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Comment by slv77 | Hacker News Reader

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?

How did we get here?

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Actually, I think the housing price expectations discrepancy is probably a function of where you live vs where the GP lives. Inflation-adjusted housing prices haven't actually risen all that much outside top-tier cities.

http://www.realestatedecoded.com/case-shiller/

Given that a relatively small percentage of people live in these places, I get the feeling the perception of a housing price crisis is larger than the reality. I don't mean to say that housing isn't unreasonably expensive in some places, but that the issue likely receives disproportionate attention because it most strongly affects those who tend to write and read about issues like a housing price crisis (i.e. journalists, software developers, economists, etc. who often live in these expensive cities). The people dictating and participating in these conversations are those who are living in expensive cities.

For the typical poor person, I suspect the costs of higher education and healthcare are usually a bigger obstacle than housing costs. Though this is probably not the case for a poor person in San Francisco.

Millions of people live in top tier cities and millions of people live in Nowhere, USA where housing is still ludicrously expensive in proportion to job prospects

This hits really close for me. I am a Seattle IT guy and looking at houses back near family in Michigan. Sure, houses are 2-4x more expensive here...but I will most certainly make 1/2 as much in the areas in Michigan that I would like to live...which is as far away from the Detroit metro as possible. And even if I can make that much I will be lucky to find a job. Here in Seattle people come to me to hire me!

Remote work will someday change this but boy is that change slow to occur!!

Amen... but with Washington DC. Northern VA has literally the richest counties per capita in the US. Then I look at Eastern WA or Idaho and lose my shit. Montana, too, though the culture is terrible.

If only I could get a job there that didn't pay poor salaries...

You know, I've always heard that and thought it seemed reasonable, but when I actually started looking through the data I noticed that the top tier cities often have significantly lower median incomes.

The top tier cities also have higher mean incomes. The top tier cities tend to attract the outliers. If you are Mark Zuckerberg, you probably live in a top tier city. But almost nobody is able to say they are earning like Mark Zuckerberg. And if you are earning like Mark Zuckerberg, the cost of housing is the least of your concerns.

It seems for the normal every day average person, they actually make less money in a top tier city.

gp actually answered that with "especially if you want to live like it is the 1940s".

There is a quiet denial about how luxurious modern living is. People just flat-out underestimate how much work it takes to keep the infrastructure of the modern world in place and humming - traditional infrastructure, IT grids, distribution of goods and services (particularly maintaining an enormous fleet of wheeled vehicles).

I know a lot of people who are poorer than I am but spend more, because they just don't clamp down on things like car usage, sending money to their children, pets and ordering a daily coffee. The only thing that will force them to live a simple lifestyle is literally having no money.

Sometimes people maneuver into a position where they have no choice, because they make bad long-term lifestyle choices early on, but so far the evidence is that human demand for stuff and services is infinite. People use their spare hours to gather and consume more.

Ah yes. The poor are poor because of poor morals, instead of you, who is of good moral standing.

The poor are poor due to lack of money. This is caused by increasing costs of healthcare, education and houses, you know those basic things needed to live. And by a capitalistic class taking about 95% of all gains from productivity increases. Saying millions of people are poor because because of bad morals is disgusting and completely false.

I thoroughly reject whatever it is you are suggesting. There is nothing immoral about wanting to enjoy a high standard of living.

I agree with your core thesis, but it could probably have been expressed better. In the USA there's a moral system that some people have that equates wealth to virtue. In my experience, it leads to conclusions that are generally dehumanizing and unempathetic of others, which is definitely not a long term sustainable foundation for a free society.

Ugh, poor money management skills have nothing to do with morals. It's fine to say someone has poor money management skills just like it's fine to say someone has poor C++ coding skills.

Creating a budget and sticking to it requires behavioral changes that take time to sink in.

It's extremely unlikely that you make the perfect amount of money to cover your exact needs that result in you being broke. It's much more likely that people adapt to a system of spending all money that comes in on whatever 'priority item' pops into their mind because they lack the skill and/or discipline of budgeting. This is evident in higher income people as well that suffer from lifestyle creep.

Again, this has nothing to do with morals. It's just a statement about the appalling lack of financial education in the vast majority of the US population.

I think you and the original poster are in violent agreement Reread his post all of the way through.

> There is a quiet denial about how luxurious modern living is.

Absolutely! I genuinely marvel every time I go into a supermarket. I can buy a huge variety of delicious foods from all the corners of the globe. 200 years ago a king couldn't eat this well.

Also, I have literal robots doing my housework! A robot cleans the floor. A robot cleans the dishes. A robot cleans my clothes. It's nice to take a step back and appreciate all this.

>200 years ago a king couldn't eat this well

A kind 200 years ago couldn't eat this variety.

But they could eat very much better -- all free-range, well made, top quality cuts (not hastily made, lower tier BS, with all kinds of additives to increase self-life or make it appear more appealing in the shelves), made fresh on their own premises or bought from the best artisans.

And of course all prepared at their whim by their army of personal chefs, and served by an army of servers.

And they had all the time they liked to enjoy those things, with friends and family, not having to gulp them down between 60-hour work weeks...

> And of course all prepared at their whim by their army of personal chefs, and served by an army of servers.

Math says that majority of people were among army of personal chefs and servers not among those being served. So, you are arguing by outliers.

Parents were talking about kings, not about service people.

Reportedly Boris Yeltsin was so floored by a random American supermarket that it help spur him to end the Cold War: https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-randalls-grocery-...

If you find that interesting, in a similar vein, a walk through corn and soybean fields in Canada lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-walk-that-changed-t...

>There is a quiet denial about how luxurious modern living is

There's also a big denial about how luxurious 1940s living was compared to 1840s or the palaeolithic ages...

...and that's just as well, because it's not really relevant. Living standards and necessities are determined socially, in comparison with what others of the same era have (and expect people to have), not with comparison to the past.

Someone that lives in nice large cave in Malibu with rocks for furniture and self-made pottery, and a stock of food he has hunted himself, would be considered well-off in the cavemen era, but homeless today.

> Living standards and necessities are determined socially, in comparison with what others of the same era have (and expect people to have), not with comparison to the past.

By this definition aggregate living standards can never improve (nor decline) over time.

Leaving aside how arguable it is, this definition of living standards is not relevant to this subthread, which is about the claim that prosperity has not been increasing for decades, followed by an unfavorable comparison to the 40s/50s. By such a useless definition, the claim is tautological: of course prosperity can't have increased of living standards are defined as being eternally static. Incidentally, it's a subthread you started and a claim you made, so it's a little bizarre to see the goalposts being moved so dramatically.

If you maintain a 1920s lifestyle today, you probably could work just a few hours a week.

Thing is, nobody wants that kind of a lifestyle.

Thing is, it doesn't make sense to want that lifestyle. It's not an option anymore, the same way living in a cave is not an option.

It would place you in pariah status, for one -- and a lifestyle is not just to putting food in the table or a roof above your head, it also includes making you eligible for a partner, able to raise kids to do OK in society, and so on.

Pray tell, what is that lifestyle? What has changed?

People lived in homes both rented and owned, there were few big flats of apartments. They didn't have cars but used bikes and public transport.

They had comparable quality food if not better. Ate somewhat less meat. Slept better and longer. Worked similar or shorter hours. (with exceptions)

More worked physical jobs, but a sizable number ran office jobs.

They tended to be more locally sociable and active I suspect too.

Fewer went to get higher education.

> while the home may be slightly larger than those in the past it’s 30+ years old.

Pardon my naiveté, but is this a common bar? I didn't grow up poor and I'm _definitely_ not poor now, but I don't think I've ever lived in a house that was less than 30 years old. I didn't even realize that was desirable; my impression was that the stereotype of new construction is "classless, soulless cookie-cutter Levittown" (not saying that I agree with this notion, just that it was my understanding of how the property market treats housing).

Am I mistaken here? Or is this perhaps different between cities vs more rural areas, or suburbs? I've only ever lived in big cities.

Suburbs built in the 1970s have the same problems as houses built today - rapid, low-quality construction, cheap materials, etc. They're temporary buildings. (Levittown, in fact, was built in the 50s!) At the very least, a new house is further from it's expiry date than an older house. You'll probably find better construction where land costs more (downtown cities) or pre-1950s buildings, but these are quite rare.

EDIT: As a reminder of the endless progression of time, a 30-year-old house would have been built in 1988.

Meanwhile, in the fifties all the houses were new and all the school districts were better than average.

"all the school districts were better than average"

That might be a statistical impossibility:-)

Depends. Suppose you take those new-fangled school districts just built in the fifties. Are they better than the global average? Likely. Are they better than the average school district in America? Possibly. Are they better than the average school in your state? Maybe. Are they better than all those new school districts? Definitely not.

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