Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

What do they mean by "to be poorer"? The current generation already is poorer than previous generations. Income has not kept up with inflation and the income gap has widened tremendously. That previous generations could afford a single-family house with 1 person working and with multiple kids. Now, a double income is almost required, even with renting and not owning, and the rate of couples without children is rising too.

How can anyone be surprised that a candidate who decries all these things is having such success? Everyone in the newer generations know that they're getting the short stick and that we gave it to them. Bernie Sanders is just pointing out the obvious.

http://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/Qf-ESWM07.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm

View on HN

> That previous generations could afford a single-family house with 1 person working and with multiple kids. Now, a double income is almost required, even with renting and not owning, and the rate of couples without children is rising too.

I find it highly ironic that while feminists wanted to enable women to have jobs, capitalism intervened and forced women to have jobs. So we have a reserse, but equally bad situation (earlier women had to be home, now they have to work).

I once read on a crazy dude's website that corporations did exactly this to take advantage of feminism. They saw that women wanted to work so they dropped wages for men and then, on top of that, paid women less for the same jobs so that they could further undercut those looking for work. I thought that was crazy talk but maybe it's not too far off. That may not have been their motivation, but that's the situation that's happened anyways.

Wages for men didn't drop but many things (like housing) slowly became twice as expensive. It's not some grand conspiracy; it's supply and demand.

Right. That was the point I was making. The conspiracy stuff was all nonsense, but somehow we still ended up in the same situation where no one can afford anything.

And we spend more on other things (like child care) because both adults are working.

This a great point. It's not a conspiracy. Housing prices trend to match median income in an area. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If your income was significantly higher then current prices of houses you'd immediately buy a house, because why not, it isn't a big percent of your income and therefore isn't a huge risk either way. The moment prices reach what feels uncomfortable you'd think hard about renting vs buying. We are now in the later stage in several tech cities for tech wages.

Oh this definitely happened. Of course it did! I had an econ professor that gleefully talked about how he'd hire female architects to get lower wages / better quality at the same wage.

So you're claiming that it wasn't Capitalism that existed from 1950-1980, that enabled families to make it on one income? And further, I can only guess you're implying that Capitalism is a recent phenomenon from the last 30 years, rather than the reason the US was able to become the wealthiest nation with the highest median income and most productive economy by ~1890?

Capitalism and culture interact. Before 1860, part of "capitalism" was also slavery. After that, it wasn't.

The causes for the US development are many, if I had to guess I would mainly bet on the extensive natural resources they had available.

The southern slave economy 1800-1860 performed very poorly, which is one of the underlying causes of the South wanting to secede from the Union. The industrial northern economy, based on free labor, completely overpowered the slave economy.

As for natural resources, Asia, Africa, and S. America are loaded with natural resources, yet the booms did not happen there.

> Asia, Africa, and S. America are loaded with natural resources, yet the booms did not happen there

They are also loaded with people. America was a free-for-all (except the American Indians, of course, who were overpowered by superior technology).

How is N. America different from S. America in the 1800s, in people and resources?

Oil? I'm unaware of any big (existing) land-based oil extraction in S. America. Maybe they had them in the past, though.

S. America had enormous silver mines. Venezuela is big on oil production.

I imagine the main resources that USA had are the huge plains to grow food in, in a relatively favorable climate. The industry comes later.

Maybe there was a lot of wealth in silver, I don't know about that. It seems that it had some land-based oil that they started extracting in the beginning of the 20th century, but I've no idea if they were as extensive as in the US (where there was Standard Oil, an immensely wealthy corporation).

Mind you, I'm not saying it was only the natural resources, there are other factors as well - different climate, geography, cultural background (English vs. Spanish/Portuguese), colonial history, ... I somewhere read that it's a curious phenomenon how so many countries in SA had so many dictatorships in sequence...

It's really hard to argue that S. America, Africa, Asia, etc., all don't have immense natural resources and favorable climates.

A small note. I read a Statfor report that North American Rivers were very important.

What about the systematic destruction and de-industrialization of places like India by the British tho?

Capitalism is unhalting in its slow shift toward efficiency. Every moment in a capitalist economic system there's someone racing one step ahead of someone else toward the bottom, screwing over a worker or consumer to make a penny more profit and beat his competitor. Women in the workforce was just one inevitable step, but a large one: families with two incomes obviously make more money than families with one, so it was inevitable under capitalism that eventually the more efficient double-income family would become required for survival. We're not there yet but we're barrelling full speed toward that goal, and after we reach it we'll find some other way to push even further toward the worst possible dystopia, peak efficiency.

edit: Also you're attributing success to capitalism where it should be attributed to slavery. It's easy to have a very strong economy when you have free slave labor and most economic gains are still limited by manual labor. If you want to conflate capitalism with slavery I think that's not unreasonable since slavery of some kind is essentially the end goal of capitalism but I'd assume that's a move you don't want to make, so don't try to claim success for your economic system off the backs of abused slaves.

As you say, it's easily explainable by capitalism, supply and demand: * People want the nicest house they can buy, there is a shortage of houses in nice neighborhoods * Women start working, families have more income * supply is still short, demand has more money * price of housing goes up, in addition to the fact that families need child-care * gone is the extra income, cost of housing has increased, no way to turn back. Now everybody needs a double income to afford a nice home.

This idea made Elizabeth Warren famous. It was quite a profound finding. Well, I should speak for myself, when I first red the synopsis of the Two Income Trap it really felt like a slap on the head. It felt it was counter-intuitive, yet explains so much shiftily looking at own's family spending habits.

I also found the book's message darkly subversive sometimes. For example, all things being equal, it is better to spend more of your income on luxuries than on he biggies (housing, transportation, debt). If you do the former, you can easily roll back. If you do the latter, when times get tough, you're hosed. In yo face papaa!

Never heard of her, thanks. Sounds interesting.

Seems like a basic rule that has impact on more ideas recently discussed on hacker news: in a market where there is a short supply of high demand items, more money will cause more inflation.

This will also impact ideas around basic income.

Income from jobs is less and jobs are less stable, most stuff is more expensive (especially rent!), and the younger generation is suffocated by high-interest high-principal student loans which get paid out even if it means wage garnishing. To be explicit, the bandwith of money inflow has decreased, and the bandwith of money outflow have increased. The big-picture money outflow from rent and student loans go more or less directly to the richest.

Don't overlook the increasing share of the GDP that the government consumes. See chart S.03t:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_chart

That more than explains the lower amount left for people.

Saying that is an oversimplification of what is going on would be an understatement.

> most stuff is more expensive

On the contrary, I think the thing that has deceived us about how much poorer we've become is cheap stuff. TVs are cheaper than ever. We spend less as a percentage of income on food than we've ever done in the past. Even automobiles and computers are more affordable than they've ever been. To a superficial viewpoint, we have more purchasing power than we've ever had (and the CPI includes many of these items which give that superficial viewpoint).

But we see the true regression in purchasing power once we look at things that haven't benefitted from lowered manufacturing costs. Housing, education, health care and the like are showing the true nature of the situation of how poor we've become.

P.S. Yes, I know I took the quote out of context and I'm more agreeing with you than disagreeing with you. But there is a distinction to be made that it's not all stuff that's more expensive, just the important stuff.

Consumption-class goods have become commoditized/cheaper whereas investment-class goods and services have become more expensive.

That's a good point, actually. Dropping cost of typical consumer goods and food really masks how much more money gets thrown into credentialism, rent, and healthcare. This fact means that it's easy to pick up a new X and fill your apartment with Y, but it's nearly impossible to pay off your student loans or move out of your parent's house. Low cost of goods allows people to be massively in debt but not starving to death.

With two programmer incomes we can't buy a home 35 miles away from Boston. So pathetic.

Sadly it's not surprising. As it was said once on The Wire, "We used to make things in this country, build things. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket." That's the economy that the previous generations left us and that we're perpetuating for our children.

I feel like there is a lot of context lost in this quote without pointing out that it's being said by a union dock worker to a lobbyist he has been paying to bribe politicians with money earned from smuggling prostitutes and heroin into Baltimore for an international crime syndicate.

Nah man, let him have the simplification for the HN upvotes.

I agree. The irony of that statement was huge. But it also brings it back to a "chicken or the egg" scenario. That's what I didn't really want to get into. Is the dock worker's union struggling because he's been paying the lobbyists or are they struggling because everyone else was?

We do build things. We're the 2nd largest manufacturer on the planet.

We just don't need guys on an assembly line tightening the same bolt ten thousand times a day for forty years, like my grandfather did (true story.)

Sure, we build things... but not without layers upon layers of middlemen to just pass the buck along with interest.

"We just don't need guys on an assembly line tightening the same bolt ten thousand times a day for forty years, like my grandfather did"

I would argue that we do need that.

You don't take a child straight from the womb to an r-rated movie, nor do you put a small plant start right into a torrent of rain. Living things need an environment and activities that match their lifecycle.

A society is also a living thing and has strata that are at different points in that continuum ... and if there is nothing appropriate for that strata, that strata will stagnate and die.

So when people look ahead to some golden utopia where we all work half time as knowledge workers and spend the other half on philosophy or maker projects, they ignore the fact that some sect of a society will not have the makeup for that.

You need to have something for them. Your society needs to have depth and breadth.

This is why I think we need a basic guaranteed income - for all the people who would've been bolt-tighteners fifty years ago. We just don't have the work for them anymore.

You wouldn't be better off in the Valley either. With home prices topping $1m/1000sqft, only the elite of the elite can afford to buy now.

You can buy a home with as little as 3% down in the valley. That's 30k down for a 1mil home. Sure payments will be a lot at around 4k/month, but you can rent out a room to help out. Its not any less affordable than an apartment really.

Hell of a lot more risky though...

Some people can buy a home with only 3% down. FHA loans and some first time buyer programs allow that.

If you're borrowing $970K, you're monthly payment would be a lot more than $4K. When I was looking at mortgages, borrowing $600K was ~$4500/month in mortgage, property taxes and insurance. $970K would be more like $6K per month.

Not to mention that a bank will require that $6k/month payment to be less than 28% of gross income, so that hypothetical small house is out of the question for a household making less than ~$260k a year.

3% down w/3.85% fixed interest 30 year locked in. That's 4.5k/month in mortgage. That's not including maintenance, property taxes...etc.

If people are doing this, it's no wonder there's a crazy bubble going on.

Here's a better plan: Buy a huge house for a fraction of that money in the north of England, rural Spain, anywhere in Japan which isn't Tokyo, etc., and telecommute to work.

How do you find these good telecommute jobs? I'm a web developer and would love to telecommute.

- https://weworkremotely.com/

- https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22types%22%3A%5B%22full-tim...

- http://hnhiring.me/ {remote ok}

- https://authenticjobs.com/#types=7,1&onlyremote=1

Something tells me you haven't actually tried to do that. No bank is going to lend 970k with such little equity.

The only program that does do that, FHA, have loan limits and in SF for a single family home that is about 625k...

BUT, in hot markets like SF and the east coast, no seller is going to accept your offer with only 3% down because of the risk the lender having an LTV issue and the sale falling apart. In markets like NYC, Boston, DC, SF, etc you need to come in with a) offer over ask b) at least 20% down.

I approached a bank, and that was their offer. 3% down on a 1mil home w/a 3.85% 30 year fixed rate. I've also met some people in the bay area putting 0% down and leveraging their RSUs as a down payment.

I'm trying this plan: work for a San Francisco company, remotely. Buy a house in a city that is only "expensive" instead of "ludicrously expensive".

Ha. That's pretty close to what I did. Ended up buying in Portland. Don't tell anyone though. They hate transplants here ;)

Amazing how artificially inflated the housing/real estate market is considering the surplus that exists due to overproduction. Last I checked there are around 5 vacant homes for every homeless person in the US. Playing the game of Monopoly as a kid was just getting us ready for reality.

Which incidentally was the goal of the game Monopoly!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Mono...

The lack of affordable housing is an intentional policy. Take https://twitter.com/bryan_kirschner/status/66776075183092940...

Intuitively this seems very true to me, but can you recommend somewhere to read more about this? The residential real estate market definitely feels rigged, but I don't know where to find the case for this claim layed out in a cogent way. The linked tweet (being a tweet) is not particularly detailed, nor is the 2-links deep Vox article.

You can consider the greater Toronto area as a case in point. We had greenbelt laws enacted for supposedly environmental reasons. We got shitty, tiny condos all over the city and million dollar detached houses.

What I thought was particularly perverse was builders lamenting that no one wanted 3 bedroom condos, which is why they were building so few. Complete B.S.! Since they charge per square foot, no one can afford the 3 bedroom condos!

I recall reading somewhere how this will eventually affect the fertility rate. As a couple that waited quite a bit longer to have kids, I can see this being accurate.

Then you're looking in the wrong place or you are both underpaid, because with two programmer incomes, we bought 8.5 miles from Boston.

Really? I just did a search on Redfin centered around Boston for sales in the last year, SFH (3bd/2ba, etc), and built within the last 25 years and found the averages to roughly be near a million...

Loosening the age to all years, I saw the average to be about 650-700k. That is 140k down payment plus a probably expensive upgrade to the old and aging systems in the house...

Boston was settled in the 1700s. You need to open up your date range.

My house was built in 1870. It needed some work, but has mostly been fine because the previous owners (and probably the one before them too) had kept it pretty up-to-date.

An 140k downpayment sounds about right. It did wipe out all our savings, but that was only because we decided to buy and then sell. The equity in our old home basically offset it.

Please reread, I loosened the date range to all years...

However I find it a bit dishonest on your part to claim it is easy with 2 programmer jobs to afford a 765k house, including a ~150k down payment which puts you at jumbo rate mortgage rates and hide the fact that you used the equity from a previous property and you bought an extremely old house (I've lived in Boston all of my life, no way would I buy a home that old).

1) Jumbo rates are basically the same as regular rates in this area. Source: https://www.dcu.org/loans/mortgage-fixed.html

2) We had the downpayment in cash. Selling the old house just let us replenish savings. Doesn't change the fact that it's possible to save 150k with two developers working (actually more, because we had previously saved for a down payment on our old house, and for extensive (100k+) renovations to our previous house).

3) I'm sorry you don't want an old house. Yes, they can have their problems, but so do houses of any age, including brand new ones. They also have charms that newer houses don't. It's a tradeoff. Newer houses are also available. The same day we first saw our house, we looked at another for around the same price built in the 70s a few blocks away (also in Medford). It needed a lot more work (a new kitchen) where our house was move in ready.

Get an inspection and figure out if the problems are deal breakers for you. Expensive problems are part of the "joy" of owning a house.

Curious, what towns are you looking in and what prices are you seeing? We're about to go through that process too (similar income situation), and were thinking we could afford to live within 5-10 miles (e.g. Medford, Malden, Waltham, Allston/Brighton). Not possible?

We bought a 4 bed in Medford (10 min walk to Davis) in February 2015 for 765k. Later in the spring, we sold our previous 3 bed in Wakefield (10 min walk to commuter rail) for 465k.

Prices are reasonable, but houses sell quick. Both the house we bought and the house we sold had multiple offers the Monday after the first open house weekend.

Then buy a smaller home. Homes have increased in size by 50% since the 1970s and more than doubled in size since the 19050s while people per household have decreased.

You aren't poorer than your parents. It's just that your expectations are bigger.

Real income per hour has increased.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRNFB

A double income is not required to keep up with your parents, it is only required to keep up with the (much richer) Joneses.

If we aren't richer than our parents, it should be easy to name a good or service that we consume less of than them. Anyone care to do that?

> ... it should be easy to name a good or service that we consume less of than them. Anyone care to do that?

Social Security and health care come to mind.

Social security is not a good. Neither is health care - its a category.

Did you mean "the basket of health care goods available in 1970"? I imagine we consume far more than that (e.g., MRIs, statins, etc). Would you be willing to stick to your parents health care choices?

You're missing the part where people actively avoid going to the doctor unless they're super sick/injured because the doctor is too expensive, even with insurance. The paradigm of consumption of medical services has changed: the doctor will not permit you to visit them, and then not get referred for tests XYZ and drugs ABC; it would be negligent for the doctor to not provide the standard of care to the patient, and the standard of care is immensely expensive relative to yesteryear.

Was medical bankruptcy a thing in the 1970s?

> Social security is not a good. Neither is health care - its a category.

Allow me to quote myself, quoting you: "name a good or service".

> Would you be willing to stick to your parents health care choices?

Do you mean the health care choices they are exercising now? Who do you think is racking up the most MRI hours, 20 year olds or 60 year olds?

I'll put a finer point on it, both services are subsidized by the increasingly resentful youth.

At 30, will you stick to health care invented when your parents were 30?

Again - MRI is a service. Health care is a category.

> At 30, will you stick to health care invented when your parents were 30?

Why would I, why would they? The issue at hand is cost; they pay much less than I do to utilize the same services due to now legally mandated insurance.

> Again - MRI is a service. Health care is a category.

Again... the health care industry is comprised of both services and goods, the unequal consumption of which is what you challenged anybody to point to.

The question is whether you are richer than your parents at the same age. If you have more goods and services (including all those cool medical techs that didn't exist when they were 30), you are richer.

I certainly am - in 1980 I'd probably be a cripple. In 2014, cheap airline fares + modern medicine fixed me up for a few thousand.

It sounds like you are projecting your own situation onto an entire generation, completely ignoring the statistics. You aren't richer for having available a resource that you don't need but you are still made to pay for. That is the situation for the vast majority of young people. It is a very screwed up situation where the least able are made to pay the greater part.

I note that you still haven't named a good or service that we consume less of.

You've either somehow overlooked the two I initially named - one of which has been actively discussed, or you disagree and have decided to make a sarcastic remark instead of offering a counter argument.

Social security is not a good or service, it's money. You can't consume money. Also, we consume more healthcare today. Also, sarcasm doesn't mean what you think it means. So no, you haven't named a good or service that we consume less of today.

> Social security is not a good or service, it's money.

I'd agree if it were a self funding program, but it isn't. Due to the ever increasing deficit, scarcity increases with consumption - the earlier generations are paying less and drawing more than later generations.

> Also, we consume more healthcare today.

That is news to me - and probobly the entire health insurance industry, how did you arrive at that conclusion?

> Also, sarcasm doesn't mean what you think it means.

I made my point, being aware of my point you stated the opposite in a ridiculing manner: that is the very definition of sarcasm. It doesn't need to be a sassy remark made with an eye-roll and accompanied by a laugh track to be sarcasm.

> That is news to me - and probobly the entire health insurance industry, how did you arrive at that conclusion?

Take any illness you might get and look at the outcome 40 years ago versus today. Look at the maintenance treatments people make for vision, dentistry, and orthodontics.

> I made my point, being aware of my point you stated the opposite in a ridiculing manner: that is the very definition of sarcasm.

That's not the definition of sarcasm.

Would you give up every treatment not on the market in 1970 if you could pay 1970s prices for healthcare? How many people do you think would?

The chart is ultra-deceptive because it isolates one variable and ignores all the other attendant charts which indicate massive generational loss of wealth. If real income per hour has actually increased, the marginal lifestyle gain from that increase is beyond a doubt, zero.

Millenials own far fewer cars and homes than their parents ever did, in addition to having less (typically negative, due to debt) net worth. To reiterate, if millenials were to liquidate all of their assets (of which they have none anyway), they would still be in the hole for huge sums. I am fairly certain that my parents never had negative net worth; I know for a fact that they also had much more substantial savings and spending ability in their 20s despite coming from humble backgrounds and working menial jobs.

This isn't about keeping up with the Joneses, it's about reaching zero rather than being in the negative.

EDIT: And, as the other replier so far mentioned, millenials consume very little healthcare while being forced by law to spend vast sums to merely have the ability to spend more money (via high deductible plans) to get shitty quality care. For a time in the previous generation's course, it was normal to have mental health care as part of the standard of care, which has slipped away from us-- now, mental healthcare is barely consumed, and is ludicrously expensive when it is covered under the paltry plans at all.

Nope - cars per capita went up.

http://www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/...

Homeownership has been 64% or higher since 1970.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Hi...

Houses have just become larger since then.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7002/6843606169_618efc8942_d.j...

You are just plain wrong on all counts.

All those statistics include the generations before the millennials. Perhaps It is our parents who are still buying more cars and bigger homes?

your graphs are just plain useless on all counts

The first chart doesn't even go to the point where the generation in question came of age... it ends at 2005, before most millenials were even legal to drive.

Look at 1979 in the second chart... the trendline for the present is dropping beneath it. The size of house isn't relevant.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/02/18/stude...

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/021914... "Over 25% of them had late payments or are dealing with bill collectors, and well over half are still receiving some form of financial aid from their parents. One of the most disturbing findings of this study reveals that seven out of 10 young people define financial stability as being able to pay all of their bills each month."

http://www.millennialmarketing.com/2010/11/whats-not-on-mill...

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/04/30/homeownership...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/chart-of...

http://www.businessinsider.com/millennial-home-ownership-sur...

http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/blog/real-estate/2015...

...

This argument doesn't make sense...people's consumption patterns for various goods fluctuate over time. You want to compare your 20,30,40,50 year old father with your 20,30,40,50 year old self in order to determine relative wealth.

My parents both consumed more education (much cheaper, less supply of students), earned relatively higher wages (inflation-adjusted) in a better job market (less unemployment, more aggregate demand, higher LFP rate), bought into the housing market with an affordable mortgage in a nice area, and are now expecting to collect a decent revenue of social security and health benefits on top of their pension funds.

If this holds true across the population on average, we will consume less education, housing, social security, and medical benefits than our parents. Not to mention have a poorer quality of life. On average. There will most certainly be exceptions.

The solution? Go back to a top 10 school and get that law/medical degree, then spend a decade or so paying off the loans (or have parents pay for it). Or go the high risk/high reward route of a startup and live/work like a college student for 1/20 chance to hit it big and become an angel/VC. Or network your way into finance/consulting/tech management.

Houses with big lawns in the SF Bay Area. (Per capita.)

I mean, land is a finite resource, and what with population growth that's happened in heat-riddled places like Phoenix, I think the overall per capita quality-adjusted land ownership has declined.

This is more of an orthogonal population matter, though.

I'm probably only slightly less "poor" than my parents were at my age, but I'm vastly more wealthy.

Interested to hear what you mean by this...

"Wealth" in economics is the sum total of all of your physical and intangible assets, including a calculation of discounted future earnings.

So being rich and being wealthy are very similar concepts in economics - large NPV of assets and income. But in normal parlance, rich and poor can also refer to standard of living/quality of life/happiness.

So are you wealthier? Happier? Earning less?

"Wealth" and being "rich" (or making money) are similar but not the same.

Adjusted according to inflation I make slightly less money than they do - meaning I have less cash in my bank account. But the prices of everything are being driven down so quickly that I live a much fuller life than they did on a per-opportunity basis.

I have access to all the world's information, seemingly infinite entertainment, and a faster computer than they could even imagine in my pocket (not to mention my tablet and laptop). I can travel the world (I actually make money when I do so by Airbnb'ing my house), Amazon drops stuff they couldn't afford on my doorstop for very cheap.

So I make slightly more, but what I have access to is much greater than they did. I'd argue my life is much richer (er, wealthier), despite making slightly less.

Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. Yes we do live in an amazing time where the standard of living/availability of goods and services in developed countries is great relative to 40 years ago.

The only thing I would push back on is the increasing cost of some of the more fundamental investments - higher education and housing. Can't (sustainably) enjoy fast computers/airplanes/Amazon without a degree and a home.

I suppose it depends on where you live/where you go to school. I went to BYU so my tuition was $2k/yr (then dropped out, so no degree either), and I live in a small town so I pay very little for rent ($800/month for a three bedroom house, work remotely). If you're in SF though, yeah, you're in trouble.

Oh, did your parents have faster internet, bigger TVs, and better cars than you?

Richness, wealth, is not money. It's the things we want. My parents never had $2/lb strawberries in February, or MRI machines, HIV drugs, discount airlines, etc, etc.

We are insanely more wealthy than our parents.

This is a tough one for economists. While a Roman emperor had far more gold than any of us could ever buy, he couldn't get clean water, clean sanitation, a tetanus shot, fly in an airplane, etc etc. Regardless of purchasing power, what we can purchase today is much better and more useful than what could be purchased before. Thank you capitalism.

Yeah we need 80% fewer resources per $ of GDP we create than we did 70 years ago, and there's is no indication this will stop anytime soon.

Yes we "need" 2 incomes to buy a house, but that house is nearly TWICE the size of the one our parents had on average, and MUCH fuller with the things we want.

The things we are tricked into 'wanting' by a multi-billion dollar advertising industry that pays top scientists to spend years doing research on how to best manipulate our desires. Nobody needs a house twice as big. It's a pain to clean. Nobody needs all of these things. Both parents working overtime so they can hire a nanny to babysit their child they never seen in an enormous mansion is nobody's idea of progress, or even stagnation. It's far, far worse.

So much bias to unpack in your comment. Nobody needs all of these things? Nobody's idea of progress? According to you? Your strawman example seem awful to me, but I bet there are many many people who would prefer to be workaholics with mansions and nannys to having lots of free time to enjoy their family in a rented apartment. I find it a little contradictory that you seem to simultaneously think we're all brainwashed sheep that really should instead be a bunch of robots that all only value things purely based on utility. How is that different?

If there's so much bias perhaps you could begin by identifying some, much less 'unpacking' any of it. Though it's not clear what you mean by 'bias' -- the way you use it it seems like a generic word for "things you don't like".

Nobody claimed we are brainwashed sheep most of all me -- the claim is that quality of life is reduced, and you suggest it's in exchange for an increase in consumer goods that we want. I respond that we don't actually want these goods; our recent ancestors did not want them, the desire has been manufactured by a well-paid hard-working team of expert psychologists. So we are not now meeting a desire that existed; a desire has been manufactured and then met. So when you compare our circumstances to that of the past you must consider the fact that advertisers had not become yet sophisticated enough to force us to want things we do not truly want, so our wants were different; driven by life, not driven by profit.

If you'd like to pretend you don't understand the difference between "having a happy life, supporting a family and taking care of yourself and those close to you" and "having expensive toys" then you are free to do so, just don't ask me to indulge your absurdity by pretending it's reasonable.

that house is nearly TWICE the size of the one our parents had on average

This is not true everywhere: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2398714/The-incredib...

You should thank technological progress instead of capitalism.

I don't see them as separate, they are very much interconnected.

Tech progress is learning. The "economy" is the act of economizing; learning to do more with less. It's a virtuous cycle.

In capitalism the idea is to pit people's greed against other people's greed. In alternative methods, people's greed is still there, it just isn't as well checked. Take for instance some of the insane scientific beliefs held in the USSR. Someone in power wanted this to be true, so the scientists made it true-ish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Faster internet, bigger TVs, better cars, and fancier produce have very little influence on your actual quality of life.

Better medical care does, but it's expensive medical interventions that bankrupts middle class families. Also: Real estate - much further out of reach. Education - much deeper in debt. These are the things that really matter.

I'll give you cheap air travel, though. That stuff is great. Hooray for cheap jet fuel.

The safety of automobiles (ABS, airbags, auto-collision-avoidance, better tires, crumple zones, etc) have a HUGE influence on the quality of life (as you're defining it) for populations. Diet is by far the most effective way to provide life-long heath, and we've never had better access to food & nutrition info.

Medical incentives may be messed up in the US, but most people on the planet who have access to healthcare don't have to worry about it bankrupting them.

It depends really on how you measure wealth. For me a bigger TV or better car truly doesn't matter.

Could our parents afford to own a home, have children, live comfortably off one income? Can we? I guess we have plenty of fun cheap toys made by slave labor that we can't play with because we're always working so if that's how you measure richness then sure.

> Could our parents afford to own a home, have children, live comfortably off one income? Can we?

Yes we can. But it means tradeoffs most people aren't willing to make.

You'll notice one of the requirements above is "live comfortably" -- so your answer then is no.

Are you also not saying "where I want"? There are plenty of low-cost geographies. You may need to retrain as a truck mechanic or fisherman and maybe learn a new language to live there though. But the point it its very possible.

I only wish more people could see this post: your posts higher up in the comment thread almost look reasonable but this one really highlights the descent into madness necessary to accept your view. Things haven't gotten worse; your parents needed to work hard to have a good life. We just need to learn a new language, move to a third world country, give up all of our rights and our home, and pick a new profession.

I've noticed a pattern activities or hobbies that've been around at least a few decades: you ask "which X should I buy?" and the answer is often, "DO NOT buy common 'consumer' stuff—either pay 5 times as much for one that isn't terrible or buy ANY model from the mid-eighties or earlier and refurb it, at a total cost of ~1-2x as much as the new garbage"

Part—not all, but part—of the supposed increase in quality of life due to cheaper goods is because entry level quality has dropped, for certain categories of goods.

cheaper is sometimes from lower-quality, but don't discount the effect of economies of scale. Every doubling of production volume reduces cost by ~30%. For example, Tesla thinks it's gigafactory will reduce the cost of their battery pack by ~30%, because that one factory will double global battery production. The same thing is happening to solar panels. As production sykrockets, prices plummet.

Except in the basics, like housing costs, health costs, and tuition, which have been more or less skyrocketing, and job security and pensions have pretty much gone out the window.

Sure, we have cooler, cheaper toys and food is easier to get, but the rest of it makes it much harder to get by, in general.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com