Since '67, households making $150K+ (inflation adjusted) grew from 1.8 to 23.8M

"Health care was not nearly as expensive"

True, but its capabilities have grown since then, too. Things like monoclonal antibodies can now cure very serious conditions, but they are very expensive to produce.

In the 1960s, cancer was an almost certain death sentence, nowadays, it is often manageable - but that increase in survival comes with a price tag.

I call this sort of reasoning the "Wonder Years" fallacy. People forget that the “middle class family” in "The Wonder Years" show--headed by a man who graduated college and a woman who completed some college--would have been a solidly top 10% family in 1970.

Since 1970, the poverty rate among seniors has dropped from almost 25% to just above 10%: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45791.pdf. Although more people had pension plans (though never a majority), they were not portable, and most workers never stayed at a job long enough to earn their pension. Pension benefits were also low compared to what they are now. See: https://retirementlc.com/golden-age-pensions-another-fairy-t...

Healthcare was cheaper in 1970, but because doctors could not do much for you if you got heart disease or cancer or other chronic illnesses. In 1970, 40% of heart attack patients who were hospitalized died. Today, it is well under 10%. Living longer doesn’t happen automatically, it costs money. Not just to develop heart medication or cardiac stents, but for the decades of additional care that is required when a heart attack patient survives to old age instead of dying at age 55. It’s not just old people either. The infant mortality rate has dropped from 26 per 1,000 in 1960 to under 6 per 1,000 in 2020. That wasn’t from cheap interventions like vaccination, which happened a generation before that. It was from expensive interventions like giving birth in hospitals, extensive pre-natal care, surgical interventions for sick infants, etc.

The costs per square foot of new houses has stayed pretty much the same from 1970 to 2015: https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa.... What people overlook is that (1) as the population grows, the "frontier" of where the typical new house is being sold moves; and (2) people are using their growing income to buy much bigger houses. For example, Silicon Valley was an underpopulated, undesirable suburban and rural area in the 1960s—that’s why they built semiconductor facilities there!

It’s important to account for both price increases (paying more for the same thing) and consumption increases (paying more to get more). A good example of both of those things happening is college. The cost of college has undoubtedly gone up faster than inflation. But it’s also a very different product than it was in 1970, with fancy housing and recreational facilities and tons of handholding from support staff.

By contrast, housing is a good example of something where it’s been mainly consumption increases. People are taking all their extra income and using it to buy bigger houses in more desirable areas.

The crunch at the bottom causes people to try to get their children into the elite. This causes high competition among the elites (you can see that with college tuition going up and people with degrees working as baristas) which causes a crunch at the top which is starting to cause political instability. I think a lot of this is cyclical although I'd argue that (in the US anyway) the crunch at the bottom came before it really needed to due to some poor policy decisions.

> many of the things that today's households making > $150k spend money on were vastly cheaper.

So in other words, "inflation adjusted" wasn't done right here?

Isn’t this comparing inflation adjusted incomes?

I’d be interested in seeing these metrics and how they quantify living standards. Does living standard mean “keeps pace with the average <standard> at a given time” or does it mean “given a specific objective <standard>“? For example, when I was a kid having cable television went from not standard when I was in elementary school to standard by the time I entered high school. Similarly: internet access, cell phones, having a computer, having a laptop, etc. This was true even outside of tech: having more than one car, having central air AC, having your own bedroom, taking the bus to school or being driven, and even having a bike evolved as I grew up.

Yeah you're gonna need to back this one up chief. Not sure about you but I'd rather be living in a 1 bedroom apartment with modern appliances, internet, smartphone, and a laptop than I would in a 8000sqft that had none of these things.

We have a lot more expenses today in large part because standard of living has increased. Certain components, like home affordability and medical, have become much worse than they were. Many other components have improved.

They don't though. Real GDP per Capita is almost 2x what it was in 2000, and 3x what it was in 1980. Hdi has also increased over those periods, though not as much as in European countries.

I'm actually not sure if there are any metrics that show us living standards dropping, much less "significantly" from the late 20th century to 2020.

It's raining. The reason you're not more well off is that due to cultural and technological progressions you are overall less valuable to other human beings in general than a smaller group of human beings 80 year ago. This is not a deliberate scheme to disenfranchise you or others. Trying to compare the modern economy with the economy of the late 1960's is childishly naive.

> almost every observable metric shows living standards have dropped significantly in the US over the past few decades

What are some examples of the specific metrics you're referring to?

And it's all downhill from here. With the collapse of globalization, everything will become cheaper, slower, worse quality, and harder to get.

definitely, i suspect you would see very different distributions... simplified charts like those hide a lot of important details

also, how significant is income actually? how about total wealth? whats the debt level at each of these gradations etc?

> I'm shocked at how many people take inflation numbers seriously. To me, it's just obviously government propaganda.

I agree that the current way of dealing with monetary policy feels closer to rain dancing than actual science but people are taking it seriously because they're seeing it in their grocery and fuel bills every day.

Right. For sure if you look at the data I think the biggest increases have been the .1% and the .01%.

The drop in poverty is really good, and something our negativity biased news organizations are happy to skip. There have been some great human improvements over the past 50 years.

For whatever reason positive news tends not to play well on HN, even if it’s factual.

But on another point, I recall that the entry of women into the workforce was almost complete by the 70’s so moving from one to two earner household isn’t likely the main driver.

Good point. It's really hard to adjust for inflation. On one extreme you can use the official inflation numbers, which are lies and damned lies to make the economic progress since the 1960s look better than it is. On the other extreme you can use housing prices. The truth (inflation as felt by the average household) is probably somewhere in-between.

No. The entire Bay Area is home to about 8M people, of which approximately 10% are tech workers [0]. This is a drop in the bucket across all 23.8M high earning American households.

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/14/tech-employment-bay-a...

This is an actual and not news-of-the-day topical Liberal, "gotcha." America's wealth is in Her moms! Great comment. God bless Peggy Seeger & Family!