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Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or is it a little silly to compare the 1919 world economy pre-mass production/consumerism with today?

The irony to most of this shutdown is that "essential" businesses are still open. What the Great Pause has exposed is the shallowness and fragility of mass production/consumerism. During the pandemic of 1919, 80-90% of household income was spent on food and essential needs.

Can you even imagine if we spent 80-90% of our income on essential needs? Well shit, we wouldn't hurt so much when non-essential business was put on pause, that's for sure.

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> "Can you even imagine if we spent 80-90% of our income on essential needs?"

most american households (as in >50%) do spend 80-90% (or more) on essential needs.

You may very well be right, but I'd be curious if you have a source for that?

Most of these things seem quite essential and aren't cash in the bank equivalents (pension is debatable)

https://images.app.goo.gl/HLGya1YkFJ5vv5oS8

If you think about which of the industries in that chart are partially or fully shut down, it seems pretty consistent with the 14% unemployment we got.

Piketty has a book called Capital in the 21st Century, which makes similar statements and has pointers to his reference material here: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2

Also, it's a good book.

In the early 1900s most American households spent 80% of their income on food, clothing, and housing -- and the food was by far the largest expense, more than housing.

The picture for American families today is much better.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...

This data seems to stop in 2003, before Great Recession and the massive increase in housing costs in urban centers. Also doesn’t seem to take into account the dramatic increases in healthcare costs in the intervening years. I’m not sure how useful it is as a measure?

Do you honestly believe that modern households, even after the Great Recession, spend more on food than housing?

Come up with better data if you don't like mine.

No? I think that housing prices as a percentage of income have increased since then and are trending worse for younger generations, which a quick google suggests is true:

https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCH...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/real-es...

The late 90s (just before this study ends) were also one of the last periods of meaningful wage growth.

So combined with, again, a lack of consideration about things like rising healthcare costs, it’s difficult to view this study as relevant or meaningful. And especially when the data ends before the now two largest downturns since the Great Depression.

I don't think anyone's claiming anything about the relative spending on food and housing, nor that it has any bearing on the matter under discussion - I think the claim is that total spending on "essential needs" has remained fairly high and has not become "much better." According to the article you linked, while food, housing, and clothing are now only about 50% of your budget instead of 80%, there's also about 20% on transportation costs, which didn't show up in the 1900 figure. I think those also count as "essential needs." Things are better than in the early 1900s, but not by very much.

that article makes the point that basically all the savings from food from 1900 went to housing and transportation in 2003.

~75% of 2003 household budgets went to food, housing, transportation, clothing and healthcare ("essentials"). among non-essentials, only ~5% to entertainment.

those are aggregate numbers, so you'd still expect more than 50% of american households to be spending 80-90% of their budgets on the essentials (said differently, the median household is most certainly above the 75% figure because of the highly disproportionate skew of the top 1%).

you could argue that we own too much house and too many cars on average, but i doubt that makes much difference to the big picture, because that's also disproportionately skewed to the top 20%. most american households are still spending most of their money on real essentials.

Yes, except we’ve replaced beans and rags with Big Macs and Nikes

“Essentials” is flawed in your argument. Americans in 1919 actually had to struggle to survive.

About 1/3 of people in the US lived on family farms in 1919. Which pretty much means that 1/3 of the population was already working from home.

It's interesting to see loss aversion made so explicit in these suggestions that we should abstain from nice things unless we can guarantee them forever.

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