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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Look at real, median household income. It's been going up and up. The things that have gone up in relative cost are housing (because we heavily regulate building it) and premium services like healthcare and education because of Baumol.

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Link for the curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Baumol plus zoning and NIMBY driven real estate hyperinflation basically explain the modern economic malaise among especially the young.

I’ve also heard this called “in-deflation.” Inflation in everything you need, deflation in everything you make.

Thank you for linking what I was too lazy to link.

To add, politics usually responds to Baumol by subsidizing demand and/or more regulation. Needles to say both make it worse. Article: https://www.niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-socialism-how-su...

so many projects got nerfed by NIMBYs during good economic times and now are infeasible. there's more political will for change now but i'm still skeptical things will change much given the cost of construction in major metros.

Deporting or deterring much of the construction workforce certainly doesn't help either

Probably also doesn't help that to many people want/need to live in the same few areas. If you could take your office job (which in most cases would work perfectly fine) and move to a less popular area, 30% might be rather high.

That's the thing or at least one thing. These discussions aren't about most small towns and cities in the Midwest. They're about prime areas on the coasts for the most part. Heck where I live about an hour west of Boston/Cambridge is a lot cheaper than the metro itself for the most part.

Housing prices in the Midwest have also inflated greatly.

I'm paying 28% of my net income for rent and utilities on a one bedroom apartment. I could find a cheaper place too and it would be just as nice, just not in as desirable part of town. Not sure I'll ever be able to afford a house though.

Well, it doesn't help but that's where the money is and as a society we should want people to move where they are most productive. Geoffrey West shows in Scale that social outcomes like GDP, patents, etc. but also crime grow with a factor of 1.15 while infrastructure needs like pipes, wires, heating cost, gas stations, etc only shake with a factor of 0.85. So it should be highly desirable to have larger, denser cities. Unfortunately, it seems that once the boomers had stepped into adult hood and bought there first homes, we decided that cities are complete now and existing neighborhoods shall not change anymore.

Does median represent the normal anymore?

When it comes to income and wealth, I don't think so. There aren't enough people in the middle ground between rich and poor for that to be a meaningful stat for most things.

If there are very few people in the middle ground, and more people are poor, then wouldn't the median be a poor person and therefore somewhat representative? I'm not sure I'm following your logic here...

If you look at income distribution over time you'll see that the middle indeed shrunk. However, they moved to high income.

The median alone doesn't paint the whole picture. We need to compare the spread as well. The median doesn't care if you make just under the median, or $1 a month.

Certainly better then the mean....

It depends on the distribution. The reason it is often used is when there are extremes in the distribution like a handful of people paying $1B per year on a property pulls the mean upwards.

Also depends whether you can about the middle more than the 10-20% of the people most struggling who can earn much less than the mean or median

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