$3.75 in 1975 is $20.97 today. A quick search shows starting pay for a mail carrier today is $16/hour. The federal minimum wage is 7.25/hour which would be $1.3/hour in 1975.
You were actually paid very well at $3.75/hour compared to today.
He lived in a fascinating time of growth and expansion in the USA. He was born on a farm without a car or electricity. And he lived until the early 2000's with a cellular phone in his pocket.
There's the big "essential" stuff- housing, healthcare, education- which have skyrocketed in price and nowadays take a higher percentage of people's salaries. Then there's groceries, consumer goods, electronics, restaurants, which have gone up much slower. So in a way, that $12/hour was good in terms of the amount of non home cooked food you could get (or live music tickets or whatever other things you considered luxuries at the time).
The tiers are relative to the labor component.
Goods & services that have gotten more efficient over time as we've introduced technology, automation, (what we do on this site) or been offshored.. have gone up slower than inflation.
Everything that has a fixed, domestic labor component has gone up faster than inflation.
There's really no other magic trick to it.
Food is a great example. Something like 40% of the country lived & worked on farms in 1900. That number is now about 1%. That means 40% of the entire countries labor was required to feed 100%, and now it only requires 1%. So a 2.5:1 to a 100:1 ratio change of food labor consumers to providers.
Other areas like education & healthcare, the lack of efficiency is often a selling point. Look at colleges that advertise student:faculty ratios or K-12 districts that talk about classroom sizes. In my experience we've probably actually gotten less efficient as everyones gotten much more precious about the education their kids receive.
Most stats have shown we haven't really made much labor efficiencies on housing construction. No one wants to live in a prefabricated / factory built home, which is what would drive down the labor costs dramatically. That said I'm kind of a weirdo and like to browse the container home websites frequently, lol.
Further, modern homes are bigger (and nicer) than our parents or their parents generation lived in.
Couple that with the land component being basically inflationary due to natural scarcity PLUS government zoning rules restricting lot sizes to be artificially high, banning multi-family construction, etc.
You have a lot (basically all) tipping the needle towards higher cost.
See it works both ways.
YIMBY argument is largely that government and neighbors shouldn’t have such a front ability to restrict development.
Again, trailer parks have been a thing for 70 years now. The innovation here has been rewriting zoning rules without actually rezoning, to bring the trailer park to people who can afford to live somewhere better. The funny thing about class warfare, though, is that people take their lack of class with them and end up making slums wherever they go, and other people manage to make a buck and stay ahead of them.
There were no conditions that the surrounding properties wouldn't change over time. You might have thought there were, but it was an illusion. If you want to control your neighborhood, buy it for yourself.
> the reasoning behind the change was a foolish sop toward social justice, and clearly comes from a place of sheer hatred born of jealousy toward anyone living in a single family dwelling.
This is ridiculous. The reason behind the change was likely because residents of your city want cheaper housing, and your government is trying to make that happen. Most Americans grew up in single family homes, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want to keep living there themselves, and any animosity towards single family homes is because these people are forced to live there because nothing else is available in their city, and they would rather spend their money on something else rather than a single family home.
Your suggestion that denser housing options like low-rise (plexes), midrise, or even highrise are "slums" is patently false.
Buying a piece of land doesn't entitle us to control what happens on neighboring pieces of land.
My parents house used to be surrounded by farms and woods, now it's surrounded by homes.
100 years ago 5 story brownstones in NYC were surrounded by other brownstones, then by mid-rises, and now by high-rises.
The vacant lot next to me is now going to be developed into a house. If I wanted it vacant, I should have bought it and carried the RE tax indefinitely.
No one is banning single family homes. We are just trying to reconcile that the main cost lever is density, and in a country with growing population, mostly crowding into a few metropolitan areas.. if you want the next generation to be able to afford a place to live, we can't leave the real estate market ossified.
This is an attempt to change some laws set by the previous generation that restricts your right to develop your land, and freezes the housing market as it is, constraining supply.
If the state was literally banning the construction of single family homes, or taking yours away with eminent domain, you'd have more of a leg to stand on.
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area the twin forces of NIMBYism and Big Government have made it difficult and uneconomical to build anything. The NIMBYs have enacted extremely restrictive zoning laws almost everywhere that prevents you from entitling projects on the front end, and well-intentioned over-regulation has driven up the cost actually building anything on the back end.
After you spend years in public hearings placating bored and angry old people, you then need to hire more professional services, pay higher impact fees, pay higher permitting fees, etc than practically anywhere else in the country. It'll cost me more to knock down my house here than it would cost to build the same plans somewhere else.
My parents live on a 1 acre lot in a non-HCOL area, which costs 1/2 of what a parking spot in Manhattan sells for. Their 1 acre lot comes with a 2000 sq ft home.
Class sizes haven't gone down in colleges, admin costs have gone up though.
What's common between them is they're essential services and the government increases their affordability. Student loans, mortgage interest deduction, tax breaks on healthcare spending (HSA, etc).
Okay it still happens but until the 1990s it was pretty much all restaurants except fast food chains. Now, it seems like most new restaurants use the "customer orders at the counter" model to save money on wait staff.
First, like it or not, chains are a form of efficiency in terms of management/procurement/logistics overhead.
Certainly more fast casual formats than before that reduce the need for front of house staff.
And as always with labor shocks, efficiencies get found. With the recent pandemic shock of restaurant shut downs & slow reopening... a lot of restaurants are back to full pre-pandemic high tables served (or more, in places like NYC where seating has expanded to large outdoors spaces never occupied 2019 or before), but never hired back their full staff.
Im my experience, it seems more like the tiers are relative to the regulatory or barriers to entry.
Starting a hospital or college or building a home has regulatory barriers. And those prices have climbed dramatically the past two decades.
A lot of these pre-00s hourly wage/cost stories are kind of perplexing to me. It's interesting in how clearly they show the relative strength of labor in different eras.
I remember my dad telling me he worked in a record score & lived at home to put himself through college in the 70s. Going to college in the 2000s, this was obviously no longer in any way possible.
This was an era I was making $5/hr working retail myself, against gas that was $1.50/gal & eating off the $1 menu for my meal break.. it wasn't very much.
Looking at data, 30 years before when my dad was working he'd have made at least $2.10/hr against gas of $0.35-0.40/gal or so.
Currently the ratio in our home state would be $14/hr against gas of about $3.50/gal.
What did you think of the rest of the story?
Second was a story I read on hacker news fairly recently. There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.
There may be more than one, but Costa Rica is definitely addressed this way. A hotel I stayed in was 70 meters behind the church of Saint somebody, there was a great restaurant who was “near the old tree” (and everyone knew which one!). It was impressive.
Don't understand why they didn't create new addresses when they subdivided these plots from 2 to 6 houses.
Bad title but- https://geoawesomeness.com/how-the-crazy-japanese-addressing...
I can't find an image, but I was lost in Japan and had the address I needed, and a shopkeeper took out an ultra local map where each /shop/ was about the size of my thumb, to find where the address actually was.
This is definitely the case in India and I used to look for a postman when lost.
I imagine it's pretty uncommon these days especially after all the E911 rationalization of the past 2-3 decades. But when I was growing up in a hardly back of beyond Philadelphia suburb we had a rural delivery route which was just a street name.
I imagine most everyone at a university in the US these days still has a physical inbox of some sort. But working as a not-officially-remote worker at a company, you basically can't get a work package to me unless we make special arrangements. (I basically give you my home address on the rare times I need something physically delivered.)
Nicaragua and Costa Rica use a landmark based addressing system, where "From the park, 1 Block South" could be valid address.