He had a huge 4 bedroom house, double garage, large backyard with a swimming pool, 2 cars etc and was close to paying off the house at my age. Meanwhile I'm looking forward to pay off a tiny studio apartment in a few years.
Yes we've got bigger TV's and smart phones now, but they don't contribute to a high standard of living.
>these comparisons don't really make sense over extended periods of time like this
Yeah. It's probably useful in something like a magazine article or book to give a sense for how someone in 1800 would have viewed a $20 bill in purchasing power. But you go back a century or so and the basket of goods you're comparing look so much different.
And behaviors are also just a lot different. Most middle class people in the US won't have a cook but they have tons of dining and take-out options. Just to give one example.
> Additionally, crappy wages and unrealistic job descriptions.
What’s interesting, is from what I’ve seen, a lot of stuff is paying a lot better than I remember seeing a decade ago. However, the costs, notably the cost of things you need to survive (especially housing) has managed to far outpace those wage gains in a much shorter period of time. Although that might be specific to my location.
> Sure, $250 doesn’t sound like much but adjusted that’s around $2,300 today.
Tangential point: Prices are always compared adjusted with inflation, but I think it is actually more telling to compare based on average income because IMHO that's what really tells how expensive something was for people.
In 1959, the median income was $2,600 [1]. In 2019 it was $57,456 (for men) [2] and dropped since because of a certain pandemic...
Therefore, something priced at $250 in 1959 'felt' as expensive as something priced at about $5,500 today (that's quite more expensive than using inflation because people have got richer, i.e. incomes have been increasing faster than prices).
> Are we comparing a person in one location to another? I thought we were talking about improvements year over year.
We're doing both. And in both metrics, the bottom are the best off today than ever before. Unfortunately, the bottom were really poor in the 20th century, so being better than that (while good), doesn't mean our work as a society is complete. But that's a welfare problem, not a "what is the system like for the average American" problem.
It's also worth noting that, in America, the bottom 3 quintiles are extremely underrepresented in the highest COL metros. That's just not where they're concentrated. Given the purchasing power disparity between US states, the variance in the US-level data is probably too wide to be useful, and you kind of have to compare from State-to-State -> https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2019/12/1.... Once you account for that, the root causes also become easier to identify — predominately local land use policy.
> Everyone knows that if you’re in the bottom 50% of households in terms of wealth in this country, you’re essentially screwed.
This kind of relative comparison has never made sense to me. So if the bottom 50% means 500 sq ft per person, 3k calories, a car, health care, pension et al, then you're still "screwed" because others have 1k sq ft, 5k calories, 2 cars, luxurious health+pension?
> The wealth of the bottom half of households has ticked up by $1.4 trillion to $2 trillion, a tiny fraction of the wealth of the 1%.
So the bottom 50% now has 333% more wealth than they did 10 yrs ago?
This article is only concerned with people getting a bigger _share_ of the pie, not if the pie is growing for all.
> Does the average American born after 1990 have more house or a better retirement plan than their parents?
No, but their parents had longer to save. The average person born in 1990 has a higher average real wage than their parents did. Given the novelty of college debt, it’s difficult to say much more, but mean statistics point to a wealthier American population at all levels today than any time before. The issue is the rich have gotten richer faster, not that the poor are getting poorer.
> "it's easy to argue the average middle class worker is substantially worse off"
it's also easy to argue that the typical metrics used in this comparison are misleading.
A "typical middle class worker" in the early 1970s lived in a house that was built in the 1950s or earlier, around 1200 square feet, 1 bathroom, 2-3 bedrooms, without air conditioning or a washer/dryer, and had one vehicle available to the household [0]. Nowadays, we consider that "the projects", undesirable housing for poor people, while the "middle class" live in considerably larger dwellings with more amenities.
The reason I mention this is that real wage / purchasing power comparisons almost universally use "average housing costs" as a significant part of the metric, and "average housing costs" are in no way measuring the same thing. (
It so happens that I live in my childhood home, which my parents purchased in 1975 for $32,500 -- about 3.1 times the national median household income. I purchased it from them in 2012 for $135,000, a mere 2.7 times the median income.)
If you actually compare the goods a median-wage worker can purchase today to the goods a median-wage worker could purchase in the 1970s, there are definitely some things we have a harder time affording (like routine health care), but with the majority of material goods, you can get much bigger/better/faster/higher quality stuff for the same portion of the budget [1]. A modern middle class income gets you much better than 40-years-ago middle class living conditions.
> lower classes are worse off now than they were then
This is objectively untrue in terms of real incomes and net financial position. Life expectancy, too, has gone up since the 70s. Consider the quality of life of America’s destitute in 2022 vs. 1972 and the choice is apparent.
This isn’t a roses and sunshine pitch. But believing the West is in decline (versus being caught up to) is a common mistake that leads to predictably bad outcomes.
>>> the normal people are faring compared to other/previous years.
The economic disparity is gross, you can't argue excess.
Comparing to the past is isn't going to play out the way you think. What time period do you want to compare to? Is that a period where "better off" was for a narrow segment of the population, where "better off" was robbing tomorrow?
The problem is that life looks a lot like the classic game design dilemma of "power creep".
I'm not sure that this is 100% accurate, but its close enough to convey the point: https://compasscaliforniablog.com/have-american-homes-change...
If it was 1950, no cell phone (1 house phone bill), no internet, no cable, no streaming, no Spotify, no computer... You might have a tv (one, singular), radio, those are one time costs. Power, water, phone, food, house/transport (and likely 1 car for many family's). My neighborhood grocery story is a gym... so we traded a close by place to shop for more travel for food, and a place you pay to go exercise.
People ate canned and frozen veg, not fresh trucked in from everywhere items. And before you make the argument for health, go look at the nutrient content of a flash frozen green bean vs one that sat in a box for a week to get to your plate, the frozen wins.
Guess what, all of what we have, unsustainable. 8 billion people can't live like middle class Americans! As more of the globe wants in on the action things are only going to get HARDER for people, unless we make some drastic lifestyle changes.
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