Well, he couldn’t afford the house which became a running joke unlike his car which was always broken down or wrecked. After a few seasons they finally started writing in scenes about his crippling debt and missed utility payments.
I think a similar analysis could be made of The Simpsons, which (as the post mentions) started around the same time. While later retconned, it used to be the case that Homer could afford a house and sustain a family as the sole breadwinner and without a college degree.
Groening has also said it's pretty much in Oregon, especially since so much in the fictional town is taken from there, where he grew up.
Besides, among what we know is that it's on a coast, so it definitely can't be in Illinois. You can say the show has lots of contradictions, but Springfield being on a coast is pretty consistent.
Which isn't coastal. Nor is Springfield, OR. In fact, if coastal is required that generally rules out Oregon as a candidate state. Not too many major coastal population centers of any name...
Well yeah, I stated he grew up in Portland in the comment you are replying to and asking that question...what the heck?
I didn't say Portland was coastal, I said Springfield was. Clearly the universe of The Simpsons is not our universe, but in that universe Springfield is coastal, and most likely in Oregon.
As far as I know, it’s based roughly on the Hanford plant. It is in Washington, but very close to Portland, Oregon. The Hanford plant looks very similar to the one from the Simpsons.
It was a throwaway gag on the Tracey Ullman show; I doubt much thought was put into the "interchangeable suburban house" they came up with, or Homer's income as a nuclear plant technician.
Even when the Simpsons first aired, I highly doubt that you could get a job as a nuclear safety inspector without a college degree or highly specialized training like in the military.
yeah, what is overlooked is that homeownership rates are the same now as in the 80s. Prices are way up, but way more financing options, lower rates, long-term mortgages, fatter wages even adjusted for inflation, etc. Outside of certain metro areas, homes are still not that expensive.
The follow-up comment, which is also interesting in its own right, constrains the Bundy house to 9600 addresses within the city limits --- but the Bundys live in a Chicago suburb. 95th street takes you through Evergreen Park, Oak Lawn, Chicago Ridge, Hickory Hills, and Justice; the latter suburbs are pretty blue collar and very white, or at least were when I grew up down there (I grew up in Beverly, where the comment attempts to place the Bundys, and: no way).
That comment forgetting that the Bundys are suburban means its conclusion that they live on the Southside is incorrect - there's plenty of West suburban houses in the 9600s. I think the house itself is a little unusual for any of the towns you named, especially Evergreen. A bungalow (in Evergreen), ranch or split level would be more typical. Your assessment of the demographics of those towns back then is accurate, btw
Funnily enough, the amount of those luxury glamping-mobiles I've seen near me (Seattle) go up on Facebook Marketplace has exploded, but still are priced to nirvana. Those expensive toys are gonna be the first to go when people have to pare things down.
Hold some dry powder now and those riparian dreams may be fulfilled at firesale prices in the not-too-distant future :D
The parent is saying that “dry powder” (i.e. cash) can be used to "pull the trigger" on a purchase of luxury vans when a rainy day comes along and the owner of the vans are forced to sell at reduced prices due to economic hardship.
There is such thing as vanlords these days. They rent motorless vans or failint trailers from $400 to $1000 a month (California). I think they even tow you into a public parking lot for that money.
My dad (high school diploma) blundered through his 20s with a series of gigs and barely-paying-the-bills solo businesses, had an expensive divorce (kids in the mix, too), a kid out of wedlock, then finally got his career going as he approached 35. Worked for a railroad. Started at the bottom, worked his way to upper-middle-management before the railroad sold, MBAs took over from career railroad guys in upper management, and they ruined his work-life with constant pointless meetings and having to put up with idiots who didn’t know how anything worked calling the shots, before ultimately “encouraging” him and a bunch of the other expensive career guys into somewhat-early retirement. FFS, he was literally raised in a barn—and not a nice one, and not one attached to hundreds of acres of valuable paid-off farmland or anything like that—they were a kind of poor that barely exists outside the homeless, these days.
My mom was about 30 when they got married. Junior college stenography degree. Never worked for pay again after getting married. Dad was a railroad man (working class, nothing fancy) and mom a homemaker.
They followed a playbook that’d spell doom today, but rode rising real estate prices and real honest-to-god pensions to a couple million dollars invested plus social security. We did a couple weeks of driving or (sometimes) air travel vacation every year. All the usual American Dream stuff.
Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.
The high home prices, inflated away wages, and poor quality of life for long hours worked, plus no fault divorce, the family court system, etc, may be contributing to the demographic issue.
The price of property in Australia has increased so much but the demographics aren’t there to support continued growth. Yes immigration is a thing but most immigrants don't move to Australia with $4 million(AUD) in the bank to continue fueling the boom.
There’s plenty of growth, it just isn’t going to the people who work for a living, even if they’re highly educated, highly skilled, and working long hours.
Back in the day on would get into the top 1% by getting a good degree and working hard. And getting a good degree and job was a function of who and where you were born.
Now that is even more amplified.
Most young people will become rich by inheritance in US.
Yeah, to be clear, I don’t mean that as a “them damned boomers!” post. They’re not to blame for circumstances conspiring to put life on (relatively) easy mode for them. If they’re guilty of anything (at least, many of them) it’s failing to appreciate how much harder it’s gotten to achieve what they’d consider a basic, unremarkable, ordinary, comfortable middle-class life.
Locally though there are areas that have grown quite a bit compared to others, the average misses nuance. LA has grown by a million people since 1970, while chicago has lost almost as much in that time. Are things more affordable than Chicago in Southern California? Certainly not, even if economically speaking the region is "more productive" by whatever measure.
Really what makes things cheap is a simple formulaic application of supply and demand to things like housing, which takes up the bulk of the American take home pay bar almost nothing else in comparison. Boomers had things cheap not because of riding off a population boom, but a home building boom, that zoning changes in the decades since have made impossible to replicate.
Same sentiment, closer to the actual concept of a nation state.
Or maybe, “my kids can’t have grandkids, so I’ll just adopt myself some.” The reasonable question you have to ask isn’t “how do I adopt more grandkids?” It’s “Why can’t MY kids have their own kids?”
You’re aware these people dealt with the draft, significantly higher crime, high inflation, 14% mortgage rates and the continuing tide of automation too right? Watch “Falling Down” to see what the silent generation thought of no fault divorce, computerization and the iron curtain falling down (yes, one of the reasons for the title…)
People of my generational cohort have it easy by comparison. The unemployment rate was < 4.5% when I graduated college. SPX (a big chunk of my own retirement) is up 65% in the last four years.
The great depression? My man we had 5% GDP growth last quarter after just seeing 15% unemployment 3 years ago. What the actual fuck are you talking about?
I think you're both talking past each other. We have it better now in many ways than our parents and grandparents did. But they had it better in other ways.
The necessities were more affordable then, as were the simplest pleasures. My mother's father was a milk man, and her mother was a gas station clerk. They had 3 kids, a house and 2 horses. But, calling the next town over was exorbitantly expensive, their siblings were drafted, their uncles and aunts had had polio, they couldn't get kiwi fruit or sushi.
My siblings can talk to anyone anywhere in the world real time for free, eat any food they can conceive of for relatively cheap, were never drafted, have an endless stream of stimulating entertainment, can read any book they like at a whim, diseases like measles are a fairy tale. But with 17 years of education and two salaries they can barely afford a house, a basket of groceries for a week costs them a day's labor, they're constantly bombarded with bad news, real or not.
Things are better for us, but the basics were easier for them. Something's not quite right, and we can all feel it, even though the measures all tell us it's better than ever. I think the real problem is that we mostly agree that things will not be better for our grandkids. Increased international tensions and drug resistant disease mean that the two main ways we are better off won't last, and on top of that, the basics are unaffordable.
I'm not even convinced the basics were cheaper or easier then, food spending as a percentage of the median income is near the lowest ever. People just had very few options and didn't know what they didn't have.
You can live the 1960's middle class lifestyle today, it's just considered lower middle to lower class. I think that's great, it means our country is becoming wealthier every year!
> Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.
My father-in-law didn’t do quite as well but had the same kind of easy mode experience – working as a letter carrier for years was enough to support a stay-at-home wife, kids, house, pension, etc. He upgraded towards the end by moving into being a supervisor and then the IT group - by virtue of having bought a PC in the late 80s, the regional postmaster knew him as one of the most experienced - and retired at 60.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I feel it’s constantly hard for most people of that generation to understand how much different things are now.
None of what you are saying is supportable by any data or statistics.
The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.
My parents, my grandparents, they grew up the same way everybody else did back then. They worked on a farm from the age of like 5 doing manual labor.
When you are talking about your parents, you are talking about the luckiest people in the country. Nobody got a pension back then. Maybe if you worked for IBM, but that was not the norm.
What you are saying, "every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then" is completely false. Every plausible life-path has been upgraded since then, the things you are saying just aren't true.
> The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.
Yeah, I know, I’ve hand-pumped water at the well my dad used growing up. The ‘40s and ‘50s were rough for a lot of families—but their kids basically just had to not constantly fuck up for multiple decades to be on track for at least moderate success.
I think it’s why a lot of that generation (my parents included) assume anyone who’s not doing at least decent is basically not trying at all, or is astonishingly useless. For their relatives who didn’t climb out of poverty with the rest of the wave, that’s mostly true.
(YMMV for minorities over the same time span, of course—racist FHA policy and other measures meant e.g. black folks didn’t get such an easy on-ramp to the postwar-success highway, to put it mildly)
Hmmm...seems like this would be better suited for r/askeconomists . But the tired trope about the supposed affordability of homes 60+ years ago is contradicted by the data, which shows that home ownership rates are the same now as during the mid 20th century. Yes, homes are way more expansive, but also: more financing options 9such as longer duration mortgages), lower rates, and of course, higher wages. Inflation-adjusted wages have gone up for almost all income groups.
Friends is pretty obvious to me, they are mostly born rich. Other than Joey and Phoebe, who are shown as working class / poor and are also this in the show. Rachel's dad is a surgeon. Monica and Ross were in the same town in long island, and dad was an engineer iirc. Chandler had a good job, and his mom was a famous author. So you combine that with the rent controlled apartment, it makes plenty of sense.
This was directly explained IIRC, which is that they subletted one of their grandmother's rent-controlled apartments, which was technically against the rules but the super looked the other way.
People own homes, sure. But who lives in them? Young couples? Families with young kids? Multigenerational families? Empty nesting retirees? DINKs and prestige professionals?
Or at least: how many people live in each owned house now vs in the past?
Total ownership numbers aren't the ones that matter to people right now. If owned homes used to be populated by multigenerational and nuclear families, while elders moved in with their kids and bachelors rented apartments in the city, but are now populated by elders and high-paid professionals while families with children are generally left to rent, it's a whole different world even while your quoted figures remain the same.
Indeed. general household size has gone down over over time, with a significant increase in single people. There has been a decrease in grandparents living in multigenerational homes, and an uptick in adult children living in multigenerational homes.
Well high wealth inequality doesn’t translate directly to “worse off” but it does indicate that there’s some truth to the social sentiment.
Beyond that, it’d depend on definitions…
- data shows housing, healthcare, college costs outgrowing wages and inflation
- data shows tons of other stuff costing less over time when accounting for inflation.
Basically, data shows that (American) consumers have access to more and more cheap consumable goods, but the 3 things that are the (probably for most people) biggest purchases in life are the most expensive they've ever been.
The data can say whatever you want it to say depending on which data you look at and how you interpret it and what bits you include and leave out.
"Home ownership is higher than ever" is what the data says, and this can "prove" that there is no problem. Of course, you can also point out that the average age where people buy a house is ten years later, and that house prices really have massively gone up, and that especially lower-income people are spending an ever-larger share of their income on housing.
And of course averaging out over any country (especially a huge country like the US, but also smaller ones) is a very incomplete picture in the first place, and there can be huge differences between different groups that averages don't display: if everyone stays put with old low housing costs but entering the market is very expensive then "the data says" that there is no problem.
etc. etc.
Try doing a working-class job and try to find affordable housing for you and your family. This is the data that matters.
> The data can say whatever you want it to say depending on which data you look at and how you interpret it and what bits you include and leave out.
This is what most people don't understand. Like 99% of the population. There is plenty of data that is fake as well when they want to brainwash people and there has never been more brainwashing in the US than there is today.
There are many, but one good leading indicator is freight companies / shipping rates.
Looking at things like housing and cars directly can hide things because of can-kicking shenanigans. Melody Wright has a great substack that goes over what the homebuilders are doing to make it seem like sales are strong [0], going well beyond the "have the construction workers park in the driveway of unsold units" stuff.
"The homeownership rate is the proportion of households that is owner-occupied."
Which seems contrary to the story being told that more and more homes are owned by corporations. At least this is a reason being tauted when questions about single family housing inventories are low.
Also, that stat conveniently stops before 2007-2008 housing collapse. So maybe that's where the disagreement begins???
> "The homeownership rate is the proportion of households that is owner-occupied."
Often overlooked and makes it possible to have a steady 'homeownership' rate while the actual proportion of young adults that own homes falls off a cliff (i.e. due to the obvious trend towards adult children living with parents longer).
What is being air quoted? I pulled a direct quote from the link provided by the comment I replied to, hence my use of the quotes. The question is where in all of the stats on home ownership are the homes owned by companies where it is not the primary domicile of the owner. I'm ignoring summer homes or other vacation/2nd homes, but there are a lot of homes that have become part of investment portfolios. How do these factor into the %?
Homeownership rate is very locally variable, so national averages miss a lot of nuance in the housing discussion. For example over the last 10 years its decreased in the Bay Area, and in S.F. county its only about 38%.
I will give you data for other in demand housing markets then to demonstrate how variable this stat is. In LA county, the homeownership rate is 46%. The homeownership rate in Queens is 45%, the homeownership rate in Brooklyn is 30%, in Manhattan its 24%, and in the Bronx its 20%. In Boston its 34%. In Miami its about 31%.
Really, homeownership is quite low in most in demand markets, especially ones that have been in demand for some time now.
Thank you for adding this information. It shows how important it is to get granular with data otherwise so much nuance gets lost in the interpretation.
The phrase "home ownership" elides a lot of detail. What percentage of income is spent on the home now vs then? Probability that current owners will default due to major unforeseen cost, etc.
Last time I did the math on this using median incomes, median home prices and mid year interest rates for 1980 vs 2022 it was something like 24% vs 28%. I’ll see if I can find the math and sources
Interesting. I wonder if using medians is valid though. Incomes and prices are so localized that they may not represent what an actual human in an actual place could expect to be faced with.
There's a whole lot of anecdata over the last few years that's not accounted for by a 4% increase.
I agree, it doesn't make sense. Home prices just about everywhere in the US (including a lot of rural areas) went up way more than 4% between ~2020 and 2022, and that's with annual CPI inflation at <3%. Maybe some of that was eaten by the 2022-2023 inflation period, but I don't think either the increases in home prices or consumer prices were reflected in wages. I'm sure this can all be found in the right FRED time series; if someone has the motivation to dig for it, I'm happy to be proven wrong (but happier to be proven right).
Yeah, if urbanism/centralization (of where people live and also the economy) increased over the same period, the raw figures may give a misleading picture of what things are really like. There are a lot or rural towns that have been shrinking over that time span, and cheap housing in those places doesn’t meaningfully offset rising prices in growing cities.
Sincere question - why not? It seems like the idea is that someone owning one cheap house in a rural community is of less consequence than another higher value home owned in a higher value market. And I'm sure some math could be applied in economic terms to bear that out. But looking at it from a human perspective, I have a hard time accepting that one is better than another.
It’s one of several factors that could mean the prices seen by the median person looking for a house are worse than that 4% median house price increase suggests.
To take it to an extreme to illustrate why this may matter, if one town gets abandoned and the houses all sell for $1 to a single family, while all the former residents move to another similar-sized town that sees prices more than double… you’d be best off ignoring or down-weighting the effect of those $1 houses if you’re trying to figure out how the housing market is looking to most people.
Though it’s possible the figures used for the analysis already account for that kind of thing, in some fashion. Are they actual sale prices, or asking prices? Do they only count sales to someone who’s intending to use the dwelling as a primary residence, or all sales? There’s a lot of room for the median experienced house price for a person just trying to buy a place to live to differ from the median on-paper, depending on how it’s handled.
Using anecdata as evidence is a textbook example of information bias. There are multiple layers of self-selection bias taking place when an anecdote is volunteered.
Even within a single city, median house values are pretty meaningless. There is no median house or neighborhood. It’s a blend of multiple neighborhoods and housing inventory, just an artifact of recent sales history in an aggregate set. If you actually went shopping with the median value as your budget, you’d likely find a lot less desirable and a lot out of reach, not a lot at that budget. At least this has been the case where I’ve resided.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_united_st..., homeownership also depends on your race. Caucasians have a much higher rate of homeownership (higher than the average rate - one guess as to the minority group with the lowest homeownership rate).
If median age has increased and home ownership has remained relatively constant, doesn’t that imply that it _has_ become harder to buy (ie lower rate of first time buyers per year)?
I can't imagine it would. I assume you're talking about rental properties? The number of homes owned for sale by investors at any given time is probably small, given that flipping a house is pretty fast (several months?), and houses in major metro areas tend to go from listing to under-agreement in a matter of days. Or is there some phenomenon of investors buying properties and holding on to them for sale, rather than for rent?
>The homeownership rate is the proportion of households that is owner-occupied.
The main cause for the increase since 1900 was the invention of the mortgage, which did not really exist until about 1950. Loans existed, but the exact mortgage structure is a modern invention. It increased home ownership rates but also housing costs due to higher demand.
These shows merely point out what was/is happening in the worlds of the past and present eras.
In 1960 or thereabouts, a production-line worker at Ford, etc, earned about 100 bucks a week. On that wage he could afford 2-3 kids, a reasonable house, a reasonable car and could afford a stay-at-home wife. Todays' wages have not kept up with 'inflation'. More acurately, wages have not remained relatively constant in the face of declining buying-power of the US Dollar.
To maintain parity with his grandfather's lifestyle, a production-line worker in today's factories would need to be earning about 5 grand a week.
That ain't happening.
That's why today a man and his wife are both working, sometimes with more than one job, and still can't make ends meet.
Cars and homes in 1960 were considerably cheaper to build in real dollars. Cars didn't have any electronics in them whatsoever, the fit and finish was primitive, there just weren't that many parts in them. Similarly with homes. No dishwasher, no garbage disposal, no microwave, 1 bathroom, single pane windows, no A/C, and on and on.
And I personally know a decently large number of families where only one parent works and they own a house, a mortgage, etc.
It’s certainly still doable but people may not be willing to make the sacrifices to do so (such as living in a house from the 1960s or earlier).
I was moderately amused to discover I paid less in real dollars for my new vehicle than my dad paid for the only new car he bought about 50 years ago. And my vehicle is a freaking Martian spaceship compared to his old one.
Yeah, I know it - I have a 1960s-built home. Problem is, despite no major upgrades since then, in the 70s or 80s I could have bought it for 3-3.5x the median wage, when I bought it in 2017 it was about 7x the median wage, and in the post-COVID craziness its value has gone up at least two more median wages, so we're talking 9x now, so as financially screwed as my generation has been, the next generations will have it even worse...
And honestly I don't care that the value has gone up so much since I bought it, because any house I would want to shift to if I sold it will have also gone up in value just as much - basically the only benefit is to those with multiple houses, or those inheriting houses from relatives...
Inflation vs COLA is the punchline. Everything you list is at best a footnote to the story.
The story is harmful deregulation after deregulation even though lots of smart people kept saying it was a bad idea. The ridiculous wealth inequality and the inability for anyone to get ahead without preexisting generational wealth . . . ironically unexpected.
Since you are talking about Ford, it's worth pointing out that autoworkers in the US are still doing very well... even better since they recently renegotiated their contracts at strike-point.
I am guessing that in 1960 they were doing relatively well compared to other factory workers also.
A quick google search says Ford assembly line worker salaries range from $20-38 an hour, with the typical wage of $28 per hour. It’s not a terrible salary, but I wouldn’t necessary say they they’re doing “very well”.
If we’re going off of OP’s math, the average autoworker only has a fifth of the purchasing power that autoworkers had in the 1960’s.
>”For decades, the UAW tugged wages upward. In 1960, a UAW member made 16 percent more than the average American manufacturing worker. By 2006, the figure was 74 percent. Today, new hires in the UAW make about 20 percent less than the average.”
Hourly wages tell only part of the story here. Their benefit package, particularly their pensions, is very generous compared to that of most other hourly workers. Indeed compared to that of many non-hourly workers also, since most people now get only 401ks.
Because Al sold shoes at a time before we thought it was rational to pay someone $400k a year to write shitty Python code.
Said average developers then banded together and built an e-commerce website that sold shoes drop shipped direct from the sweatshop and put Al out of business.
We have very low unemployment and wages are higher. But housing is way more expensive than it was in the 90s. Housing is the big problem.
Health care and tuition are the other cost disease centers. People today are better off and richer when it comes to everything except housing, health care, and tuition. I’ve heard these called “the big three.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those three things are all areas where we simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.
For all three, it's a problem of demand exceeding supply, because supply is artificially constrained (and inefficiently allocated).
1. Housing. Increase supply of affordable housing. Which means upzoning existing land for denser redevelopment. Which means more public transit. (And outlaw the realtor / commission system for transactions)
2. Health care. Increase supply of GPs and allow mid-level providers more independence (within bounds) to take less complex work off their plates. (There's also the inefficiencies created by the ridiculous number of middle layers. To which, single payer)
3. Tuition. Make highly-automated online degrees the new base normal to increase scalability of the system. (And use the stick of government tuition assistance to bludgeon any university that disagrees or exceeds set administration cost caps)
For tuition I don’t think you even need the tech approach. Just cut university administrative and construction overhead. Both of those areas have bloated massively, fueled by lots of easy student loan money.
Student aid and subsidized loans should require that the admin to teacher ratio not exceed a certain value. That would help a lot.
For the others you nailed it. Housing is tough though, because the existing policy is a massive success for older homeowners who bought before the prices rose and property speculators.
Automatically, after 30 years of pain. There is no easy answer. I'm about the last person ever to pay full tuition while working, no loans or other help. In 30 years we can make that normal, but it will take that long to figure out how, and I pity any youngster stuck in the middle while we work on it.
It isn't that fast. Even if the money stops tomorrow (which it won't - there are a lot of laws in place that need to be found and undone), universities will take a long time to adjust. They have contracts they need to pay. They are in debt to pay for those buildings and that needs to be paid. Which is why I said 30 years - that is a much more realistic timeline.
Bankruptcy protocols would be utilized. There is no mandate for US federal taxpayers to keep subsidizing universities’ largesse. If they are in debt for fancy athletic facilities and don’t have the cash flow to service the debt, that is between them and the lender.
Congress can surely do pass a law removing access to taxpayer backed student plans starting whenever they want.
So they start cramming even more students into classrooms and creating other new, innovative ways of getting money and giving the students less for it.
Without access to unlimited taxpayer underwritten loans, students will not have money to give to schools.
And one can safely assume schools are already cramming students as much as they can to maximize budget for other expenses that benefit administration.
In any case, the number of students should be declining for a very long time, so they will have to figure out how to compete for the students’ business.
For tuition, I’d also be okay with funding it as an investment. Prior to the late 1970s, tuition at the UC system was nominal – where the “part time summer job paid for college” beliefs came from – and it worked out well for California having so many graduates paying taxes for decades to come. The idea that education should be paid by the student is just tragically shortsighted (and dovetailed with nastier things: a lot of the late-70s “taxpayer revolt” stuff was also older white people deciding they didn’t want to pay for things their own kids no longer needed because the current beneficiaries didn’t look like them).
Housing, health care, and tuition were all far less expensive before the government got involved in them. More government interference will not improve matters.
My general sense was that the government was equally (or more) monetarily involved, in terms of total funding sums.
But less involved with regulating.
Then, inevitably, fraud and scandal happened, which begat additional regulation, which begat regulatory capture by industry.
And then the government stopped directly buying/doing most things, which introduced a new layer of intermediaries, which in turn required additional regulation to police.
The older I get, the more I think paying the graft tax for direct government production but getting a simpler, more manageable/agile system might be a preferable outcome.
But I just went through Springfield Armory last week... which managed to supply 1/2 a Civil War, most of 2 World Wars, and innumerable minor wars from a government enterprise (while innovating). So maybe government successes are readily at hand in my mind.
> Yes. A lot less. The US government was fairly small until WW2.
It looks like we went from ~20% GDP federal budget pre-WWII to ~35% 2023. [0]
Digging in, most seems like it's from the creation of health and social security entitlements? And certainly (sadly) most YoY growth. [1] [2]
> You have to look at the cost before determining if it is a success. Not simply the volume of production.
Well, cost and capability. There are many government functions that industry doesn't really need to do.
And if you create businesses for the sole purpose of performing government functions... aren't those just outsourced government departments, albeit managed by contract instead of directly?
And all this things are vastly cheaper almost anywhere else in the world. And almost everywhere government is hugely more involved than the U.S. And I don't mean just "Europe": also South-America and Asia.
But maybe the U.S. is a super-special case and whatever works for the rest of the world doesn't work for the US shrug.
For Americans without rich parents, tuition has gotten cheaper. Sure the base number has gone up, but that's to soak it to the rich and to foreigners. The availability of scholarships and bursaries is much higher than it was 40 years ago, reducing average costs significantly. For example, Harvard is free if your parents make less than $85,000 and not much more if their income is less than $150,000.
Life as a college student is definitely more expensive than it was, but that's mostly because of housing.
> Reuters reports that New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley was heckled at a speech in Queens today when he suggested that the rising cost of food is offset by how cheap iPads are. (2011)
No, it also means that if you cut costs in those three critical categories, you'll have a better life than people used to have before.
Lots of us were able to cut costs in housing. And many of us were able to cut costs in healthcare through preventative care. Tuition is entirely optional.
If you've got a mandatory need for a big house, have some pre-existing condition to maintain, and want to get a Harvard Divinity School degree then yeah, life's going to be much much worse.
For my part, I'm very glad I was born now and not then. Life has been so much better.
As someone who was essentially born with a pre-existing condition, I’m not so sure I timed my birth correctly.
No need for a big house or any more tuition - never wanted kids so I guess I’m saving lots of money there and then when I see what family health insurance costs these days during open enrollment, I’m pretty glad about that.
I’d say you timed it decently, little over a decade ago you could be denied insurance for a pre existing condition (and insurance costs were going up at an even faster rate then)
Thanks Obama I suppose though I have never bought insurance on the individual market; I’m reliant on remaining employed for my healthcare (good thing I like my employer at least).
It may be that the fix for me is a hip replacement which has had some advancements in the past decade or two so that is also something I suppose.
Yeah, many things are just random chance. Just bad luck. Can't be helped. But many things are a result of our actions given the constraints. I wouldn't trade my life for Al Bundy's.
Hey there. I'm pretty sure you're being facetious in your post. I just wanted to say, I'm really sorry. Missing out on family to "get" to save on insurance must be pretty bitter.
I don't really know why I'm replying. I'm sure it's no consolation to you. Just... it really hit me and I feel for you. I'm sorry.
Not being facetious, but you aren’t exactly reading me correctly. I’m not saying that I don’t want kids because of the costs. I’m saying I never wanted kids (having thought about this a bit I think it’s mostly because of my inability to believe in religion; I don’t have any happy stories to tell children around life’s difficult questions), and as a result, I have saved a lot of money.
It’s ok not to want kids but personally i just cant fathom ending a bloodline for no reason. I would feel bad for my ancestors. I feel like if they knew i did it they’d slap me. Though I can see why people chose not to have kids, all things considered.
I don’t see any reason to continue a bloodline either; there’s no reason to any of this and your ancestors are long past caring. They are gone as we all will be one day and then we will be inevitably forgotten.
In theory, we each have 8 great great grandfathers (though these things are not always perfect). I can name 1 of mine because I dug the grave for his youngest daughter who was buried at his feet, but he is little more than a name on a stone to me. Can you name more?
I’d say fundamentally that is what I don’t want to have to tell a child. Global warming isn’t looking too good either, and I’m happy to avoid that one as well.
I guess it depends on how one sees the future. My belief and hope is that we will become a space faring species and that we only have to hold on one or two more generations until we reach escape velocity, and once that happens we become “immortal”. We might indeed suffer from setbacks along the way but overall we will progress as we always did in the long run. And if that’s the case then it was all worth it.
Yes, I’d consider this one of those religious beliefs (going onto eternal life in the sky) that I’m no longer capable of believing in. I’m sure it is helpful for those who are though.
I would love it if there was a religion focused on conquering space, but there is none afaik. Actually i wouldnt mind setting one up - could do with the tax breaks.
I'd say it exists and is called more or less "Techno Utopianism" to which you might call me an apostate. As a kid, I lost the belief in god pretty soon after the belief in Santa (he actually is a god if you think about it), but I held onto the belief in progress/technology, even believing in the possibility of immortality via cryopreservation. But a lifetime of slowly escalating global problems and declining political environments with few solutions in sight has made it hard to maintain any kind of optimism. Even AI, one of the keystone technologies of the Techno Utopian has turned out to be just an even better bullshit generator, all the while the carbon accumulates in our atmosphere at an ever increasing rate.
Essentially, there is almost no part of this world I would wish to tell a child about, and seeing them today causes me much sadness. It used to be that I was envious of their youth because they would live to see science and tech advances that I would not, however these days I feel quite the opposite. Maybe I'm wrong; I hope I am, but it's hard to see a happy path for humanity these days.
> Even AI, one of the keystone technologies of the Techno Utopian has turned out to be just an even better bullshit generator, all the while the carbon accumulates in our atmosphere at an ever increasing rate.
I fully agree with this. Unfortunately ai is a bullshit generator and is controlled by bullshit people. I personally speculate that some are suffering from a mild form of schizofrenia but thats an entirely different topic.
However i do recommend a change in personal environment because things while grim are not as grim as to wish an end to procreation. Life os pretty cool in some places - the further away from corporate dictatorships the better.
> However i do recommend a change in personal environment
This seems exceptionally vague. If you're telling me to get therapy as many have, I can tell you I've been in therapy for much of my life at this point and on one medication or another as well, but they never seem to be able to create any meaning to any of this. I do have appointments with new ones scheduled actually, but I suspect I'll still be bothered by the same issues that have plagued me for much of my life at this point; the "Death of God" as Nietzshce would call it and the continuing environmental degradation I have to live through (my hometown set a new high temperature record this year and it was oppressively hot all summer). I don't think a new medication will solve this, but I obviously am still willing to try. I can't help but wonder, what if I'm not depressed, but simply see things clearly?
> I can't help but wonder, what if I'm not depressed, but simply see things clearly?
I am not of the opinion that you are depressed nor am i recommending therapy. What i am recommending is a change of setting. You’d be surprised how your outlook changes once in the right environment. Also i am not saying you are wrong all i am saying is that it depends on how you look at things and what things dominate your life and the setting influences both. Issues may be more acute in certain parts of the world than others. For instance in country people living in London can only dream of owning a property, whereas outside london thats not an issue. That doesnt negate the problem of london housing. Similarly weather patterns are shifting to worse in some areas but to better somewhere else. Theres loads of nuance around us.
It's a fair point and I appreciate the sentiment (and the extended HN conversation which is sometimes a rarity). I live in South Texas where I am a native and think about moving north as it only gets hotter here. I did mention the pre-existing condition earlier which makes things harder since my job, family, friends and support system are all local and built over a lifetime. Perhaps for me the change is to get a hip replacement and potentially alleviate much of my disability (which is mild compared to what some face, but gives me trouble nonetheless). It's a hell of a thing to imagine a doctor taking a saw to your femur and replacing it with titanium and plastic, but also an amazing feat of modern medicine no doubt. Maybe I'll just change apartments in the meantime lol.
Leaving one’s nest is difficult, particularly when it provides for all the needs. Perhaps one can leave just for the peak heat season, opposite of people leaving cold areas in winters. You go somewhere nice and cold for the summer. Or perhaps in the spirit of HN one can explore unconventional ways to cool down.
Surgery is tricky. I had one recently and asked the nurses to drug the shit out of me. When i saw pipes one with blood coming out of my belly and one stuck in my willy i felt i was going to pass out. I even considered asking to be put down humanely. When they pulled it out i asked for permission to curse and boy i did. A person in a bed next to mine said they had a boner when they removed theirs. To each his own i suppose.
But i did have my surgery, it’s all sorted and a thing of the past, i am recovering, all is good. It’s a thing that a decade or two form now will be just another “ah yeah i did that”. Water under the bridge. My mind is somehow erasing the memory because it now feels as if it happened in another life. Of course each experience is unique but overall i’m laughing at myself at how scared i was, and i am a full grown adult. I say that now but i’d terrified of doing it again. There were bits that did hurt but 90% was all in my head - mostly what ifs, and they suck more than pain. As everyone else i too have fears but some things just need to be done - assuming the risks are low, and other t&cs. Just like data, you “click” your head, switch in low power mode, and walk through hell. There’s light at the end.
Yep, I would occasionally spend a week in Colorado in August which is a nice respite, so it's a good suggestion and reminder.
And you're right about the surgery, though sadly it's not necessarily a one-time thing, but a part that could require future surgeries to maintain (though the hope is that current materials will mean it will last decades). Nevertheless I try and tell myself what you said, that it's a few weeks or months of life to recover and then on with it. The what ifs are indeed the worst, but both people I've talked to online and in my life have gone through with it much success. A therapist would say to focus on the good outcomes rather than the negative, and the statistics really do bare that out too.
> Lots of us were able to cut costs in housing. And many of us were able to cut costs in healthcare through preventative care. Tuition is entirely optional.
I've done all 3 of these things to great degree of success. I've always lived 1-2 hrs away from jobs, exercise like a dog, and skipped college.
I.e. the government got heavily involved in all three.
Contrast that with the software business, which is very free market. There is pretty much no government interference with it. And costs have trended to zero. Literally to zero!
if you weight inflation baskets by how discretionary the spending is i dont think wages are higher. theyre much lower. you cant live in an iphone but you can easily live without one.
“Inflation in core needs, deflation in everything else, wage stagnation.”
This has been called in-deflation or disinflation and has been the dominant paradigm since the turn of the century, at least in the US and much of the developed world.
The terminal end state of the disinflationary economy is desperate people living check to check but carrying supercomputers with instant access to all knowledge and all media in their pockets.
Wages have risen a bit lately (in real terms even after inflation) but not nearly enough to undo 20 years of the above pattern.
Food, water, and clothing are cheaper than ever. Healthcare and tuition are less fundamental needs. So that really only leaves shelter as the one "most necessary thing" that has increased in cost.
> Healthcare and tuition are less fundamental need
Eye, people who are sick and uneducated are very employable, have good prospects in life
> Food, water, and clothing are cheaper than eve
yes and no, we prodyce loads of unhealthy food cheaply, you wont starve. Fresh produce costs, organic, ethicslly farmed stuff us really expensive. The latter is probavly a closer comparison to food as it was produced in good old days
I didn't say they were unimportant, I said they were less fundamental. Refer to the hierarchy of needs: health is higher on the pyramid than food, clothing, and shelter.
I don't personally shop at Hot Topic, however, being largely furless, clothing is essential for the perpetuation of the species in many climate regions. Cancer hasn't been able to stop us anywhere.
The shoe stores that put Al out of business --- Al was an employee, not an owner, but whatever --- achieved market dominance long before anybody who wrote Python could expect $400k/yr. It's a funny dunk, but as a schematic description of what actually happened, it's not at all valid.
From the hilarious reddit replies, Al was making close to minimum wage at the time based on numbers from the show and realistic estimates of what 30% of a single minimum wage income could afford in south side Chicago. Seems that we have bigger problems than e-commerce when it comes to modern housing affordability!
Salaries are relatively flat compared to costs of food, healthcare, education, etc, etc and especially housing. The income to COL ratio is what to watch.
You said it isn't due to high salaries, which is a relatively discrete variable, instead it's due to supply, which is an abstract variable related to many other things including the possible rate of supply change compared to who the existing supply is available to, and how much people making the supply are getting paid to make it compared to what it costs to be that person, each of which influences each other. Supply is simultaneously a very useful thing to measure, and a comparatively meaningless discrete part of a system.
Sounds like you're overthinking it? Fail to build enough housing for five+ decades and watch what happens. The situation is not a subtle one where we need to inspect the tea leaves.
Not to mention real wages have stagnated for almost as long with 1%ers taking a larger and larger slice of the pie. Trying to blame the housing crisis on workers getting paid too much is misguided to say the least.
Fire every programmer in the world and at most it might make a temporary minor dent in the housing market. Those "overly paid" tradesfolks would pick up the slack in short order.
> Fail to build enough housing for five+ decades and watch what happens.
True, but that's just an abstract measurement of what happened, not that interesting when trying analyze the parts that affect it. Particularly when it comes to different geographical regions.
> Not to mention real wages have stagnated for almost as long with 1%ers taking a larger and larger slice of the pie. Trying to blame the housing crisis on workers getting paid too much is misguided to say the least, especially programmers, who are already all fired.
Blame, particularly blame aimed at specific income earners, is a different thing than saying it obviously has an affect. Dismissing a part of the system that has an impact is as silly as suggesting it's the only culprit.
But I also wasn't necessarily implying it's workers getting paid too much, that's just one of the bits that varies depending on context, but there's more than likely an inflow cash that currently and will continue severely outpacing supply, and whatever supply is created is often so expensive to build for a series of other reasons that it can only be marketed to an endless supply of buyers with an endless supply of money. Especially because of the reason you mention—decades of not building—one has to think of it as the complex system it is, with the bottlenecks and winners and losers it has. The whole thing doesn't work.
