So while we're better off than we were in the 1970s, it can feel like the average worker is falling behind. That's because they are. The workers haven't shared fully in the economy growth. Their slice is bigger in overall terms, but it's a smaller part of the overall pie.
Adjusted for Inflation from 1952 the average home price has risen 3.5 times. The cost of the average car has doubled, as have stamps, while college tuition has risen eight times. Food is a mixed bag, and has mostly remained stable.
Meanwhile, average incomes have fallen to HALF.
I'm sorry, but halved income and doubling or more of necessities such as homes, is not 'a bigger slice'. If I have to work SEVEN TIMES as hard just to keep a roof over my head compared to the previous generation, then by no fucking definition am I doing better. By no definition am I doing 'the same'.
I'll remind you that the first fundamental principle of survival is shelter. Its also the base of the heirarchy of needs. This isn't some pissant nuisance like the cost of a fucking iPhone, or the price of gas (Mostly stable, 1% increase).
Pull the other one, its got bells.
That's complete nonsense. The average cost of homes has gone up, but so has the
size of the homes. This isn't a case of a carton of milk costing three times as much as it used to, in real dollars. It's that we're now buying 3 cartons instead of 1. As people have gotten richer, they've decided they want to spent more of their money on comforts, like more living space. And if you compare living space per person, it's jumped even more, because family sizes have gotten smaller.
https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-decade-by-decade.htmlNo serious economist disputes that standards of living have improved, since the 1970s. Here are two wage curves, one from a left leaning site, one from a right leaning site:
https://www.epi.org/blog/professor-hubbards-claim-about-wage-and-compensation-stagnation-is-not-true/https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/productivity-and-compensation-growing-togetherThe first one is fairly flat. Things haven't gotten much better, but things haven't gotten worse, in real dollars. Though as I mentioned, that doesn't include improvements in existing products, like how much better TVs and computers are today than they were 3 decades ago, so it's an underestimate. The second curve slopes up a bit, and that's because it tracks total compensation, not just wages. Due to favorable tax exemptions, more of our income is included in benefits, like healthcare, rather than in a direct salary. Note it doesn't account for the improvements, either. So wages, and especially overall compensation, have increased (though slower than the overall growth in the economy, as I covered in my previous post).
What's changed is well illustrated by the housing example: People's expectations have risen, even faster. People expect a car per person, larger houses, a TV in every room, eating out or prepared food every night, and so on. They feel poorer because they're greedier and more demanding, not because things have gotten worse.
You can certainly make an argument that healthcare and education in particular have gotten more expensive, but that's a long separate discussion. We'd have to talk about the nearly 1:1 correspondence between government subsidies in education and increases in cost, and the huge rise in administrative staff. And in health care, we'd have to talk about the third party payer system, the distortions of Medicare, and the way the US subsidizes drugs and research for countries around the world. And for both, we'd have to talk about how the allocation of spending changes as the population gets richer.