I'm not sure which is more applicable:
1. Hurray, decency.
2. Shouldn't getting excited about what would've been middle-class income 70 years ago be a sign how far workers' pay has fallen?
The standard of living that 70k USD buys today is vastly better than what the median income bought in 1950.
(Of course, Seattle is rather expensive. The 70k USD would go much further in a city that didn't restrict residential construction so much.)
At any rate, the claim that "stuff" is more expensive because it is better implies that decades of technical improvements have resulted in no efficiency gains. At best, it implies the value per man hour has essentially remained flat. And since the option of buying lower priced versions of items has dispersed, we can never know if the higher quality item is fairly priced.
(But in addition, there are those restrictions on housing supply that I already mentioned.)
You are right about insulin probably not having gotten much better. There's a few other goods like that as well. Some of those problems are self-inflicted. Eg education is much more costly these days, too.
Who claimed that stuff is more expensive because it's better?
Taking hedonic adjustments into account when producing inflation numbers is the proper thing to do. Productivity improvements would then show up by decreases in the price level measured like that. We can see that for eg computers. A good enough desktop computer today costs less in nominal dollars than in the early 90s, despite being enormously more powerful.
Yes, you are right that we can not buy many of the crappier things any more. That's partially down to regulation, but also down to there just not being enough demand for lots of crappy stuff to keep production at scale running.
So that makes calculating the price level harder. The usual work-around is to only look at adjustments from one year to the next, and chain them.
Another workaround is to go with the Big Mac index. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index) That index is a bit of a joke, since it just measure the price of a Big Mac. But it's surprisingly useful for what it is.
Any commodity TV is immediately beyond-economic-repair, IMO.
1 - https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-50-class-led-nu6900-ser... (literally the first search result I found)
99.5+% of people are better off economically and time-wise to throw away any out-of-warranty TV undiagnosed and buy new.
Ignoring the big 'if': most goods today are better than what we had in 1950. Especially if you compare the quality of goods that required the median worker to work the same amount of hours.
The 'junk' you talk about takes minutes of work to earn enough to buy. And most of the time, that's good enough. The stuff that you spend a few hours of pay on, is mostly so much better.
Another commenter already pointed out that the example of repairability don't really hold up. It's mostly because wages have increased that repairing those things doesn't make much sense any more.
Just think how much time even well-to-do middle class women used to spent on darning socks and mending clothing. Basic clothing is too cheap to measure these days.
Cars need much less maintenance these days.
It's easy to view the past with rose tinted lenses. But most things were really crappy.
See https://www.gwern.net/Improvements for more on this perspective:
> clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”; the idea of, say, darning socks is completely alien3, clothing companies routinely burn millions of pounds of clothes because it’s cheaper than the cost of selling them, and Africa is flooded by discards.
> materials science has produced constant visible-yet-invisible improvements in textiles yielding, among other things, far better insulated (and cheaper) winter jackets: instead of choosing between winter coats which make you look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or freezing (and if you get wet, freezing anyway) or exotic ultra-expensive garments aimed at mountain climbers, you can now buy ordinary (and much cheaper) winter coats which are amazingly thin and work even better to keep you warm—so much so that you have to be careful to not buy too well-insulated a coat, lest you swelter at the slightest exertion and be placed between the Scylla of overheating & the Charybdis of opening your coat to the freezing air to cool.
I submitted Gwern's piece at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865
>cars need much less maintenance these days.
And, especially if you lived somewhere with snow and salt on the roads, they mostly lasted about 50K miles before they rusted out. Growing up, it was an unusual car that made it to 100K.
That said, minor repairs of otherwise functional gear can make sense. I'm generally in agreement on electronics. But I fairly commonly repair or have repaired hiking or camping gear for example that just needs some stitching to get back in working condition.
In the anecdata department, the last time I took something into REI to be repaired they told me they didn't do that any longer and to send it to Rainy Pass in Seattle.
The more expensive insulins that are on the market have different effect profiles that (somewhat) simplify managing blood sugar.
(The article implies it's for 'Americans'. But it's just not very precise.)
Edit: I did the calculation backwards. Thanks to everyone who pointed that out.
If you look at inflation only, that is equivalent to saying that workers should have gained absolutely nothing from technology and efficiency gains made in the past 70 years. But obviously we know that workers are far more productive today than they were in the 50s, and the extra productivity per worker is reflected in GDP.
I'd be curious to see the numbers for my assumption, though.
But yeah, the original comment we are replying to doesn't have much going for it.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/if-people-knew-the-actual-in...
In any case, I agree that inflation (or more precisely, the price level) is a finicky statistic to agree on. So if you are making an argument, it's better if you can avoid inflation.
Eg people like to argue whether median real income has stagnated or not. And that crucially hinges on inflation. But what they actually want to talk about seems to be whether workers get 'exploited' more. So we can instead look at the labour share of GDP over time. No inflation adjustment necessary.
The article you linked to is somewhat hilarious. It suggests eg China is cooperating with the US in massaging American inflation numbers. (See point 2 in their list.)
Now compare with median annual incomes in 1950. Asking Google about '1950 median american income' gives 'Average family income in 1950 was $3,300.' Not quite what I wanted to know, but close enough. (We are looking at per worker income, and would probably be more interested in median than average.)
(Though not sure about workers per household.)
> [...] it's increasing because more people in a household are working.
More people are working outside the house and participating in the market economy. Women worked before, domestic chores don't show up in these statistics.
Presumably they produce a lot more working outside the house: to estimate a monetary value of what they did before compare with the prevailing wages for nannies and housekeepers.
GP is probably also relating to what you can buy using 70k.