> You can measure a country's success not by how much its top-earners pull down but by how much those at the bottom make.

Wealth isn't measured in how much you make. It's measured in choices.

You can measure a country's success by how many choices those at the bottom have.

https://mises.org/blog/wealth-isnt-just-measured-money-%E2%8...

> It would be if not for the problem of housing and transportation being vastly more expensive than they were in the 1960s. You could get a cheap suburban home back then for less than a year's salary. Try that now and you're living 300 miles from the nearest city.

You've now correctly identified the problem. Housing costs in the US are out of control and have been for a long time because we have policies that promote housing as an investment asset that should always grow in value. Many baby boomers have their entire net worth tied up in housing and have supported policies for decades that increase the value of that asset to support their retirement. Housing has become a vehicle for an inter-generational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.

Or if you prefer Mill:

It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements.

Chapters on Socialism, p. 713.

"Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."

-- Karl Marx

https://goo.gl/LJh3Kh

Spending trends for Americans over the last 75 years:

https://howmuch.net/articles/american-spending-past-75-years

it's worth noting that housing has also gotten much bigger since the 1960s. A source worth looking at is the American Housing Survey, which is put out by the US Census Bureau.

What I find most telling is that average housing in 1970 is comparable to sub-poverty-line housing right now, in terms of total square footage and number of rooms -- and average housing in 1970 had considerably fewer amenities (fewer full bathrooms, less likely to have a full kitchen, much less likely to have AC or in-unit washer/dryer, etc.)

I won't attempt to tease out all of the issues that led to this, from changes in demand to zoning regulations to developer preferences. Just pointing out that "housing inflation" is a major driving factor in the cost of housing. As others have pointed out, there isn't a lot of affordable housing inventory, particularly not in big cities.

If those houses were less then houses available now, it would also be worth looking at how they compared to high income housing of the era. My guess is these changes have been societal and it's proper to assume that cost should decrease or stay the same while function improves.

you can see from the link malandrew provided about American spending habits (in a sibling comment to mine) that Americans are spending considerably more on housing, on average.

I don't believe the surveys cover "high-income" housing, but they do show median / middle-income housing growing by the mid 2010s to roughly triple the 1970s square footage. Inflation-adjusted, that means lower cost per square foot.

But it's certainly worth thinking about whether the shift to much bigger housing has been an entirely positive one, or whether it has drawbacks.