Hacker News Reader

It took, by her estimate, about two years to have enough furniture before she was willing to invite over any sorts of company. ... Today you can furnish an apartment reasonably with about a months worth of wages.

You do understand there's a difference between a month of wages and having a month of wages saved to spend, right?

Considering most people live month to month... saving an entire month would take many people more than 2 years.

Really shows how some people in HN have never experienced poverty. If a households main income earner is making minimum wage they will not be making shopping trips to IKEA to furnish their whole apartment lol. IKEA is cheap but the $50 you have left over after bills won't get you much. Many months you will have a negative balance after you've paid for essentials.

>If a households main income earner is making minimum wage

Maybe you shouldn't start a family when you are making minimum wage, in a city with a high cost of living.

I don't see what that has to do with what I said but sure, the poor shouldn't start families.

Then start lobbying the red states to stop placing restrictions on birth control and family planning.

It surely seems now that the biological imperative is just a luxury for the rich...

Personally I agree that in modern society its a good idea to wait to have kids until you can provide for them....

But its a little weird that a Caveman's most basic prerogative (To procreate), is not something many people in modern society can afford to do.

It's also something that is fairly important to the continuation of our species, so hopefully we can figure out a way more people can responsibly afford to have children.

So, your proof that decline is a myth is that you can buy cheap, moderate quality, mass-manufactured furniture that didn't exist in your grandparents age? Something seems awry there.

I think GP does have a point while missing the bigger picture. Yes, low to average income people can today afford more stuff to make their life a bit better. But they also can‘t afford an apartment close to work (loosing anywhere from 2 to 5 hours of their day they cannot spend e.g. with their kids) and they cannot afford college tuition. That‘s what‘s creating perpetual poverty, i.e. low social mobility, which is IMO one of the most important aspects of a fully developed nation.

My grandmother couldn't afford a chair. Most people today have reasonably furnished apartments, smartphones, some kind of vaguely functional computer with (low speed) internet access, and probably a car.

Food went from being very expensive (people actually died of starvation not that long ago!) to being so cheap that obesity is a major epidemic among the poor.

Since 1940, the percent of the US with a high school degree went from < 50% to over 80%. The percent of the US population with a college degree went from < 10% to over 20%.

What is your argument that the economy is in decline? That you don't magically get a two story house with a yard, a new car, and the ability to support a family of four? That has never once been the case in US history. It's a great myth in the past that the 1950s were somehow a magical time when everyone had a house and the income for a family, but it's that - a myth.

Not sure how the cost of chairs is relevant, compared to the costs of things like housing, student debt, health care, transportation, you know, the things that are actually keeping people today from saving.

I make about 4X what my parents combined made as schoolteachers, yet my housing costs about 10X what theirs cost. In order to get that great price I had to move about 2 hours from work (and pay for the required transportation), compared to their 10 minute commute. I came out of grad school six figures in debt, whereas theirs was cheap enough that they barely had to finance it. They paid for reasonably priced doctor visits out of pocket, compared to my high deductible "healthcare plan" that still has me dropping $hundreds for a single X-ray.

But I have a cellphone so I'm a reckless spender.

This is, of course, because technology has brought those costs down. Or in the case of education, government subsidies have made college "free". Not because living wages or the economy have improved.

> Food went from being very expensive (people actually died of starvation not that long ago!) to being so cheap that obesity is a major epidemic among the poor.

Food being cheap is not the reason for the obesity epidemic. It's because food has become of such poor quality. Also, it is engineered to cause you to overeat.

Otherwise, I agree with your overall point.

Mass produced goods including furniture is cheaper nowadays but everything else is more expensive. This includes essential things like housing and healthcare.

Further the needs have also grown: without a car it’s impossible for most people to have a job

> but everything else is more expensive

Yes and no. One thing to keep in mind is inflation, so we always need to compare prices to average incomes. A house is listed as being <10k in 1940, but the average yearly salary was also <2k, and the minimum wage was $0.30 per hour.

However, things have genuinely gotten more expensive in some cases usually due not to the economy, but due to safety. That's a good thing - we no longer have asbestos and lead paint, cars are safer, and working fire alarms are a thing. However, those things do cost money. You can no longer buy an all metal box that goes 80mph without seatbelts or airbags.

I find the car claim to be somewhat of a red herring. Yes, you need a car now whereas before a bicycle might of sufficed. However, a decent car can be had for two thousand dollars - not a pretty one, but a functional one. You might be able to go cheaper if you have any mechanical ability, but we'll assume the average person doesn't have that.

In addition now of course you need drivers insurance, and you probably need to take a drivers ed course before getting your license. Those things do add cost, but they also save lives.

Yes and no.

The median home value in 1940, adjusted for inflation to 2000, was $30,600 ($2,938 pre-adjustment).[1] The median income for a man was $9,948, using the same inflation factor of 10.406639 ($956, unadjusted).[2]

The median home sales price in 2015 was about $300,000[3] while median household income was $54,000.[4]

[1] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/valu...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2012/04/02/149575704/the-1940-census-72-...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

[4] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...

You're ignoring that the percentage of people living in cities has gone up by 50% (56% -> 75%) from 1940 to 1990 (couldn't find later data).

The size of homes has also gotten much bigger.

So the $30,000 home in 1940 (in today's dollar) wouldn't look anything like a $300,000 home today.

I'd be more interested to learn what a townhouse in Manhattan cost in 1940 and 2010.

And you need to count in something else, the actual changes in living standards.

Nowadays the cost (for a new house) for "utilities" (water, electricity, heating, A/C, etc.) plants/hardware is a considerable factor, as a rough estimate 20-30% of the construction costs, and a large house in the 40's would probably have had one single bathroom/WC (if any[1]) for a 3 bedrooms home.

jaclaz

[1] In rural parts it was not so unusual to have an external loo

Healthcare is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison from many decades ago. There are definitely serious problems with healthcare, but we are also increasingly getting options in healthcare that were not available 30, 40, 50 years ago and contribute significantly to costs.

With housing, on the other hand, we are routinely seeing people pay upwards of 500% what people were paying for the exact same property a few decades ago with few or no changes, even with the effect of inflation removed.

> Further the needs have also grown: without a car it’s impossible for most people to have a job

In parts of the US. For most parts of the Europe, and indeed many cities in the US, a car is not a requirement.

Nobody's denying that the world has improved. The relevant question is "where are we relative to where we could be, given all that we have to work with?" One answer, in the opinion of many informed people, is that we (Americans) haven't done nearly as much with what we have as we could have potentially done.

My grandparents also lived through the depression. And how did they cope with it? Joined a labor union, joined the socialist party. Maybe not such a bad idea?

As a counter-anecdote, my grandmother is still alive: she was born in 1918. She just voted for Trump, to give you an idea of where she stands politically. She coped with it by scrimping and saving every penny. She literally washes saran wrap to reuse it, despite having enough pension these days to get by. She saves grocery-store bags. She eats every crumb on her plate. She never wastes leftovers, ever. She went to college at 40 years old, which was not thought of highly in her time, and had a 20-year career as a schoolteacher. She still corresponds with some past students, who are her last living friends.

My grandfather's college fund (to be a dentist) was wiped out, the bank closed. He worked at a GE factory his whole life, work that I will say was far beneath his potential. He never complained. He once traded his easy job on the line for a much harder one, where he had to lift each engine block twice to inspect some fiddly bit on it. He traded to get a 5-cent raise. If you offered my grandfather a government subsidy, he might not have been able to conceal his contempt.

I don't think the decisions of any of the individuals we've mentioned are great indicators of what's correct or incorrect, but the depression didn't influence everyone the same way.

> He traded to get a 5-cent raise.

A five cent raise in today's currency or back then? Per hour or week?

Assuming it's hourly, if it's from "then" could you convert it to modern currency, or present it as an percentage increase so we can understand what kind of relative increase that was?

Five cents sounds like nothing today, but 70 years ago it would have been significant.

According to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm $0.05 in 1930 works out to $0.73 today.

Figuring out a percentage increase is a bit complicated without knowing how much mod's grandfather earned. According to https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/spring/1... in the 1940 census average (yes, not median) annual income was $1368, which works out to $24,505 in 2018 dollars, or $12.25/hour assuming 40 hour weeks and 2 weeks of vacation.

So at a guess, $0.05/hour was less than a 10% raise, but more than 1%. I expect it was /hour, not /week, because weekly wages would have been in the ballpark of tens of dollars.

Disclaimer: I am not mod, and this is not my grandfather we're talking about.

This happened when my father worked at the same factory, so it was all the way in the 60s. My father passed up on the same job because he didn't think it was worth the raise. He's the one that tells the story--the entire thing was not noteworthy to my grandfather.

Did your grandparents retire? At what age? How are they doing now?

For comparison, when do you plan to retire?

Now do the same run down for your entire cohort.

My grandfather retired at 67 due to failing health. He was primarily supported by his military pension, and to a smaller extent by a pension from working at a major grocery store. My grandmother only worked odd jobs, but collects a small amount of social security. She's still doing quite well and spends most of her time reading library books and painting (though notice both of those are extremely cheap hobbies).

I'm a distinctly unfair comparison, since I could retire as early as 55 to 60 (I doubt I will, I do terribly when left without something to do, but who knows.) That being said, I recognize my situation is very unlike most of my peers.

My cohort falls into three categories:

+ Those with high income and good financial management. Like me they are capable of retiring without any government assistance at 60ish in most situations.

+ Those with high income, but no financial management skills. Even now with no family to support and no "required" debts, they struggle to remain afloat. Simply throwing more money into the fire doesn't help it turns out.

+ Those with low income. Universally, and not for lack of intelligence, they have no 401k, no major longterm savings. If they retire it will be through programs such as Social Security (assuming it still exists). This is the group that worries me the most, because I don't have any answer for how to improve their situation. They're simply caught in the spiral of not having enough money to make progress on saving.

Please don't take my argument as "Everything is perfect now!". Mostly my argument is, "Things aren't majorly worse and are generally better." Nor am I making the claim that the future will forever be better - Social Security might collapse, pension programs dry up, etc. We shouldn't stop assisting the poor, teaching financial literacy, or behaving intelligently. Simply that the average condition of people is better than it was.

"Please don't take my argument as..."

Ok. Peace.

"...average condition of people is better than it was."

My generation (X) griped about student load debt, which seemed crippling at the time.

No comparison with today's kids. Then pile on housing costs, rising insurance premiums, day care & pre school (for anyone choosing to have kids), ...

I despair for the millennials.

That's a patently false statement.

Inflation has been 3% a year for decades and wages have stayed flat.

Your example of home furnishings has been improved by industrialization.

Property value have skyrocketed, vehicle prices have skyrocketed, college, healthcare...

Things you NEED have become way more expensive. Luxury goods have gotten cheaper.

Wages have remained flat when inflation is taken into account, i.e. real wages are flat, nominal wages continue to increase. We also have seen upward movement in median household income recently, and we should expect that trend to continue. So the idea of flat wages may be coming to an end.

What hasn't remained flat is the wages paid to the top N% which has greatly increased and accelerated the wealth gap. It is this gap that leaves people less satisfied despite being generally better off.

I would qualify: people aren't just dissatisfied because of the "unfairness" of growing inequality. The growth of the wealth gap has some very real ramifications, ie: on the distribution of power in politics.

As if the poor ever had any power in politics. Huey Long might have been a lightning rod for poor people, but it's not as if their votes have been courted since I've been alive.

>Inflation has been 3% a year for decades and wages have stayed flat.

Every time I read this claim and go looking for data, I find data that says that real wages are roughly flat, which means that they have kept pace with inflation. (That's the definition of real wages: that they are in inflation-adjusted terms.) It seems a common journalistic (and often political) talking point to say exactly what you said, which makes the math or reading comprehension challenged assume something quite different. While the author or speaker is not technically lying, they are merely misleading the reader/listener with a confusing (and sometimes confused) combination of nominal inflation and real wages.

See figures 3 and 4 here: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

> Property value have skyrocketed, vehicle prices have skyrocketed

This next chart is in nominal dollars (meaning, not inflation adjusted): http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/pricechanges....

It shows that vehicles have not gotten more expensive (even as they've gotten much, much better, safer, more reliable, etc) and that housing and food/beverages have inflated by less than wages and by roughly the same amount as general inflation (which is no great surprise, given that they are a substantial component of the inflation calculation and that it would be difficult to sustain inflation over a long period of time in a consumer-driven economy in the absence of [nominal] wage growth for consumers).

College and healthcare have indeed risen much more quickly than wages or general inflation.

Do you have contrary sources?

Figure 3: "When it comes to the pace of annual [real wage] increases, the top 1% wage grew 138% since 1979, while [real] wages for the bottom 90% grew 15%"

Figure 4: "Middle-class wages are stagnant—Middle-wage workers’ hourly [real] wage is up 6% since 1979, low-wage workers’ [real] wages are down 5%, while those with very high wages saw a 41% increase"

I wouldn't exactly describe those figures as "misleading". In fact, they're pretty clear: one group is benefiting much more than the others.

As for the second one, is it really saying that real new-car prices have declined by ~50%?

IMO, the graphs show that the quoted statement is absolutely misleading: "Inflation has been 3% a year for decades and wages have stayed flat."

I agree that they would likely not refute a different, unmade, point about income inequality.

The second reference is saying that real new-car prices have declined by about 36%. ==> 1-(100/155.6)

Median wages have decline by 4% since 2000.

Median wealth has fallen by 28% in a decade.

The middle class has been reduced by 11% since 1971.

Even in the chart you posted, things people NEED have become steadily more expensive while wages have remained flat.

Student loan debt has skyrocketed over 200% since 1990 which is needed in most cases for a good job.

How is this not decline?

* http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...

Whether or not a bad financial choice is a out of necessity is highly situation-dependent and the situation doesn't look great for the majority of millennials. I think this point sometimes gets lost among the HN crowd for whom a bad financial decision is most often a choice.

Things like the extraordinary rise in the cost of higher education -- which has become a near defacto requirement to obtain a livable wage -- should not be discounted. The example of student debt is particularly salient because it appears to materially impact the vast majority of millennials. Even those of us fortunate enough to be making six-figure incomes spend many years pouring money into debt instead of retirement or brokerage accounts. In most cases this setback leads delays in home ownership, starting a family, and retirement. This is a problem that cannot be remedied by teaching good financial skills.

I think that you're correct.

People who knew me early on in certain contexts thought that I was "rich" comparatively speaking.

They didn't see the 10 year old car, 4 roommates (in a cheap city), camping vacations, sale clothes, etc. I was debt free quickly. I'm in a fairly well compensated gig now but kept the habits. The car is a 2003, my house is older, vacations are in nicer hotels but we drive, etc.

That's not to say that people have challenges that are tough... but so did I!