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Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

> But when everyone spends more, the effect is merely to raise the bar that defines special. The average American wedding now costs $30,000, roughly twice as much as in 1990. No one believes that couples who marry today are happier because weddings cost so much more than they used to.

It seems odd to claim this increase is due to keeping up with others' weddings when inflation between 1990 and 2015 was roughly the difference here. The weddings were/are more expensive because everything was/is more expensive. $15,000 in 1990 had the same purchasing power as ~$27,000 in 2015. So this hardly seems related to bigger, more extravagant weddings. People have had to spend more to maintain the same quality of wedding as the previous generation.

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TBH, it seemed such an obvious point you're making that I assumed the author had to be comparing inflation-adjusted dollars, but from the (very little) digging that I did, it looks like that's not the case.

In fact, weddings decreased in inflation-adjusted cost between 1990 and 2023: https://ktvz.com/stacker-lifestyle/2024/03/01/how-us-wedding...

I would assume that downward trend has continued as inflation has spiked in the past few years and people had to spend more of their money in other areas.

> I assumed the author had to be comparing inflation-adjusted dollars

As did I.

90s weddings remind me of the Friends episode where Monica was scoping out her wedding. Chandler revealed how much money he had by writing it on a price of paper (that is, the audience never saw the dollar value), and Monica said something like "oh, we can go with best one, plan A" and Chandler said he didn't want to spend that much money "on one party". I've always wondered what amount of money that was.

Well they used the money to buy a house in New York so it wasn't 15000 , because that's not a down payment for a New York house/ apt, even in the 90s.

Inflation has made prices higher, but people's purchasing power has been decreasing all this time. Salaries, benefits etc have all not been keeping up with inflation for decades. It is why young people are marrying later, not able to afford to buy property etc. All the gains the economy has made over the past handful of decades have been captured by a small percentage of the population.

> Salaries, benefits etc have all not been keeping up with inflation for decades

I don't believe that's consistent with the data

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Also when you factor in the age of the wedding participants it almost seems like a regression. A couple in their 30s should be able to afford more than a couple in their 20s a generation ago.

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