Yes. Absolutely. I saw an interview of someone who talked about living in the 60s. He was saying how a painter could own a home, afford a wife and six kids with no problem without the wife even working a 2nd job. Today, a single painter could barely afford himself, let alone a family of six and a house. I know it's anecdotle, but the difference is so vast and stark, I think it's obvious there's been a huge difference in quality of life over the last 60 years.
Obviously, some of that you can't avoid. No one is making 1000 sq ft brick homes anymore for new homeowners, so you don't have an option of a small, cheap home in many areas. You only have the option of the bigger, more expensive home. But some of it is a personal choice. I think there is something to the argument you're making, but I also think people are underestimating the frugality of people in the past.
You have to remember, those new homes are only bought up by about 1% of the population. So, to say that 1% can afford much larger homes is not saying much about the other 99%.
I can guarantee you there are effectively zero millennials living with their parents or with roommates in a small apartment who would turn down the chance to own an affordable small home.
Or, more neutrally, our standards and expectations have changed from the 1960s. If you want the 2020 life on the kind of job that got you the 1960 life, you're in for a disappointment.
The bigger home is inherently cheaper, though. (At least, in the US).
A ~1800sqft new home (the average new low-end build out here in the midwest) takes way less resources and labour to construct than that old 1000sqft brick home did. Houses today are made out of the cheapest plastic and twigs (many don't even have a single piece of real wood in them anymore). Houses back then used bricks and real-wood timber (expensive to purchase, expensive to move, expensive to lay, etc). Your old brick house probably had expensive copper pipes, new builds use plastic PEX straws so cheap they're practically disposable, and so on.
Homes built today are made using far less labour, less materials, and far cheaper materials than before. If land and asset valuations had stayed consistent, homes today would be drastically cheaper than before. Yes, homes are "bigger", but those extra open empty spaces cost practically nothing extra, the fixed costs are mostly fixed and the variable costs are trivial.
Well, the single-family detached suburban California home I bought as new (not complete when we signed) construction in 2006 was 997 sq. ft. on 0.1 acres, so other than “brick” that was certainly possible to find new not that long ago.
I live in 500 square feet, don’t go anywhere(like to a bar) and don’t have a car. I don’t have kids.
Which is precisely what's been happening. Just take a walk around any major urban center in the U.S. There is misery in the streets. The opioid crisis is another manifestation of the same despair. Historic civil unrest, "eat the rich" / "billionaires shouldn't exist" rhetoric heating up. Etc. etc.
good point, there's basically no evidence[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7] of misery across the american population.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_St...
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police#Unite...
6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt#Social_and_politi...
The opioid epidemic is potentially a real indicator of immiseration (not the same thing as misery btw), but I don't know much about it.
Please, allow at least a little breadth in the scope of rhetorical wordplay: immiseration is fundamentally about misery, and the links I gave are examples of the broad misery felt by the average American. That misery is not sourceless: my entire point is that that misery is due to the increasing relative impoverishment of the average person.
On the surface it is just misery, but when you think about the causes, it is apparent that it is immiseration, in the jargon sense: the people are poorer than they have ever been, and they are visibly angrier and more upset because of it.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immiseration_thesis
1 - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Das_Kapital_Volume_One/Chapte...
Happy, wealthy, comfortable, safe people who believe a bright future is in store do not take to the streets, burn buildings down, and get into large scale fights with their local police force. They don't throw bricks through coffee shop windows, hang out in tear gas clouds, or crowd up during a pandemic.
Their willingness to do so, over clearly expressed feelings of hopelessness and loss of control or participation in the system, over a feeling that they are losing out overall, it's coming from a place of desperation. It is coming from a place of misery. You've got to be pretty miserable if you think fighting the cops sounds good.
I'm sorry that you see very little connection there. It may unfortunately be that you see very little overall, or that you're intentionally looking away.
> Happy, wealthy, comfortable, safe people who believe a bright future is in store do not take to the streets, burn buildings down, and get into large scale fights with their local police force. They don't throw bricks through coffee shop windows, hang out in tear gas clouds, or crowd up during a pandemic.
Yeah, see, they could be wealthy, and still not safe because of skin color. That's the point of the George Floyd protests. If you see people like yourself getting shot by police for reasons that seem absurd, over and over, you don't feel safe. You don't believe in a bright future. You aren't happy. And economics has very little to do with it.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/lq7kvq/a_recent_...
After all, most people feel safer driving than flying. They're simply, wrong.
I wanted to acknowledge the possibility that our respective political beliefs, whatever they may be, might lead us to look for different types of issues in different places as root causes.
My own beliefs lead me to characterize choosing to believe that economic inequality is not integral to the Black experience in America as tantamount to wilfully ignoring a root component of the problems people face. If that belief is insulting to you, we may tragically be living in different worlds of experience, and might not ever have a meeting of the minds. That's what I was going for.
Despite that concern, from what you said, it seems like we might actually agree on a lot -- as you put it,
> If you see people like yourself getting shot by police for reasons that seem absurd, over and over, you don't feel safe. You don't believe in a bright future. You aren't happy.
That sounds spot on to me, and I absolutely agree that the fear of violence affects wealthy Black Americans too.
Regardless, the outpouring of rage from the community certainly transcended just the fear of violence from police. Violence is one particularly horrifying aspect of how the system hurts people, but people are being crushed all over, and people are mad about all of it.
Here is one quick example[1] of this being stated, sourced in one of the Wikipedia pages I originally linked (which explicitly lists "inequality and racism" as a cause of the George Floyd protests). This article is an interview with the Surgeon General of America, and says:
> The surgeon general pointed to Covid-19 disparities and other health care gaps among communities of color including maternal mortality rates and the opioid crisis, saying these issues and the frustration surfacing across the country are intermingled.
> “It's on the top of my mind as a black man, as a father, as a brother, as a son,” Adams said.
The brutality of the police is certainly the salient, focusing point of the protests, but the overall causes and broad outpouring are larger than that. The protestors have often called out the broad systemic aspects of racism, like healthcare access, home ownership rates, debt levels, access to quality education, and investment in communities of colour. Those sorts of things impact Black people's lives daily on scales far greater than police brutality, and they are economic issues at heart.
Police violence is uniquely horrific in its instances, and is the central igniting issue here, but the issues as a whole are much bigger than it alone.
1 - https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/01/surgeon-general-pro...
In mid 30s, all women, all have bachelors and have been employed long term, 3 of the 12 are married, 2 of the 12 have children, another 4 are paired up with long time partners, but there was a palpable unease and underlying depression about the future income prospects and lack of security about where they would be able to live.
And “can never afford” seems like an extrapolation of the last ten years ignoring corrections that came before that.
For those of us who lived through 2008 it’s amazing how quickly we went from “i’ve never over pay for a house again” to “housing only goes up”.
There are plenty of places in the US where housing is still affordable. Sure, maybe it’s not your first choice and maybe you won’t be keeping up with the Jones’.
Places like Austin, Denver/Boulder hell, even Seattle were affordable not that long ago. But they weren’t cool (which is why they were affordable). Suddenly they become desirable, housing prices go up and people complain they can afford to buy where everyone else is buying.
Seriously, like lets say 100k combined income yearly. Save 20k/year. Should be fine for a downpayment on a 200k-400k house.
And that's all if you can live in a small-town-enough place where homes "only" cost 400k -- in many cities in the last 5 years (i.e. places where there are easy jobs to find), that's just not a realistic house price anymore.
I was a brick/stone-layer's labourer back around 2005, and we built a home that cost ~400k at the time, on the edge of a mid-sized town in southern Ontario. It was a mansion. Stonework, 4-car garage, big lot, 3 stories tall, 5 bedrooms, 3+ baths, the works. Today, I think that house we built could sell for ~1.5-2M.
Where would you need cars and have to pay 2-3k for an apartment?
Prob like 1.5K/month, two economical cars. Pay off debt and build a nest egg, married at 30, kids at 32. Cook cheap and healthy meals. Outdoors for fun. No big drinking or expensive hobbies.
They can easily make it happen if they do the above.
It’s not my fault that people can’t prioritize and strap down.
Have you been watching the news lately? Keep watching. Violence and deaths of despair are skyrocketing and will continue to.