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If it were so simple to achieve, we would not see child labor.

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.

https://cse.buffalo.edu/tech-reports/2006-05.pdf

Are you a CEO? If not when are you becoming a CEO to rake in billions then? It ought to be easy since they don’t do much according to you. They get compensated a lot because it is a lot of responsibility and stress.

Why doesn't the prime minister of UK become the king of Britain, even though it's less work for way more luxury?

(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.)

I agree that wealth inequality is a problem, and I fully support billionaire taxes and wealth caps. If we were to take all that stored wealth and redistribute it equally amongst the rest of the world, each person might get around US$10000. That would provide enough to take everyone currently living in absolute poverty out of it for a decade or so. Would that solve child labor? Perhaps. Would it allow Americans to afford a house and car and freedom from work for 4 out of every 5 people? I don't think so. So I think the problem is bigger than just the inequality between the fantastically wealthy and everyone else, if the goal is for everyone to have the "golden age" lifestyle.

The post you are responding to didn't have Starbucks coffee every day, did have internet, cable tv, subscriptions to streaming services, a computer with a monthly subscription in every pocket. They didn't even have that option.

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.

Is that actually true? Subscriptions £30 pm Starbucks £40 pm Phone contract £20 pm ISP £30 pm

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.

Sorry for the pedantry, but 1 coffee at Starbucks per day is closer to 120pm alone.

I was thinking more what would a typical Starbucks regular spend in a month. Like I don’t think they would but a £4 drink every day.

It all adds up. If you only have a Starbucks on special occasions it isn't much, but some people have daily habits. Likewise a lot of people have the most expensive cable plan which is a lot more money. Phone plans can also get a lot more expensive if you but top of the line phones every couple years.

Ok, could you do the math then? Try to see how many Starbucks coffees you have to forgo to afford a down payment at a median house in the US.

The current median home sale price in the US is $416100[0], so with 3% down for a first time homebuyer ($12500), and assuming a Starbucks coffee costs $3.50 including tax, it'd take ~3570 coffees, or a little under 10 years of a daily habit.

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.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

Now, could you add on the housing price inflation over the last 10 years? Your calculation assumes housing prices stay flat for the next 10 years, which is a tall order.

Also, what would happen to people with not so well off parents?

The avocado toast meme is six years old now, and people said the same thing at the time (hence it becoming a meme). It's fair to say "actually I don't have any subscriptions and don't buy daily coffee or go to restaurants/bars (including fast food or pickup) or drink alcohol or smoke or use any other drugs" but complaining that $3/day doesn't add up to a down payment was wrong then and it's still wrong now even after the housing balloon of the last few years. Simple math demonstrates this.

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.

Well, as the parent poster mentioned, interest on the savings are not taken into account. Furthermore, the inflation in the price of the Starbucks coffee is also not taken into account. So, seems like the logic/reasoning still stands.

Okay, so do the math. How many Starbucks coffees should I abstain from to afford a home?

I wouldn't worry too much about the coffee, everyone knows it's avocado toast that really destroys your chance of affording housing.

No you can't. What does Internet and a computer cost next to rent and going college? Let's say $2,000 for a really nice laptop and another $1,800 for 3 years of Internet access (@ $50/month), round to $4k? Vs $40k, easy, for college?

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.

> But is it realistic for all families everywhere to be able to support themselves with just a single worker?

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.

I gather average productivity growth in most developed countries has been around 2 or 2.5% for the past 60 or so years, working out to at best 3.5 times what it was in the 50s or 60s. Which still makes it reasonable to ask why it's not feasible today for a single income to be sufficient to support a mortgage on a typical family home in the way it was in those times. What I'd like to know is in what cities around the world has housing not become so unaffordable in that period...

Both the urbanization rate and the homeownership rate were considerably lower in the 1950s and 1960s. Said city housing may have been cheaper, but that is because it wasn't wanted.

Your question is much like asking why we can't afford to feed lobster to prisoners anymore.

Home ownership rates for those under 30 at least have fallen considerably in many Western countries (certainly in Australia). And yes urbanisation has increased but not that dramatically. What hasn't really happened though is any significant new cities forming, meaning more and more competition for being located in desirable areas of existing cities, which is surely one of the bigger drivers of decreased affordability.

> Home ownership rates for those under 30 at least have fallen considerably in many Western countries

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.

> Yes, it seems the under 30 crowd would rather go to college/university instead these days.

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.

> Fairly sure housing affordability is a bigger problem for those without tertiary degrees though!

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.

That's actually now perhaps getting closer to a better (if harder to demonstrate) theory - that housing has become unaffordable largely because we've made cities (and their surrounding suburbs) so much more desirable places to be in than they were 60 or 70 years ago.