Hacker News Reader

There's a LOT more to wealth than GDP/person, saying postwar america wasn't rich is absurd.

exactly. The economy didn't need to support so many restaurants and food services when most people cooked at home. People also mostly entertained themselves or spent time with friends/family. Moving all that to a company or service will raise the GDP.

Plus childcare and eldercare. Take those and the ones you mention into account, and GDP/person has probably dropped since the 1950s.

It's relative, not absolute. Saying America today isn't richer than postwar America is even more absurd.

It's easy to confuse relative and absolute wealth.

Relative: 1950s USA was easily the richest country in the world, and in history.

Absolute: In today's world, that affluence is only average for the world. Other countries around there are Brazil, China, and Algeria.

Both those things are true.

https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/

Just like today, wealth is not evenly distributed.

There are people in the US today living in abject poverty. Name the cause, fine, but that doesn't make it less true.

The poverty level 70 years ago would have been even more desperate.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1952/demo/p60-00...

Adjusted for inflation that's about a $35,000 median family income compared to an average of about $55,000 today. Still not great, but other items like homes were cheaper (and smaller), cars, etc. So not quite as bad as the GDP per person, but it does make me think about how that monumental rise of GDP isn't reflected more closely in how much money is being made by the average working person

Income per family is a treacherous measure, since family sizes have shrunk considerably.

If I marry you, our family income has doubled, but none of us is any richer.

> Income per family is a treacherous measure, since family sizes have shrunk considerably.

> If I marry you, our family income has doubled, but none of us is any richer.

I don't disagree with your core point, but I have to nitpick a bit the last part.

Expenses don't grow linearly with the number of people in a family, especially with the number of wage-earning adults. You will be richer in a couple, and I don't only mean emotionally :-) Rent won't double, all sorts of other living expenses can be shared, etc. Disposable income should definitely be higher than for 2 single people.

I feel that a decent chunk of the issues in modern societies is that many people are single for long periods of time. That makes things really hard financially, plus there's less support in case of issues...

I would expect that two could live a fair bit more cheaply (apples to apples) than double what they individually spent as singles. Rent, utilities, and (to a lesser extent) groceries all seemed to get quite a bit more efficient when we moved in together.

The "median family" is wildly different today than it was 60 years ago. A skyrocketing percent of households are single individuals with a single income and no child expenses.

https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone

We have grown-up people earning 4x median wages on this website living with roommates, am not sure it was the case in 1950.

Yes, because of special circumstances in one metro area; that isn’t typical nationwide.

The Bay Area is definitely an extreme, but millennials nationwide are doing worse financially than their parents, even though they're working more. Here's one of my absolute favorite articles on the topic, which addresses everything from work/health/education/housing.

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn...

Not really. Millennials certainly face different problems than previous generations but it would be generally inaccurate to say that they are financially worse off. Going back to that article you linked, I have to take the opposite stance in terms of its quality. Articles which rely heavily on anecdotes to make their point are really not a good way to try to understand what constitutes "typical". In fact, they're mostly useless for that. If you want to understand what really is "typical" then you really need to dive into some dry and boring data releases. Let's use the BLS Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers Archived News Releases found here https://www.bls.gov/bls/news-release/wkyeng.htm

These reports provide reliable information about median weekly earnings for full-time workers, are available online going back to 1996, and include more specific data about different age groups. Let's compare the age range of 25-34 in Q1 1996 (non millennials) to the same range in Q4 2019 (millennials) while adjusting for increases in cost of living using CPI-U. Here are the major spending categories assessed in CPI calculations https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_1...

For ages 25-34:

Q1 1996 weekly earnings: $419

% change in CPI-U over duration: + ~66%

Q1 1996 weekly earnings in Q4 2019 dollars: $695.54

Q4 2019 weekly earnings: $815

% Increase in real weekly earnings: ~17%

The plural of anedcote is not data, but there's more to financial better/worse off-ness than comparing the percentage change in Consumer Price Index.

As the comment states, that calculation is the change in real weekly earnings. "Real" being calculated using CPI-U. To reiterate, the purchasing power of the median weekly earnings for the 25-34 group is 17% higher now than it was in Q1 1996.

“BLS data collectors visit (in person or on the web) or call thousands of retail stores, service establishments, rental units, and doctors' offices, all over the United States to obtain information on the prices of the thousands of items used to track and measure price changes in the CPI”

At least from that sentence and a cursory glance at categories collected, it doesn’t appear they’re specifically factoring in mortgages / home ownership aside from rents nor medical insurance aside from one-off clinic visits (which, given CPI is a snapshot of purchasing power at a given time and not a measure of lifetime household wealth, why would they?).

I don’t doubt purchasing power has gone up — private car ride hailing, specialty juices and cleanses, avocado toasts, food delivery, organic foods, wellness products, travel, hotels, all the once-expensive things people love to criticize millenials for buying are truly more accessible than ever.

That doesn’t definitely say anything about how much the cost of long-term financial obligations such as education, insurance, and home ownership costs, however.

Buildings and other structures are considered capital goods and investment items rather than consumption items as they provide a service and may appreciate over time. This is why mortgages aren't counted in CPI calculations. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

As for medical costs, it's more complicated but as an overview:

    The CE (consumer expenditures survey) tracks consumer out-of-pocket spending on medical care, which is used to weight the medical care indexes. CE defines out-of-pocket medical spending as:
        patient payments made directly to retail establishments for medical goods and services;
        health insurance premiums paid for by the consumer, including Medicare Part B; and
        health insurance premiums deducted from employee paychecks.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/medical-care.htm

But you're right, there are still plenty of problems. Like I said in my original comment, the problems faced by millennial are different than those faced by previous generations. Often these new problems can be considered more stress inducing due to a higher degree of initial commitments required to even enter many new fields (i.e. student debt) and uncertainty about the future. Whether these new problems are worse than the problems which they largely replaced depends on your definition of "worse".

But why CPI-U, why not CPI-W, or the more useful C-CPI-U. How do seasonal adjustments change the picture? What investments are those 25-34 year olds making in 401k, mortgage, stocks/bonds so that when they're in the 35+ bracket, and how might those compare? What does class mobility look like for the bottom 25%? How happy are the respective cohorts? How many hours/wk are those people working to get that purchasing power?

The huffpo anecdata-based story is "just so", but comparing a single quarter, for a single age-group, based on a single metric known to have short comings, and presenting it without context as "the reality", tickles my "just so" meter, from the other side of the spectrum.

>Why not CPI-W

If I'm trying to assess if a typical 25-34 year old is better off now than in 1996 why on Earth would I use a measure which only assesses a specific section of the population which constitutes less than 30% of the U.S. population? CPI-U covers about 90%. Barely anyone uses CPI-W.

>Why not C-CPI-U

I would love to. Unfortunately C-CPI-U figures only go back to December 1999, bit of a problem if I'm trying to work from Q1 1996. Also, C-CPI-U tends to be a bit lower than normal CPI-U meaning that 17% increase would actually be slightly larger if assessed with C-CPI-U.

>How many hours/wk are those people working to get that purchasing power?

Since we're using median earnings I'd need median hours worked for the same age range at the same times in history which is not something I could find. That said, weekly hours worked by employed individuals have been decreasing for decades. That trend shows no signs of reversing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006023

A lot of the rest of the questions are harder to answer given available data but most are also of pretty questionable usefulness when trying to assess the financial well-being of a "typical" millennial relative to the previous generation. If your question is specifically "Does the typical working millennial have a worse material standard of living than their parents?" the answer is no.

If you want a more complete and accurate answer then use the data from primary sources to figure it out yourself. Every person that data has to be filtered through before it gets to you adds an extra layer of bullshit because when dealing with economic stuff you should assume that everyone has an agenda. That's true for Huffington Post articles and for random internet comments, like this one.

When I tell people here in Poland that I have friends living in LA, SF or NYC, making six figure salaries and living with roommates to be able to both live where they want AND pay off their student loan debt, they are dumbfounded.

GDP just reflects economic output, not the distribution of the resulting wealth to real people. If you want to adjust for anything, adjust for the cost of healthcare, education, and amount of consumer debt.

> And since this always has to be pointed out: That is adjusted for inflation.

I must point out a concern about your out point.

Is this using CPI? PPI? Currency supply? Something else?

Education, housing, and many other expenses have outpaced "inflation" for decades.

I'd argue that housing and education today are better on average than in the past as well.