First it was "support a family of five", then "luxurious lifestyle" then "humble lifestyle". Except for the "luxurious" one, it was possible pretty much at any time in human history, including now.
You are right that it's possible for one person to support a family. For most people working in the tech industry here on HN they could probably figure out a way to do it. But is it realistic for all families everywhere to be able to support themselves with just a single worker? If it were so simple to achieve, we would not see child labor. We would not see any poverty at all. Clearly we are not yet at the point as a species where we can enjoy a post-scarcity or job-free utopia. We could certainly be doing a lot more to work towards that than we are, though, and I think that's a more interesting point of discussion than looking back through rose-tinted glasses on a few decades of post-WW2 America.
You have it backwards. We wouldn't see any child labor if employers weren't trying to cut corners on wages while the people at the top of the economic pyramid rake in billions. Ownership is way overcompensated in this society, most owners/CEOs do not provide that much value and are just collecting economic rents because they occupy a position in social/economic networks with high bridging centrality coefficients. It may involve some work to get there, but culture, luck, and marketing also have a lot to do with it too.
(In case you can't reason your way into it, some positions are gained through nonzero amount of luck rather than pure "hard work and grit" or whatever boomer nonsense.)
The above is just a short list. Live like 1955 and you can support a family of 5 with, a car, vacations every year and a nice retirement. You won't have many of the other luxuries people enjoy today. If you don't want to that us fine, but don't say it can't be done.
That’s £120 pm, or £1440 annually. Doesn’t seem like it would make that much of a dent. Probably the number one thing you’d need to do is cut down on food costs, which is doable, to be fair, as it’s quite easy to spend 10x or 100x more than what you need to stay fed.
That ignores any interest on the savings. So yeah it seems like "small" regular spending in your 20s (e.g. $100/mo total) can add up to an entire down payment in your early 30s.
Alternatively, assuming your rent would be at least $1000/month, you might live with your parents for an extra 13 months (or fewer for higher rents) before moving out on your own.
Also, what would happen to people with not so well off parents?
If someone's parents were able to provide a place to live until 18, why is 19 suddenly impossible? You don't need to be well off to let your kids stay with you a little bit past legal adulthood. Surely there's room for a couch or a bean bag or something to give them a huge leg up right out of the gate, assuming you were in a marginal position where you otherwise needed to immediately kick them out and downsize.
Some people are going to have rough situations and can't rely on a family at all. Some will need to emancipate before reaching 18. How common is that? If it is common, that seems like the real problem to address.
Before there was starbucks there was a local cafe and coffee shop, before the Internet there were newspapers and magazines to pay for.
It can't be done. We've lost something. We have also gained things. don't get me wrong, I like having the Internet.
If only I could give up Hulu and Netflix, I could afford to go back to college and go on vacation every year? Let me guess, I also just need to eat less avocado toast and I'll be able to afford the downpayment on a house.
Yes, because a single worker today is maybe fifty or a hundred times more productive than a worker in the past, thanks to modern equipment.
Your question is much like asking why we can't afford to feed lobster to prisoners anymore.
Yes, it seems the under 30 crowd would rather go to college/university instead these days. A degree can cost about as much as a modest home. Almost nobody attended college in the 1950s. Hobbies always come with tradeoffs.
> And yes urbanisation has increased but not that dramatically.
15-20 points, at least in the USA. That is quite dramatic. If today's cities saw 15-20% of their population leave for rural areas, prices in those cities would drop like a rock.
> What hasn't really happened though is any significant new cities forming
Very true, and fantastically increased farm profitability since the 2007 time period has driven farmland values through the roof, which has made it much more cost prohibitive for cities to expand like they used it do.
Fairly sure housing affordability is a bigger problem for those without tertiary degrees though!
> 15-20 points, at least in the USA
I'd think if there was an era where urbanisation was highest it would be in the 50-60 years prior to the 60s, and I'm not aware of house prices dramatically increasing in that time (happy to be shown otherwise though!). But in that earlier period many quite modest-sized towns grew massively to become the cities they are today (*), so arguably there weren't quite so many people all trying to crowd into the same few cities.
(*) though in Australia at least, something of the opposite has happened in the last ~75 years - many modest-size towns have lost their populations to larger cities.
US data suggests that college graduates have seen the largest decline in homeownership over the past 10 years.
That said, you are right that college filters out those with disabilities and other life challenges, and that means those without degrees are infinitely more likely to have something like a crippling mental disability which would prevent them from owning a home. Which, indeed, makes drawing any aggregate parallels between graduates and non-graduates rather useless.
> I'd think if there was an era where urbanisation was highest it would be in the 50-60 years prior to the 60s
In fact, there was a bit of a counter-urbanization movement during the period. Cities were considered to be for the poor. Anyone with means wanted to live on large estates out in the countryside. There was also that whole "White Flight" thing. All that goes back to the people not wanting the houses.
It's easy to forget now that we've put in incredible effort to make cities more livable, but cities were industrial hell holes during the 50s and 60s. Not to mention that crime was starting to become a big problem by the 60s. They were not desirable places in the slightest. Today's cities are entirely different.
It is true that things are much more affordable when they are considered undesirable.