"We all have cell phones now, but are we really better off"
???
Are you saying that people don't want cellphones, but chose spend a fortune on them anyhow?
Many people are literally choosing materiality over 'seeing their children' more often, there is no doubt about this. If you don't want to live in NY, SF, LA there are suburbs all over America which are very affordable, if you give up all the extras you can definitely spend more time with your kids.
1) If there are 2x more workers, because women have entered the workforce, all other things being equal obviously homes will be 2x as much.
There is a fixed supply of land (homes increase with the size of the population)
It's not the 'home' is the 'real estate' i.e. cost of accessing that property.
2) Interest rates are insanely low. Go ahead and overlay the graphs that you referenced with historical interest rates.
Most Americans are 'home owners' and they are actually massively financialized - they have more leverage than ever over renters due to very low interest rates.
3) Actual homes have increased a lot in material value over 50 years. Have you been in a home built in 1950? Ratty windows, often no HVAC, they were much smaller.
Conan O'Brien's father was a Doctor, mother a Yale Lawyer and he often talks about how small and cramped his home was.
If you want to 'raise 4 kids on one income' - you can absolutely do that, but you'll have to live at a lower standard of living and give up a lot of things which those 'advanced jobs' have made available.
4) In 1960 about 7% of people went to college, now it's about 28%. Literally a 400% increase (!), and even more going to some kind of post-high school training. This is good.
There is a limited supply of 'choice jobs' and yes, entry to 'top schools' is going up radically, but the average is misleading, many state schools are not expensive. You can absolutely get a solid education at a decent rate, and the opportunity is considerably greater than 50 years ago.
What has changed is that Uni is not 'access to the elite' as it once was. But the education is just as good.
5) Healthcare - our services are considerably better than they were before across the board.
We used to retire at 65 and die at 68, now we retire at 65 and die at 85 - and we slowly die and retire tons of healtchare.
In 1960 people 'just died' and we didn't do that much about it (ask your parents) because there wasn't much we could do. Now we can and it's expensive.
Most healthcare spending used to be on intervention, illness etc. now it's almost all related to getting old. So yes, healthcare is getting expensive because we are older and breaking down all the time.
And yes, even accounting for that, we do spend more on Healthcare (from 7% to 11% of GDP over that time in Canada for example) and that's no unreasonable.
We spend a lot less $ for the same amount of material goods as we did in 1970, for example, the amount on basic groceries is about 1/2 and we eat out in restaurants a lot more.
The demand for groceries like most things is finite, but the demand for healthcare is infinite - there are always new, better procedures that we all want that are 'in development' and only when 'billions more' are spent will they come to fruition.
Imagine if there were massive productivity gains in home appliances, food, anything physical - and prices dropped i.e. full on deflation in those sectors? What would we end up spending that share of our income on? Healthcare and Housing in particular.
That's exactly what's happening: the surpluses are immense, our cup runneth over with goods, services, choice, opportunity.
There are some people 'left out' of the system (the bottom 20%) which is not good - and - the 1% are gaining increasingly more financial power, not so good, but otherwise we live in a time of incredibly high standards of living, easily the highest in history.