There's a faulty assumption baked into your comment that most Americans are actually buying/using new things. My apartment building was built in the 1970s, I would happily drive a 1970s muscle car if I could find one at a reasonable price, and in the 1970s you could actually see a doctor without worrying about going bankrupt. Also in the 1970s the building and car would have been new, so I would probably pay you to give me those things today.

> My apartment building was built in the 1970s

Yeah, but in the 70s you'd probably be living in an apartment built in the 1930s. The ones actually built in the 70s were a small minority back then, just like the ones built in the 2010s are a minority today.

I don't think that's true. Remember that there was a massive post-war boom in population and construction starting in the 50s and extending for several decades until the land got used up in cities. Chances are if you were old enough to rent an apartment or buy a house in the 70s, it was built within the last 20 years.

Most people probably already live in places that are older than 40 years.

And there's no automatic reason that doctors and manufacturers should have captured the increased value of their procedures and products.

A lot of us live in significantly higher priced 1979 or older housing, which is way more expensive as a percentage of average income as far as monthly payment goes compared to back then.

Similarly with cars, they still got you from a to b in a good enough fashion.

It’s the 80/20 rule, and many people would buy 1979 level items if they were available at 1979 prices.

I'd love to be able to buy the house my parents bought in the mid-1970s for $35K, it'd be a step up from where I'm at now. It be a good thing if affordable and practical cars like my dad's VW Beetle were more common. And you know, I'd love it if our society had the kind of access to healthcare that we had back in the 1970s. Even in the late 1980s it was possible to graduate from a state college with only a few thousand dollars of debt.

You wouldn't have to pay me to live like that. Though I wouldn't want to go back to the kind of energy infrastructure we had back then.

We made it all illegal, ignoring the fact that not all Americans can afford the fancy stuff. Maybe there was even offense taken that some people would have less-fancy things.

So now our typical building code says you have to pay for copper wires instead of aluminum, you need arc-fault interrupters instead of circuit breakers or simple fuses, you need wired-in alarms in every room, an air conditioner must be installed, balloon construction is prohibited, walls need internal cross bracing, studs must be close together, and on an on. If you can't afford all that, evidently you aren't supposed to have a home.

Likewise, producing the original VW Beetle and selling it would be illegal. You have to have a zillion air bags, all very expensive. You have to have a camera and a screen. You have to have ABS or even traction control. You have to have a catalytic converter. You have to have more than one brake light. The turn signals must be lights. If you can't afford all that, evidently you don't belong on the road.

It also ignores the extreme improvement in the US social safety net since the late 1960s, which is generally ignored in such discussions. That has improved the lives of the bottom 1/3 by a lot, which is not captured at all in the wage growth figures. As one example, it has led to a very large improvement in childhood poverty rates (about a 50% reduction in childhood poverty since the early 1990s):

https://i.imgur.com/OrMwlkT.png

You can also see that wage growth by the bottom half has soared (up four fold since mid 2013), and is now well outpacing wage growth by the top half:

https://i.imgur.com/Mi6mgme.png

Not sure why this is being downvoted. Provided sources and all. Seems like a reasonable comment to me.