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You believe that people today own fewer expensive consumer goods? My first impression would be the exact opposite.

A majority of the population owns a small, easily stolen electronic device (smart phone) that is worth an average week's pay. Not to mention computers, TVs, video game systems, etc. All stuff commonly stolen.

"All stuff commonly stolen."

Isn't that in direct opposition to the data and claims? A TV financially worth stealing is going to be too big and delicate to steal. I'm not in the i-ecosystem but I'm told changes have been made making a stolen iphone basically worthless.

I was motivated to pull my communities police blotter (which is online) and look at the last weeks thefts. Stolen last week: one microwave oven, garbage cans (the city owns the rolling bins and it is incredibly inconvenient and costs $75 to replace each rolling bin, so its a revenge crime type of thing rather than for resale profit), gasoline was siphoned out of some car dealership cars, and misc office supplies (aka someone got fired for cause for taking a pad of paper instead of getting downsized to keep unemployment insurance costs lower). Apparently in my suburb there were no "real" thefts last week.

I think its interesting that HN posters would make excellent thieves compared to the general population. Apparently the general population thieves are really stupid, or are not stealing for the sake of profit maximization but for punishment or getting even. Possibly we're seeing some kind of variation in drugs, like crack users could be effective thieves via the chemical stimulation but most of the local addicts are pill heads and the chemical effects mean they can't effectively steal things. The crime report in an urban area is likely much longer than this suburban example and that might be useful data. Finally school is out so dorm related crime last week would be very minimal compared to during school.

I think the implication is that people still involved in the crime economy aren't idiots. If you're a criminal looking to make money, robbing houses is too high-risk anymore. Other crimes like credit card fraud are much more lucrative and don't carry the possibility of getting shot by a police officer or homeowner.

I don't think the risk from robbing houses is any higher than it used to be, but the reward is probably lower and there are other, better ways to make money illegally.

I don't own a CD or DVD player, dedicated film camera, dedicated video camera, speakers, typewriter, game console, CRT TV.

These days I have a flat screen TV, smartphone, a game console, plus a few computers with peripherals; router, modem. For me it may balance out or be slightly more.

I certainly replace what I have far more than I ever would back in the 1980s back then I certainly would not have casually spent 5% of my after tax income on a single entertainment device that's the big difference I see today.

Worth an average week's pay? Not unless you define "average" as "minimum wage". Even at $10/hour, a full-time (40 hour) week is $400 (maybe $300 after taxes and deductions). That's pretty high for the kind of smartphone that the majority of the population is using. And I suspect that $10/hour is below average, as well.

Why would you be looking at the average for this though? The reason economic factors and crime rates are so tightly correlated are because it is those who are desperate for money, e.g. unemployed, working low-wage and/or part-time, etc., that would be most likely to be tempted to steal these devices. Even if you drop the resale value of those devices to around $100 you could easily get away with a smartphone, tablet, laptop at once and make enough to get by for a couple weeks.

That was what I meant. Stuff that even a minimum wage worker could purchase, thus very common.

But they are all either very inexpensive or there are knockoffs or used versions that are very inexpensive.

> before 1962 every middle/upper class white male wore an expensive formal hat with his suit

Now, nearly everyone has an expensive mobile phone with them at all times

Across the board, I'd be willing to wager that portable consumer goods now tend to be locked behind closed doors. One might see an uptick in breaking-and-entering robberies, but it'd have to be a significant uptick to offset the loss from mugging being less profitable.

Smartphones are a bad theft target; too traceable, since they tend to have phone-home technology built in (along with integrated GPS).

permanent long term decline in standard of living

Yet I suspect that any average middle class Joe/Jane in 1962 would trade their fedora, boat and RCA TV for our cellphone, ability to instantly search for anything, access to all recorded music for $10 a month, etc. But you make a good point - I might trade some of the above for their pension.

>permanent long term decline in standard of living

This is patently false but some cannot abandon the everything is getting worse narrative because it is central to their identity of being victimized. Meanwhile the myriad of wonders available abounds and is accelerating.

"This is patently false"

vs

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/US_Real_...

And note that being a .gov production, they have every motivation to make things look better than they are. And thats just looking at permanent decline in top row revenue numbers, obviously increasing medical, real estate, and education costs by 10% annually for decades lowers standard of living because merely paying $30K for a leg cast doesn't mean its 100x better than paying $300 for a leg cast, it just means middlemen siphon out more money. Or paying $600K for a house that used to sell for $60K doesn't mean the standard of living increased by a factor of 10.

Median income is not standard of living. The reason income inequality is trumpeted so much around here is because it is one the few remaining metrics that still work for the worn out everything is getting worse trope. Standard of living is the entire scope not your cherry picked datapoints.

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

"The standard of living includes factors such as income, quality and availability of employment, class disparity, poverty rate, quality and affordability of housing, people, hours of work required to purchase necessities, gross domestic product, inflation rate, number of holiday days per year, affordable (or free) access to quality healthcare, quality and availability of education, life expectancy, incidence of disease, cost of goods and services, infrastructure, national economic growth, economic and political stability, political and religious freedom, environmental quality, climate and safety."

(And edited to add, "happyscrappy is, indeed, happy" did not appear on the list, although I am happy for your happiness, because life should be fun)

Make my day, pick some and provide unbiased data showing improvement, much as I've done for decline in income.

Wikipedia is weird so I don't know what "people" or "climate" means in the context of standard of living. Also GDP is totally irrelevant to individuals and any way that it could be relevant is already handled in the previously listed economic indicators.

>Make my day, pick some and provide unbiased data showing improvement

I won't need any sources because I believe you will be able to stipulate:

Access to virtually any info at your fingertips

Safer water, food, health care, workplace etc.

Increased protection of LBGT

Increased consumer protections, remedy of fraud

Longer lifespan, medical breakthroughs, better protections and access for the blind and deaf

I could literally go on forever. It takes a pretty stubborn dogma to insist things are getting worse.

>> Meanwhile the myriad of wonders available abounds and is accelerating.

Right, so a rich kid will have 10 wonders to keep him busy. A poor kid may only have 1, but it keeps him happy enough not to have to steal one. Back in the 1970's we all played outside because there wasn't anything to do inside. This is why the Atari 2600 was a huge deal - it was the first amazing tech gadget most people had ever seen. Oh and oddly I didn't see cable TV in this discussion - more variety in couch potato options may have also kept people indoors.

I don't agree.

While it's true that buying power for small consumer goods might be greater (see first comment) because a lot of these goods are cheaper now, I think there really is a growing income gap that is eviscerating the middle class.

The important things that matter in standard of living--housing, transportation, and free time--are not better. From the 60's to maybe the 80's, one wage earner with a decent job was enough to support a family nicely with two cars, vacations, guaranteed retirement, health care, and spouse staying at home, plus maybe even a little domestic help. At some point all those things have eroded and all are less common now.

I am confused as to why one would need two cars and domestic help if they had only one working spouse. Was it really common in the 60s to have two car households? My grandparents (3 of them worked) all worked factory jobs and they certainly couldn't afford two cars or domestic help(!!!) Domestic help is the job of kids anyways.

The other things is in the 1960s the who family all shared bedrooms and stuff. Now everyone has their own room, iPad, TV, video games...

No:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Number_of...

imglorp's understanding of the past is basically just wrong

Sure, his generalization regarding "nicely with two cars" might have been overstated, but your link supports his notion that "at some point all those things have eroded," at least in the case of car ownership per household.

Now, I understand there are lots of different factors at play, some of which would actually have positive overall quality-of-life impacts correlated with decreased car ownership. For example, decreasing urban sprawl, increased livability in cities and decreased noise/air pollution. But a drive-by posting of a link, with no explanation, and with a "just plain wrong" comment is a little over the top.

If you're talking about the small dip around 1990 you're missing the the forrest for the trees.

Granted I probably gave lousy examples. Here's what I was trying to say.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Real-Media...

Nothing in that link is consistent with any conclusion that things have "eroded" in the past 50-60 years.

If people think that things have "eroded" since 1960, then they should first go back to living like the middle class did in the 1960s and see how far their money takes them under 1960s living standards.

That means

1 car with a short commute, 1,500 sq/ft house, no internet or cable, 1 TV, no iPods/Kindles/Tablets, no phones (with expensive data plans) for each kid, no internet, 2 kids per bedroom, using a broom and mop instead of expensive disposables (like Swiffer and Diaper Genie, or even disposable diapers), no air travel (vacations are a weekend car trip out of town), babies/kids have a reasonable amount of consumer goods (no endless amount of plastic crap - having a 1,500 sq/ft home helps with this). With the amount of consumer goods kids have now it is a wonder how my parents made it to adulthood without all of that stuff.

Seems to me a lot of this so called "erosion" is a very broad increase in consumer spending without an increase in salary. Otherwise known as "living above your means."

Don't get me wrong - the big things that are a challenge nowadays that didn't exist in 1960 are healthcare costs and job security. Employment benefits also seems on the decline.

One white male wage earner whos job was protected by racism and sexism.

I gotta wonder - if everyone has less stuff than they did in 1960 then why are homes getting so much bigger? The average amount of living space per person in a new home has almost doubled in just the last forty years. Do these people have a lot of empty space or are they filling up that extra space with a lot more stuff? I'm inclined to think it is the latter.

Speculative real estate option, at least until 2007-ish, "real estate only goes up". A lot of approval processes etc are based on $/sqft so obviously if real estate always goes up 10%/yr then you'll make much more money off a 4000 sq ft house than a 1600 sq ft house. So always buy the largest most expensive house the subprime lender will approve to maximize future return. Which works really well as a strategy until prices stop going up, or drop.

There is also a cultural trend aside from any financial issues where big and bland beats small. See SUVs and trucks, or rather stark looking big box CRE architecture.

Factual small scale observations can be made off TV size/resolution vs sofa position. You need a very large living room indeed to handle the angular viewing dimensions of an 80 inch TV. You need a large living room, certainly over 20x20, to pull off 4 player kinect video games (or suffer lots of impact). Empty space is easy to build and cheap (free) to furnish.

Zoning has a lot to do with it, as it's damned near impossible to build anything less than a 1500 square foot home anymore unless you build on property not in a subdivision or under city ordinances. There's now a whole counter-culture, with people building small homes where they can (out in the woods), and some going so far as to build and live in small tiny homes in truck beds or on trailers in city lots or trailer parks.

Also -- and I don't know if this is cause or effect -- we're becoming more detached as families. Everyone has their own room and own stuff. Back in the Leave It To Beaver / Brady Bunch era, kids shared rooms much longer, you had a single family room TV and you ate together at the table. Now, everyone has their own rooms, their own TV/console/entertainment, and often don't eat or entertain as a family unit.

> I gotta wonder - if everyone has less stuff than they did in 1960 then why are homes getting so much bigger?

Because:

(1) everyone doesn't, just the median person, and its by value, not volume of stuff.

(2) means aren't medians.

> The average amount of living space per person in a new home has almost doubled in just the last forty years.

Averages (arithmetic means) are often misleading.

If the biggest 10% of new homes added 15 times the old average to their size (which would be a much smaller multiple of the size of that largest-size cohort), but the bottom 90%, on average, reduced their size by 5/11 the old average, the average (arithmetic mean) size of a new home would have doubled, even though most new homes were significantly smaller.

(And that's even assuming that you can accurately assess the size of homes people live in by measuring the size of new homes -- which is obviously flawed to start with.)