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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that's true too

I was honestly just talking about "people used to afford a house and family with two vacations per year on a single income, now people can't even afford a house on two incomes" which seems to be a common refrain nowadays

I know a lot of my friends and peers believe they have worse standard of living than their parents did at the same age, and the data does seem to agree with them. Existence of smartphones is a nice convenience but it doesn't seem to offset being able to afford a house or flights and hotels for vacations

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I doubt "the data" is anything more than a survey of said people's feelings on the manner, which is basically of zero value. But we live in an age where if enough people say something is true that "makes" it true, objective reality be damned.

While true a lot of subtlety is hidden in those seemingly simple comparisons. For example has the median/average home size grown since then? If so by how much? How about amenities that are expected in a modern home? In the 1950's and 1960's what did a vacation look like for a single-income family with kids back then? What does it look like now?

If you look at the data what you see is that people have more, want more, and spend more. People didn't necessarily fly to Europe, maybe a vacation was a local seaside, a road trip, or something similar. Heck even for the same vacation to the same place you pay more today because supply and demand lets it happen; you'll pay 250% more for a trip to Disney now than you would in the 1970's, but then again the global population has exploded along with the population globally that can afford to go to Disney.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...

I know that everyone wants to believe in some kind of quick political or economic fix, but it just isn't that simple. If you want to spread out the existing wealth for everyone then the average standard of living would drop. If you want to raise that standard of living while extending it to more people... well, good luck?

> For example has the median/average home size grown since then

Sure. Let's compare to the 90s.

According to Google, New detached homes are 10-20% larger in square feet today than they were in the 90s.

Also according to Google, new detached homes are 3.3x more expensive, inflation adjusted, than the 90s. Of course mortgage interest rates play a part here too, but that's a really bad starting point

And that's just for starters.

There are also places in the USA where the minimum wage has not increased since the 90s, and there may actually still be people trying to get by on a wage of 5.50 an hour.

I know all of this is oversimplifying things to an extent. Economics is hard. But it's not that hard...

I was around in the 1980's and people weren't buying a home and a yearly family vacation on a single income, that era was long gone. If you're talking about those "Good Old Days" then you're talking about the postwar economy that was decisively long gone by '80s.

They were buying a home and a yearly family vacation on two modest incomes, though. Try doing that now.

They might have been "buying" a home with a long-term mortgage, and by the 1980's you were seeing the rise of individual credit card debt as a way to finance a previously unobtainable lifestyle. The 1980's saw the first "cash back" card and rewards cards followed, along with a culture of assuming debt to consume.

What you saw in the 1980's ended much like it did in 2008, it wasn't sustainable and it went bust just as it would over and over and over since. BUT people want more, they want to pay less for it, and many more people want that. If you're a politician you don't win by fighting against that, you swim with the currents and find scapegoats to blame instead.

> They might have been "buying" a home with a long-term mortgage

Oh thanks for reminding me, people used to buy houses on 20 year mortgages now to make them remotely affordable they have to be 30-year mortgages

Good catch!

I take it from the shift in tone that you understood my point, although you don't particularly care to discuss it. I get it, no one ever wants to hear that biggest changes have been:

More people

More money

More people with more money

More competition for something previously limited to far fewer people historically

Costs rise

Expectations rise

Debt rises

And now if you've been keeping track we're at the "people who can't afford delivery finance their Doordash with a short-term loan" stage of the game.

Housing is not more expensive because people have granite countertops. If anything it's the other way around. The land houses sit on has grown exponentially in value regardless of the quality of the building itself. Take any modest US suburban house that's been around since the 70s, and check its value over time. Even if the house is still the same building, same square footage, its current value will be much more than its initial value in today's dollars. If you're paying $700k for a house that was worth half that in today's dollars a generation ago, you might as well spend the extra few thousand it takes to get the nice countertops; their value relative to the rest of the house has gone down considerably.

https://www.nahb.org/blog/2026/08/Median-Lot-Sizes-by-Region...

If you're buying a $700k house there are only a few parts of the country where your statement is true, and frankly much of that comes down to a few cities and metro areas. The idea that people buying a house in rural NC today and 30 years ago are somehow facing radically different (inflation adjusted) lot prices doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

But again, if you want to look at houses in the 1970's then you have to remember that the US population has risen by 150,000,000 since then... the land is the same size. The cities that everyone wants to live and work in are mostly the same with some changes in the Pacific coast of course. You're also competing with far more people who have relatively more money to spend, including a willingness to go into serious debt, to live their "dream".

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