Living Wage Calculator

I often find this with HN articles. Much like the .com domain, I continue to assume a likelihood of American-focus and allow myself to be pleasantly surprised when it is a global article, service or discussion.

Perhaps that's one of the best things about code/git submissions to HN - it's often so easy to apply them to any geographic region.

> It seems that "living" does not include almost nothing beyond the immediate living requirements and it does not take into account times you cannot work, can't find job, or simply the fact that a person is a little more than her capacity to be a machine for someone.

This is very much what the US mentality on social care is like, so at least it's consistent.

And the fact you HAVE to save money, a lot of it, for the future.

I’ve found numbeo to be practically useless for most cities I’ve been to and stayed. MITs calculator is much more accurate, especially if you are someone who doesn’t earn a high wage.

Most people aren’t going to stay in Greenwich village/SOHO/UES if they are in NY, or similar elsewhere. Prices reflected in the MIT calculator seem to take all areas of living into account, that too by county.

Edit: Numbers on numbeo seem to have improved a lot since the last time I saw them. Taking back my previous opinion, but I find both to be useful resources.

Numbeo has reputation of being very inconsistent. For some cities and countries it's relatively accurate, for some others it's wrong or outdated.

It's partly due to their data collecting methodology. They rely on crowd-sourced user inputs and manually collected data. I also have doubt about their analysis methodology, it's seems very ad hoc and amateurish.

You should treat Numbeo with a grain of salt. It's honest attempt with small budget and better than nothing, but you can't treat it as authoritative source.

(Edited to add housing comment)

I agree the housing seems low. For my county, it worked out to ~$750 a month for a single childless household. I’ve never seen a rent that low around me. I assume shared living must be on the table for this.

As for the other living expenses, and whether you’re on a hedonic treadmill:

* How many meals a month are from a restaurant of any kind?

* How many of the following do you have paid subscriptions for? Cable/satellite, HBO, Showtime, Netflix, Hulu, etc.

* Do you set your thermostat to lower than 75°F/23°C in the summer, or higher than 65°F/18°C in the winter?

* Do you buy cars new? Or almost always have a car payment?

* Any microwave meals or individually packaged snacks?

* Alcohol on any semi-regular basis?

* Coffee that’s more than 25¢ a cup?

None of the above are (moral) value judgements, but they’re really easy to get accustomed to and not consider as discretionary items.

Certainly the housing values are far below current costs for California. [1]

I assume this is because the data is averaged over what _current_ residents pay which will be dominated by mortgages taken out well in the past and perhaps affordable rentals not on the market. This will bring the average far down.

Anyone moving to or inside of California today could not survive on the Living Wages listed. Even they assume some 2/3 of post tax income going to that lower averaged housing cost.

[1] for example

http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06001

vs

https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/al...

> A single adult with 1 child pays a lot more for housing, presumably because the child requires its own bedroom.

I find this funny, because it takes several years before a child will stop actively expressing its preference _not_ to have its own bedroom.

"it is interesting that someone who is willing to make their kid share a room is unwilling to share a room with their kid"

Kids sharing rooms is somewhat more acceptable than Adult/child sharing a room. Past babyhood anyway.

I suppose the problem is it all depends on genders and ages. A 5 and 6YO sharing is probably fine. A 16 and 17YO of differing genders not so much.

A single adult with no children can rent a room in a house or apartment with other friends. A couple can do this too, but some of them prefer to have their own place so this skews the average a bit. Once you have a kid it's a lot harder to find people who want to live with you so you have to get your own place. This place is apparently big enough to support up to two adults and two children after which you need a bigger place.

I just checked, I live in Phoenix, in maricopa county, I’m pretty sure lumping together people living in Maricopa, Phoenix and the suburbs is not valid, you can’t commute across the county, it’s not a single market.

As stated above, this site was actually linked on HN in 2008, that's 11 years ago, I don't think they ever updated it with recent data.

The discussion is probably more relevant now than it was in 2008 re: expansion in the ridiculous 'gig economy' sphere since then.

I think the taxes are based more on the income, which they are suggesting has to be more to still be livable. So even though you have more dependents, you are making more money (in order to be livable) and therefore paying more taxes.

What does $1,789/mo lease you in that area?

I suspect the data presumes 2 bedrooms: 1 room for parents, 1 room for children. The pattern is effectively the same regardless of state/county.

> Why not just let the market decide?

The market decides on wage stagnation while costs keep increasing and profit goes exclusively to the upper class. For the vast majority of people, the market doesn't do a very good job.

This is letting the market decide isn’t it? This calculator would have no region-specific wages if the USA were the kind of socialism (I think) you’re talking about.

Figuring out how much an individual (or family) needs to make to survive doesn’t need to say anything about the social, economic or political ideology. As far as I can tell it’s just saying “if you live here, basic survival costs this”

Edit: Italics formatting.

This isn’t trying to decide the cost of labour. It’s trying to put an approximate low band on the cost of living.

And the market does decide on the cost of living. This is attempting to quantify that decision into a practical metric.

Not sure why you’d think this has anything to do with socialism.

A less-discussed issue with capitalism and socialism - it is completely possible for a clever and motivated person to work out what 'should' be in a specific or even a general instance.

The issue is that there is no before-the-damage-is-done mechanism to determine if a given person's assertions are correct or not, so any system that uses those assertions axiomatically will likely fail.

It isn't socialism for this Professor to point out what the living wage would be. If an employee (or employer for that matter) wants to use these figures when negotiating a wage that is hopefully good for everyone.

If the government is going to mandate minimum wages based on what Amy Glasmeier thinks is fair, it will turn out that she isn't very good at adapting to changing circumstances and the huge variety of personal circumstance that appears in practice. Mid-range case is she would become inaccurate (or corrupt!) after a few months or years and start setting wages too low or high. That would also be socialism and would also lead to bad outcomes vs. just letting people do what looks like a good idea to them.