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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that many Americans would struggle to afford to pay for a phone outright. The vast majority live paycheck to paycheck and are already in record amounts of household debt.

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This is often repeated but false - it’s not the vast majority, nor even a majority.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/19/bank-of-america-nearly-half-...

It just depends on who you ask and what they think living paycheck to paycheck means.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/52-americans-live-paycheck-pa...

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/goldman-sachs-study-fin...

https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-...

No matter if it's "Nearly half" or 60%, things are clearly far from good for most Americans.

Americans are, adjusted for inflation, literally richer than Americans have ever been at any point in history right now, at every quintile in the income distribution. If that's "far from good" I'm not even sure what that phrase means.

If the point is just that the hedonic treadmill means Americans will continue to be less and less happy as we get more and more wealthy, well, that's the problem we need to fix.

How is that measured? All the anecdotal evidence I’ve ever seen suggests the number of hours you have to work at realistic (especially entry level) wages to afford rent, basic food, and transit to said job is currently higher than it’s ever been as far as I can tell in my lifetime. Rent alone has risen substantially higher than inflation, which seems like it should especially skew the numbers on the low end.

Rent has risen about the same as wages over the last 40 years. So a bit higher than inflation but not so much that it’s less affordable.

Health care and education are the two that have really outpaced inflation, the trade-off being that basically all durable and consumable goods have run way below inflation.

Inflation is the rate at which prices rise. If things are getting more expensive faster than inflation, you're just undercounting inflation.

Inflation is the rate that a whole basket of goods gets more expensive. At least that’s how CPI is calculated and it’s what I meant by it. Since that number is averaged across a bunch of goods and services, there will always be some that increase faster or slower than inflation as a whole.

Are those figures mean wages? Or median wages?

Because the difference between those is a vast gulf.

Median. BLS barely tracks mean wages at all because it's extremely hard to do.

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