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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

> Remember in 1963 only the man was working, and typically supported 4 kids, a wife and often parents in the home.

This is a ridiculous exaggeration: the average US household was 3.7 people in the 1960s, not over 6[1].

There are good reasons to hold politicians to task for recent abnormally high inflation. But this comment is more of an atavistic fever dream of the past than an expression of those reasons.

Edit: another source puts it at 3.3[2].

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183657/average-size-of-a...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...

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That's missing forest for the trees. The more important part is that average 3.7 people household was a single-income one.

I would rather disagree with GP's:

> My point is that inflation isn’t abstract and it isn’t a law of nature. It’s a deliberate approach to stealing your prosperity while you cheer it on.

A lot of the inflation, including how suddenly a single-income household isn't a viable option for most people in the West, is market working as intended - quickly consuming any surplus money, should it suddenly become greater than 0 on average, and slowly eating into any value that isn't bare-minimum strictly necessary to move a product.

> That's missing forest for the trees. The more important part is that average 3.7 people household was a single-income one.

That's not necessarily true. Per FRED (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25FEUSM156S), in 1963 about 44% of women aged 25-55 were in the workforce. That's obviously much lower than the ≈96% rate for men, but it implies that the average couple had closer to 1.4 incomes. The comparable rate based on today's labour force participation rates would be about 1.66 incomes.

The single-income family may have been the norm, but it was far from a rule. I think that our popular perception of life in the 60s has been filtered through media portrayals, which all tend to reinforce ideals as commonplace norms.

You are also assuming that 100% of those 44% were in a relationship.

We just dont know what % of those were single mothers, widows, divorcees or single women, etc.

44% of women were not working full-time

What's the definition of 'in the work force'

Is a child with a paper route 'in the work force?'

I think people are asking the wrong questions when it comes to inflation. It's not which president is at fault... It's who is profiting from it? It's not the minimum wage worker. It's not the standard office worker.

What class has shown absolutely insane growth in wealth and income in the face of what looks like crippling inflation?

Your standard office worker probably refinanced their mortgage at ~3% and is now laughing their way to the bank as their debt inflates away so they probably are profiting from it. I know I am.

Your standard retiree on the other hand who holds a lot of bonds that got absolutely hammered by inflation and rising interest rates is not doing so well.

That 3% rate was plowed into a property whose price was inflated by exactly the amount that the 3% rate discounted the cost of money.

That only works if you’re income rises faster than inflation, otherwise the relative amount of debt either remains the same or even increases.

Investment income absolutely has

The only party "profiting" from inflation is the government which controls the money supply. If you keep the money supply constant, no one profits from inflation; inflation merely reflects supply and demand of the constant money supply vs all other goods and services on the market. Inflation does not reflect capital that is accumulated and taken off the market.

When I worked a lot with government this used to be a big problem. Some minor tangential point in a finding would be slighty off or not adequately supported and people would jump on that, ignore the rest and pretend it invalidated the whole argument. It's mainly something that comes up talking to insecure bureaucrats that don't want to change.

> That's missing forest for the trees.

However, when a person is making a post saying "don't trust those dodgy manipulated numbers" and offering alternative numbers, their post is a lot less convincing if their numbers are also dodgy

I didn’t get they said the numbers were dodgy or manipulated. Don’t make the typical straw man when discussing inflation that people challenging the current formula for CPI are challenging the underlying data and so are conspiracists. The point is the relevance of the indicator. In fact the very article is about a different value if we take an older formula.

A number can be dodgy and manipulated without being outright fraudulent. And in politics it's rare someone will outright lie - I'm sure you've heard the term "lies, damn lies and statistics".

For example, during the pandemic the UK government set itself a target for covid testing, then proudly announced that they'd hit their target - but it turned out they were not counting the number of tests processed in labs but instead the number of test kits sent out by mail regardless of whether they were received, returned, or processed - allowing them to declare success before increasing lab capacity. It's not outright fraudulent, but it's questionable and errs in a politically convenient direction - that's a dodgy number.

And as I understand it, the claim in this discussion is that the government changed the definition of inflation, in a way that made the number lower? And that it now doesn't accurately reflect what it purports to reflect?

Sounds like dodgy manipulated numbers to me.

It's not the market that's eating the "surplus". Economic inequality is at an all time high. Big corporations are posting record-busting profits. Inflation is driven by greedflation, mostly.

Cops have been greedy and tried to extract max cash always, its just now people pay it

Corporations aren't natural persons. You have to look a the in/equity of the wealth of the people who enjoy the corporation's money.

Did you think I was claiming the corporations themselves were hoarding the wealth? Did it not occur to you that I was referring to the corporations as the tools of the shareholders? Do I really have to be that explicit and include misquotation alerts for every possible idiot?

The average household also includes empty nesters and people who have moved out yet haven't started a family yet. The average number of children per family in the 60s was 2.3, which means quite a few families had 3 or 4 children.

Far more divorced now too, so more demand on housing, and more people want to live in cities than in the 1960s, leading to even more demand.

It all comes down to the cost of housing, at least in the UK where housing has been ridiculous for over 20 years. That housing is driven up to soak all available income by artificially constrained supply.

All available income has increased on a household basis because of egalitarian reasons -- more women work now, which means that more women have to work now. The excess income is lost to housing costs.

We’ve replaced a world in which women are forced to stay at home with a world where women are forced to work until 70 (or whatever the retirement age is in your country). Great if you’re an exec or have some mentally stimulating job, but for the typical woman it means stacking shelves until your back gives out. What an achievement for society.

That's what equality means and what they fought for.

There is more at play than simply equal rights. Housing supply hasn't risen to keep up with demand. Education and healthcare costs too have grown significantly compared to pregnant-and-barefoot-in-the-kitchen eras.

I agree. But what does it have to do with your rant about women particularly getting a worse deal?

Not my rant. Regardless, my point is that one cannot say that the cost of equality must always or only be housing requiring dual income or shitty working life/hours.

I personally think the "forced" part is mostly bullshit. It was the default arrangement but far from the only one. In fact, when you read some historical without the feminist propaganda bias it becomes very obvious that it was mostly a desirable position for women.

It seems to me that the whole equality propaganda mostly comes from less desirable women who would have a much harder time finding a highly valuable man that would be able to bring a lot to the home (either in the way of money or skills, craftmanship, etc). They wrongly determined it would be better for them if they could be like a man. But reality doesn't care much about feelings and what happens is that those women still get the less desirable man and if they go at it solo, they find out the hard way that there are many things a man provide that are very costly if you have to pay for it in the market. One thing too often overlooked is the importance of a man in children upbringing and there are some nasty statistics about single women raising kids that pretty much depict that very painfully.

In the end it doesn't matter, everybody's got much poorer for it, the only winners are the bourgeois women who started it all, who already had a lot of power in the first place. But I guess it was the intended result even if it came at the expense of all the lower social class...

According to our experience of the last 7 years, we should expect interest rate cuts, tax cuts, and more fiscal expansion either at the same time or in some sequence. Each of them will help solve our problem. There is no fiscal conservative left in America.

> There is no fiscal conservative left in America.

Truer words have never been spoken. Fiscal conservatism died with Reagan.

Yes, Reagan the fiscal conservative who tripled the deficit and national debt:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/e...

Greek austerity imposed by Germans had resulted in the doubling of debt as percentage of GDP.

Which Germans imposed Greek austerity? AFAIK Greek austerity was imposed by Greece's major creditors, but Germany was only one of many.

Between Brussels and Frankfurt (EU institutions I mean) the general consensus was that the Greek situation was more akin to loansharking than anything else. And Germany was undeniably the largest driving factor behind this approach, and the country that most benefited from it.

But what was the better alternative for Greece?

In what way was Reagan a fiscal conservative other than making the poor targets for pain? He destroyed half the social safety net in this country while running on a hideously bigoted platform and STILL ended up spending an insane amount of money compared to his predecessors. The only fiscal conservative of the past 50 years in the White House was Bill Clinton.

I saw an interview where Bill quipped "You know how we balanced the budget? We used a little thing called 'arithmetic'."

That one of the two American political parties believes they can lower the deficit by cutting taxes (primarily for the wealthy but that's immaterial to the basic math here) has always created some sense of unreality for me; I really no longer understand what the goal is for many of these people and I often think that they don't really know either. It's almost pure nihilism except when it comes to lust for power.

It's much less deep then nihilism.

Their goal is simply to live their life as richly as they can at the expense of those they consider less than themselves. They are the wealthy and they act accordingly.

Why anyone sees Republicans as anything else boggles my mind.

Anyone who isn't a billionaire and is voting Republican may as well be a turkey voting for Thanksgiving.

Imagine a candidate who could make a quick, sharp and accurate quip.

Out here in the wider world, American elections are more terrifying every time they come around.

> He destroyed half the social safety net in this country

Democrats controlled the House the whole time, so how’d he manage that?

> while running on a hideously bigoted platform

What a remarkable assertion.

The monkey tape is revealing.

Revealing of what? That racist jokes were normalized back in the 1970s? It’s not like we stopped telling exactly that same joke—we just changed the social norm around who is allowed to tell that joke. Are you more likely to treat people fairly because you won’t tell that joke (but would still laugh at the similar Dave Chapelle bits?) and what does it have to do with his platform?

Neoliberal democrats

maybe more like Bush. Clinton was the last president who oversaw a brief surplus in the federal budget and once said "the era of big government is over".

pretty wild to think that surplus was in part driven by the internet boom. now we have some kind of stock market boom while the federal deficit is 10% of total GDP and national debt is growing by a trillion dollars (a million times a million) every 100 days or so.

Fiscal conservatism died with fiat and John Maynard Keynes' "In the long run we are all dead."

"Fiscal conservativism" is the equivalent of a household not purchasing any insurance, not going to the doctor or dentist, and saying "look how affordable everything is if we cut out all those stupid things? It's wasteful spending!" Then you get into a car accident, go to the hospital, lose your job, and cry about the inefficiency of the market because you now have a huge bill that you can't pay. It's short sighted at best. True fiscal conservatism would be all about social safety nets and free education to grow the economy, but y'all just want to save a few hundred bucks on your property taxes, everything else be damned.

Woah, you sound like Adam Smith (the real one, not the one worshipped by alleged acolytes who clearly never read a word he wrote).

I often like to observe that there is capitalism and then there is Capitalism with a an uppercase--dare I say "capital"--letter C.

The first is a kind of economic engineering with trade-offs and conditions and acknowledged edge-cases, the second is a brand supported by some rather culty dogma.

You are using a straw man. The reason we have a democracy and freedom of speech is so that each of us can voice our opinions and vote for those that share them. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect.

I'm using the term as it's used 9/10 times it comes up. I've never in my life met a self proclaimed fiscal conservative that didn't just mean "I want lower taxes". The way to lower taxes is a healthy and intelligent population. That is seen as a cost but is actually an investment that pays massive dividends. That's what a fiscal conservative would do, invest at the societal level. Otherwise they're basically just a libertarian.

I only want lower taxes if I see my current tax money being spent very irresponsibly, like "forgiving" student loans...

So a strawman. You set up the premise, you set up your misunderstanding, and then expect everyone else to follow your misunderstanding. You've even redefined what a "fiscal conservative" would actually do (if you were the one defining it).

Then you pulled in "libertarian" out of nowhere. Which is an obvious set up for another strawman, so lets lean into it. Whats a "libertarian"?

I have no skin in this because I don't live in the USA and don't want to, but no, everything in the comment you replied to falsifies "So a strawman".

You can be wrong without being a strawman. When every example you have of X is Y, it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y" — when you're wrong like that, it's a black swan.

> everything in the comment you replied to falsifies "So a strawman".

No it doesn't, user exclaims their ignorance and your follow up emboldens their ignorance does not make a QED.

Does your understanding of reasoning consist solely of the dichotomy "every position is either a QED or a strawman"?

Does yours?

> When every example you have of X is Y, it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y" — when you're wrong like that, it's a black swan.

Either way, I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth, I hope you don't go around proclaiming you're the arbiter of all that's right in the world.

> Does yours?

The very thing you quoted demonstrates that mine allows for people to make errors without condemning them as deliberately weak setups.

> I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth

If you do not like how your words are perceived by others, you should consider choosing them more carefully.

Despite your lack of appreciation, this comment is one which I am still only able to read in a way which suggests that you are stuck with this false dichotomy:

> No it doesn't, user exclaims their ignorance and your follow up emboldens their ignorance does not make a QED.

> The very thing you quoted demonstrates that mine allows for people to make errors without condemning them as deliberately weak setups.

No.

> If you do not like how your words are perceived by others, you should consider choosing them more carefully.

Lets see, you deliberately trolling and being bad faith is somehow my issue. Interesting.

> Despite your lack of appreciation, this comment is one which I am still only able to read in a way which suggests that you are stuck with this false dichotomy:

No. You lack the fundamentals.

> You can be wrong without being a strawman.

Sometimes yes, but not always.

> but if every example you have of X is Y

Is that actually true though? Are you not assuming perfect rationality on behalf of the poster, and that they have an adequate sample size, which tends to be subject to who the individual associates with.

> it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y"

That depends on the truth of the matter.

>when you're wrong, it's a black swan.

Only if the initial guess was correct.

You may be describing appearances. That which cannot be seen does in fact exist, it just doesn't seem like it because it exists in a different realm, and how our culture is trained to think about such problems spaces.

> True fiscal conservatism would be all about social safety nets and free education to grow the economy

Which is why Italy and France have such strong economies, right? What’s really standing in the way of economic growth is that the government isn’t paying for people to get free degrees in left wing studies.

or the Scandinavian countries that generally have higher spending power than the us.

remember not to conflate a strong economy with an economy that is worth living in. you can possess minimum paid jobs in order to make profits for shareholders and never see a dime of that wealth yourself, but alas, you live in a strong economy.

I agree that you can’t conflate a strong economy with one worth living in. But OP was saying that we should invest in education for economic growth, and that doesn’t make sense. There’s trade offs to be made between growth and quality of life.

It’s not true Scandinavian countries have more spending power. The OECD keeps very detailed economic data. The US has the highest PPP disposable income in the OECD: https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di.... It’s about 67% higher than Sweden and Denmark.

Now you might say, but Swedes and Danes live longer and are happier. That’s true! But as far as I can tell, Americans would rather live shorter lives and have more TVs and trinkets. My parents came back from traveling in Australia. My mom was ranting for weeks about how small and close together the houses are and nobody can get really rich. We are immigrants from a third world country. All of my family members that have come here think that “making it” means living in a McMansion and driving an SUV. I don’t know if it’s something in the water, or the people who come here are just that way, or maybe a bit of both. But it’s worth contemplating that Americans are making rational choices based on their particular utility functions.

> or the Scandinavian countries that generally have higher spending power than the us.

Do they? PPP they all have lower disposable income than the US and they are not even at the top in Europe (including social transfers). Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands are above Norway and Sweden is even lower than France.

Of course we have higher Disposable Income in the US, it's a useless metric for these sorts of comparison purposes as it includes expenditures for things like healthcare, which in most other places is paid for by taxes (aka. not part of disposable income). A more useful metric would be Discretionary Income.

The OECD economists are pretty smart cookies, and account for government services delivered in kind (like healthcare). The net adjusted household disposable income includes the value of government provided healthcare: https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/income/ (“Household adjusted disposable income includes income from economic activity (wages and salaries; profits of self-employed business owners), property income (dividends, interests and rents), social benefits in cash (retirement pensions, unemployment benefits, family allowances, basic income support, etc.), and social transfers in kind (goods and services such as health care, education and housing, received either free of charge or at reduced prices).”) So the income top line in European countries is higher than the actual income to account for the value of those services.

Also, Norway's PPP is as high as it is only because of North-Sea oil revenue.

that is used for a sovereign wealth fond. Norway produces less oil than the us.

Right, but the US has 60 times as many people. Norway's per capita oil revenue is very high.

Ok putting the fever dream aside, even at 3.7 people per household the 1963 to 2024 numbers as it relates to income vs cost of living is pretty eye opening. You are not really disproving the general point by getting fussy over the numbers.

The current average US household has 3.1 members. There’s an important discussion to be had about cost of living and stagnant wages despite productivity, but as I said in another comment: that conversation needs to be factually grounded. Vague reactionary handwringing about the good old days isn’t going to cut it, especially when the good old days weren’t all that great by contemporary standards (or for contemporary American demographics).

If we’re to correct the exuberance of emotion then this reactionary reply doesn’t fit either.

On the topic, I found this informative: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1963?amount=1

“ $1 in 1963 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $10.21 today, an increase of $9.21 over 61 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.88% per year between 1963 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 920.69%.”

Also: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1964/demo/p60-04...

“ The median income of all families in 1963 was about $6,200; but for families headed by college graduates, the median was $9,700. The median for all families was about $290, or 5 percent, higher than in 1962. Consumer prices rose during this period by about 1 percent; therefore, not all of this amount represented a net gain in purchasing power for the average family.1

Median family income in current dollars has more than doubled in the postwar period (from about $3,000 in 1947 to about $6,200 in 1963). This rise was accompanied by a gradual upward shift of families on the income scale. However, consumer prices have risen substantially during this period so that only about three-fifths of the increase in current-dollar incomes represented an increase in real income. In terms of constant (1963) dollars, median family income increased from $4,200 in 1947 to $6,200 in 1963. This increase was less pronounced than the increase in current-dollar income, but it was nevertheless substantial.”

The entire point of this discussion is whether we should question the CPI figures you are using to 'debunk'... this discussion.

You still haven’t addressed the greater point. Instead you are fixating on the accuracy of least important number in the point the original commenters post. I suspect it’s because it’s the only one you can pick at. The point being can the average single income household of 3.x in 2024 afford house, car, groceries, etc at the same ability as the average single income family household of 3.x in 1963?

What stagnant wages? The labour share of GDP has held roughly constant over the decades.

>> Remember in 1963 only the man was working, and typically supported 4 kids

> This is a ridiculous exaggeration: the average US household was 3.7 people

The avg figure in your rebuttal doesn't well reflect the commonality of large US households in the 20th century nor their change during that time.

According to US Census data, the % of US families with 4 or more children fell 10fold during 20th century.

     Early 1900s: About 35%
     Early 1910s: About 26%
     Early 1920s: About 23%
     Early 1930s: About 19%
     Early 1940s: About 18%
     Early 1950s: About 21%
     Early 1960s: About 21%
     Early 1970s: About 10%
     Early 1980s: About 5%
     Early 1990s: About 3%
     Early 2000s: About 3%
     Early 2010s: About 3%

Multiple refs inc: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED231528.pdf

This, and also the myth that only the men used to work and provide for the needs of their family: while is was true in the growing middle class it wasn't the case in the popular class at all.

the average lifespan in the middle ages was 35 too. does that mean there were no old people?

Your comment explicitly mentions averages. It's a matter of basic fact that the average working-age male in 1963 was not supporting 5 other people with his salary.

They are not census statistics they are an amateur assembling statistics using public census data. The methods are not published

The method is listed in the description below the statistics. Again: if you think these numbers are suspect, you are encouraged to find a different citation that contradicts them. Without that, your complaints are unsubstantiated.

No, but the “typical” person isn’t old. Just like the “typical” man didn’t support 6 people in the 1960s.

> There are good reasons to hold politicians to task for recent abnormally high inflation.

Well, maybe 25% for the budget deficits. The Fed is responsible for 75%. They keep over-goosing the economy. They keep saturating the money supply. That devaluing is what inflation reflects. That is your money is worth less (and appears like prices going up).

You can listen to Bing Crosby's Christmas album, to the song "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas", where the parents having 4 children (household size thus 6) is described, as an anecdotal supporting note... since it was a popular song for the masses, 4 kids was not seen as unusual.

You cant seriously be comparing actual cited stats for household size to lyrics from a song that was popular?

I specifically stated it was anecdotal... here are the census stats in graph form however: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat... ; 2.5 kids plus 2 adults is 4.5 in the household.

4.5 in the household is very specifically not 4 kids, like you claim is common. Just an insane random hill to die on

You're deliberately misunderstanding. Have a nice day.

Why not? Stats are numbers compiled for someone at some point. A song this popular is a snapshot into how people lived and perceived themselves back then. A measurement of sorts. A disagreement between the two is a good indicator that the stats are suspect, or not the right stats to be looking at

Because people dont accurately represent their situations? This seems so silly. West Virginia has a huge culture of music singing about how its a state of coal miners, when in reality, there are less than 15k working in the coal mines, with a population of 1.75 million.

That does not indicate that there are secretly a lot more coal miners, it just indicates that people are clinging to and showing off an identity that they like and want to be represented by.

The parsimonious reason is that people write songs about comfort and large, happy families, not about AGIs and statistical households of 3.3 to 3.7 people with 1 to 1.44 breadwinners. Songs (and media) reflect cultural values, not cultural realities; see also rosy movies about the "good old days" of 1960s USA being not particularly representative of the period's racial and economic strife.

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