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Comment by scrlk | Hacker News Reader

From the provost's introduction to Feynman:

> The chairman suggested that an annual salary of $3,000 was a bit too low for a distinguished faculty member, and recommended that Professor Feynman’s salary be increased $900. The dean, in an act of unusual generosity and with complete disregard for the solvency of the university, crossed out the $900 and made it an even $1,000.

Using the BLS CPI inflation calculator to convert from 1945 to 2023 dollars gives an annual salary of ~$67.5k. Pretty good bargain for a "distinguished faculty member".

However, considering that the USD was pegged to gold at $35/troy ounce, $4k in 1945 was worth 114.29 troy ounces of gold. This is $224k at the time of writing. Much more fitting for a "distinguished faculty member". :^)

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Even better metric: in 1950, California's median home price in unadjusted dollars was $9,564, up from $3,527 in 1940.

https://licensesolution.com/20th-century-home-price-changes/

It goes to show how, adjusted for inflation, people just didn't earn much money a century ago, compared to the huge mid or even 7 figures for people in tech and other STEM fields today. Same for other professions, such as law, finance, medicine, consulting, etc. Those jobs didn't pay that well a century ago. People nostalgize about out how great the past was or how there was less inequality, fail to take into account how people overall were also so much poorer too.

At the same time, however, one didn't have to make the equivalent of today's high mid-six or low-seven figure salaries in order to be able to afford to purchase a home in a world-class metro area. Today one needs to make "world class" money in order to afford to purchase a home in a world class city, due to the perfect storm of NIMBYism restricting supply and a high amount of demand from a large pool of well-heeled buyers. I don't want to come off as whiny, but my salary is only in the low six-figures and my company doesn't provide RSUs, which means I'll never be able to buy a home in Silicon Valley, short of winning either a state lottery or the "startup lottery." Yes, I can relocate and purchase in a cheaper locale, which is something I'm strongly considering once I get married, but that comes with major career tradeoffs; I'm a specialist and it may be hard to find jobs in my specialty outside Silicon Valley. There's also no guarantee that these jobs will be available remotely, especially with the pushback against remote work.

I'll share a family story. My grandfather was born in Arkansas during the height of Jim Crow. He never went to school, and he never learned to read or write. He and his family moved to Bakersfield, CA in the 1950s as part of the Second Great Migration of African-Americans from the South, looking for better opportunities and to escape Jim Crow. He worked on a farm for over 30 years. Despite these challenges, he was able to purchase a modest home there, and he managed to pay off most of his mortgage debt before he was forced to retire. This would be very difficult for a farm worker today.

I have other grandparents who still faced racism but were literate, and they were able to purchase homes in places like San Luis Obispo County back in the 1960s. Now, I wouldn't want to trade places with my grandparents; I'm glad that I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I'm fortunate to have many opportunities that my grandparents and my parents didn't have. But today's housing prices are one of the most formidable challenges facing my generation. It seems that opportunity in America (and around the world) is increasingly being concentrated in a handful of "winner" cities, and the demand to live in these cities, combined with a reluctance or even unwillingness to grow to meet the demand, has caused housing prices to skyrocket. But moving outside these cities means running the risk of having few opportunities; witness the chronically higher-than-average unemployment rate of the Central Valley of California, and witness the Rust Belt.

The interesting thing is that unless you inherited that property you probably would not easily be able to buy another one there unless you went for something really small, that's prime real estate these days.

Yeah I think that it's fair to say that we have more access to products and services today than our grandparents did, but long term real assets like real estate are less accessible to this generation. My grandfather never graduated high school and worked as a logger and then as a mechanic but was able to afford to buy 3 acres and build a house in his mid 20s.

Meanwhile my cousins who are currently in their mid 20s are mostly jobless and still live with their parents.

Are Dallas, Atlanta and Houston world class cities? Not cheap but still affordable. Not New York but very rich cities nonetheless. The GaWC ranking classifies these 3 as Beta cities.

That's because there wasn't such a huge multiplier in place to get money back out of employing those people.

$224k only seems miniscule in this inner self-selected circle though. $450k net worth is top 1%

Maybe annual income but certainly not net worth (in the United States). Top 1% seems to be a bit over $10M (household) based on a quick search.

Your point seems predicated upon more people being “poorer” rather than focusing on the fact that there wasn’t nearly the wealth inequality we have now (which you mention, but dismiss). Personally, I’m of the opinion that “poor” is relative, and the current age of hyperfocusing on payment is only contributing to all that is bad in the world today. Progress, too, didn’t slow down because the people driving it weren’t paid enough.

...but progress was slower. Exponential growth means it grows faster now than it did then.

And yes, relative poverty matters greatly, but absolute poverty is a real thing even in the US. In 1964, the US launched the war on poverty, and poverty declined. Since the 1980s, some of that progress was reversed, but it's still far better than 1964. (And poverty now is relative, and includes very little literal starvation. That certainly wasn't true in the US in 1964, much less earlier - especially before WWII.

Or... the official US inflation numbers have been bogus over the long term and the price of gold is actually a way better way to measure inflation over the longer term?

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