> If the numbers were really that off in the past wouldn't quality of living be much less than it is for most people in the US?

Yes. Absolutely. I saw an interview of someone who talked about living in the 60s. He was saying how a painter could own a home, afford a wife and six kids with no problem without the wife even working a 2nd job. Today, a single painter could barely afford himself, let alone a family of six and a house. I know it's anecdotle, but the difference is so vast and stark, I think it's obvious there's been a huge difference in quality of life over the last 60 years.

I understand this argument, and I am somewhat in agreement with it. But here's where I'm skeptical. Where I live, there are some homes from this time period. They are very small, around ~1000sq ft. Maybe slightly bigger. Now people want much larger homes. They tend to have at least two cars and possibly more if they have kids. They go out to eat much more frequently and spend a lot more on entertainment.

Obviously, some of that you can't avoid. No one is making 1000 sq ft brick homes anymore for new homeowners, so you don't have an option of a small, cheap home in many areas. You only have the option of the bigger, more expensive home. But some of it is a personal choice. I think there is something to the argument you're making, but I also think people are underestimating the frugality of people in the past.

> No one is making 1000 sq ft brick homes anymore for new homeowners, so you don't have an option of a small, cheap home in many areas. You only have the option of the bigger, more expensive home

The bigger home is inherently cheaper, though. (At least, in the US).

A ~1800sqft new home (the average new low-end build out here in the midwest) takes way less resources and labour to construct than that old 1000sqft brick home did. Houses today are made out of the cheapest plastic and twigs (many don't even have a single piece of real wood in them anymore). Houses back then used bricks and real-wood timber (expensive to purchase, expensive to move, expensive to lay, etc). Your old brick house probably had expensive copper pipes, new builds use plastic PEX straws so cheap they're practically disposable, and so on.

Homes built today are made using far less labour, less materials, and far cheaper materials than before. If land and asset valuations had stayed consistent, homes today would be drastically cheaper than before. Yes, homes are "bigger", but those extra open empty spaces cost practically nothing extra, the fixed costs are mostly fixed and the variable costs are trivial.

Houses in my neighborhood have to be built strong enough to survive hurricane strength winds. The homes back in the day weren’t that much better. The ones you see survive to this day we’re either exceptionally well built or well maintained. But there is still plenty of trash with fresh paint being bought and sold everywhere.

You're getting cause and effect backwards. New construction small homes don't exist because they aren't as profitable for developers to build not because there isn't demand for them.

I can guarantee you there are effectively zero millennials living with their parents or with roommates in a small apartment who would turn down the chance to own an affordable small home.

I'm not getting cause and effect backwards. I just said no one is making those homes. I realize people would buy them if they were available.

"Frugality of people in the past". Or, looked at from the other side, "extravagance of people today".

Or, more neutrally, our standards and expectations have changed from the 1960s. If you want the 2020 life on the kind of job that got you the 1960 life, you're in for a disappointment.

But 1000sqft homes still exist and they are still wildly unaffordable.

I'm in the process of moving (new job), and so I'm looking for houses. There are 1000sqf houses that aren't trashed for $100,000. I'm expecting to spend $500,000 for a 2500sqft house anyway, and only part of that is houses close to work are bigger. (there was a 1200sq ft house near work for $250k - not that I would have bought something that small)

Where? Here in Montréal a 1000sqft house is in the 300k+ range.

I don’t have any of this stuff and I make a lot of money and am not doing that well.

I live in 500 square feet, don’t go anywhere(like to a bar) and don’t have a car. I don’t have kids.

> No one is making 1000 sq ft brick homes anymore for new homeowners

Well, the single-family detached suburban California home I bought as new (not complete when we signed) construction in 2006 was 997 sq. ft. on 0.1 acres, so other than “brick” that was certainly possible to find new not that long ago.

Yes, average home size has increased, but that's mainly for NEW homes, not existing homes.

You have to remember, those new homes are only bought up by about 1% of the population. So, to say that 1% can afford much larger homes is not saying much about the other 99%.

*immiseration of those who don't hold assets

Which is precisely what's been happening. Just take a walk around any major urban center in the U.S. There is misery in the streets. The opioid crisis is another manifestation of the same despair. Historic civil unrest, "eat the rich" / "billionaires shouldn't exist" rhetoric heating up. Etc. etc.

But none of those things are very recent.

It's been happening gradually over the course of the last 40-odd years.

> you would see a gradual immiseration of the population

good point, there's basically no evidence[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7] of misery across the american population.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_St...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police#Unite...

6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt#Social_and_politi...

7 - https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html

By this definition France and 1990s Seattle would be terrible places to live.

The opioid epidemic is potentially a real indicator of immiseration (not the same thing as misery btw), but I don't know much about it.

Interesting -- "immiseration", as far as I know, originates with 19th century socialist theory regarding rising misery among the working class due to relatively lower wages as capitalists accumulate wealth and subjugate them[0,1]. Granted, the term is obscure and jargonesque enough that in modern use it does generally mean, specifically, "impoverishment". Which in other words could be called misery from economic causes.

Please, allow at least a little breadth in the scope of rhetorical wordplay: immiseration is fundamentally about misery, and the links I gave are examples of the broad misery felt by the average American. That misery is not sourceless: my entire point is that that misery is due to the increasing relative impoverishment of the average person.

On the surface it is just misery, but when you think about the causes, it is apparent that it is immiseration, in the jargon sense: the people are poorer than they have ever been, and they are visibly angrier and more upset because of it.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immiseration_thesis

1 - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Das_Kapital_Volume_One/Chapte...

I see very little connection between the George Floyd protests and increasing relative impoverishment of the average person.

The George Floyd protest and the Capitol Riot are each outpourings of rage, directed at "the system". One was directed at the ongoing and increasing seeming criminalization of simply being Black in America, and one was directed at what the people involved thought was an unfair and stolen election, designed to take from them what little they have. Different people, different plights, different ideas: same root cause.

Happy, wealthy, comfortable, safe people who believe a bright future is in store do not take to the streets, burn buildings down, and get into large scale fights with their local police force. They don't throw bricks through coffee shop windows, hang out in tear gas clouds, or crowd up during a pandemic.

Their willingness to do so, over clearly expressed feelings of hopelessness and loss of control or participation in the system, over a feeling that they are losing out overall, it's coming from a place of desperation. It is coming from a place of misery. You've got to be pretty miserable if you think fighting the cops sounds good.

I'm sorry that you see very little connection there. It may unfortunately be that you see very little overall, or that you're intentionally looking away.

Ignoring your gratuitous insults in the last paragraph...

> Happy, wealthy, comfortable, safe people who believe a bright future is in store do not take to the streets, burn buildings down, and get into large scale fights with their local police force. They don't throw bricks through coffee shop windows, hang out in tear gas clouds, or crowd up during a pandemic.

Yeah, see, they could be wealthy, and still not safe because of skin color. That's the point of the George Floyd protests. If you see people like yourself getting shot by police for reasons that seem absurd, over and over, you don't feel safe. You don't believe in a bright future. You aren't happy. And economics has very little to do with it.

27 unarmed black men were shot by police in the US 2020. Most liberals think the number is 1,000+, and a large portion think it's 10,000+ [1]. Maybe you should factor this in to your analysis?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/lq7kvq/a_recent_...

I tried to be careful in how I worded what I said. If I were black (I'm not), and I saw news accounts over and over about police shooting blacks for what (at first report) seemed to be trivial reasons, I would not feel safe. The number doesn't have to be statistically significant; the reasons can be better than they appeared at first report. None of that matters. What matters is that the media is beating into my head that this is going on, so I think I'm not safe. Doesn't matter whether I am or not. If I think I am unsafe, everything I said in my post follows. (Including the main point - that this isn't about economics.)

Policy shouldn't be made based on people's feelings.

After all, most people feel safer driving than flying. They're simply, wrong.

We were never talking about policy, so I don't know why you bring that up. We were talking about the George Floyd protests, and whether it was caused by peoples' poverty.

One doesn't have to be black to feel unsafe. We also have to define the term unsafe. It depends on how often the issue is occurring and what that individual's risk tolerance is.

Exactly. It's just a media-induced frenzy.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be _gratuitous_, nor particularly insulting to you.

I wanted to acknowledge the possibility that our respective political beliefs, whatever they may be, might lead us to look for different types of issues in different places as root causes.

My own beliefs lead me to characterize choosing to believe that economic inequality is not integral to the Black experience in America as tantamount to wilfully ignoring a root component of the problems people face. If that belief is insulting to you, we may tragically be living in different worlds of experience, and might not ever have a meeting of the minds. That's what I was going for.

Despite that concern, from what you said, it seems like we might actually agree on a lot -- as you put it,

> If you see people like yourself getting shot by police for reasons that seem absurd, over and over, you don't feel safe. You don't believe in a bright future. You aren't happy.

That sounds spot on to me, and I absolutely agree that the fear of violence affects wealthy Black Americans too.

Regardless, the outpouring of rage from the community certainly transcended just the fear of violence from police. Violence is one particularly horrifying aspect of how the system hurts people, but people are being crushed all over, and people are mad about all of it.

Here is one quick example[1] of this being stated, sourced in one of the Wikipedia pages I originally linked (which explicitly lists "inequality and racism" as a cause of the George Floyd protests). This article is an interview with the Surgeon General of America, and says:

> The surgeon general pointed to Covid-19 disparities and other health care gaps among communities of color including maternal mortality rates and the opioid crisis, saying these issues and the frustration surfacing across the country are intermingled.

> “It's on the top of my mind as a black man, as a father, as a brother, as a son,” Adams said.

The brutality of the police is certainly the salient, focusing point of the protests, but the overall causes and broad outpouring are larger than that. The protestors have often called out the broad systemic aspects of racism, like healthcare access, home ownership rates, debt levels, access to quality education, and investment in communities of colour. Those sorts of things impact Black people's lives daily on scales far greater than police brutality, and they are economic issues at heart.

Police violence is uniquely horrific in its instances, and is the central igniting issue here, but the issues as a whole are much bigger than it alone.

1 - https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/01/surgeon-general-pro...

Sounds like we agree a great deal, then. I certainly agree that economic inequality is an integral part of the problems faced by blacks in America.

Lots of young people with nothing but time on their hands?

Had a look at those. I see a lot of political discourse, which is certainly related to economic prosperity, but only vaguely... Has the quality of life declined in the US? Have future prospects generally declined? If either of those is yes, we could be in big trouble..

On a zoom call with a group of ~12 friends from undergraduate school, there was an awkward moment where one of the friends jokingly congratulated 2 of the 12 on being able to afford a homes (recently purchased) and start families.

In mid 30s, all women, all have bachelors and have been employed long term, 3 of the 12 are married, 2 of the 12 have children, another 4 are paired up with long time partners, but there was a palpable unease and underlying depression about the future income prospects and lack of security about where they would be able to live.

Let me guess, they all want to live in a major urban center?

There are plenty of places in the US where housing is still affordable. Sure, maybe it’s not your first choice and maybe you won’t be keeping up with the Jones’.

Places like Austin, Denver/Boulder hell, even Seattle were affordable not that long ago. But they weren’t cool (which is why they were affordable). Suddenly they become desirable, housing prices go up and people complain they can afford to buy where everyone else is buying.

Yes, no one wants the tradeoffs of moving east of the Rockies, and everyone wants to be within 45min of an airport. But that's the awkwardness I'm talking about, caused by the gap in the group of friends of those who can afford to continue living where they want to live without making tradeoffs that the others would have to.

Years ago, buying a home seemed like something you can easily share and celebrate with acquaintances. Recently buying a home in the Bay Area, I felt that's passed and I try not to bring it up. I don't feel any satisfaction from celebrating or bringing up something that 20 people in a gathering have very dim prospects of ever affording, and questions about it make me feel uneasy about their possible uneasiness.

No. Boasting about buying an expensive home was never socially acceptable. Well, except maybe among the rich.

I agree, because it's expensive. But a modest American home was never that expensive for most adults, hence "house warming parties", and thus I'm fairly sure was socially acceptable.

I mean, I went to house warming parties 5 years ago when housing was not a lot cheaper in the Bay Area. As long as you don’t throw it in peoples faces you’re probably fine.

And “can never afford” seems like an extrapolation of the last ten years ignoring corrections that came before that.

For those of us who lived through 2008 it’s amazing how quickly we went from “i’ve never over pay for a house again” to “housing only goes up”.

How could you be in your mid-30's, married, and not be able to afford a downpayment for a home?

Seriously, like lets say 100k combined income yearly. Save 20k/year. Should be fine for a downpayment on a 200k-400k house.

Some people are so lucky, but let's say you each have university debt, and you have 2 kids, and you need to pay for childcare, and you have 2 cars so you can each get to your jobs, and your 3-4br apartment rent is 2-3k/month -- good luck saving 20k/year on ~70k take-home!

And that's all if you can live in a small-town-enough place where homes "only" cost 400k -- in many cities in the last 5 years (i.e. places where there are easy jobs to find), that's just not a realistic house price anymore.

I was a brick/stone-layer's labourer back around 2005, and we built a home that cost ~400k at the time, on the edge of a mid-sized town in southern Ontario. It was a mansion. Stonework, 4-car garage, big lot, 3 stories tall, 5 bedrooms, 3+ baths, the works. Today, I think that house we built could sell for ~1.5-2M.

Having 2 kids by 30 without being financial stable is kind of bad planning. They deserve to get crunched.

Where would you need cars and have to pay 2-3k for an apartment?

Prob like 1.5K/month, two economical cars. Pay off debt and build a nest egg, married at 30, kids at 32. Cook cheap and healthy meals. Outdoors for fun. No big drinking or expensive hobbies.

They can easily make it happen if they do the above.

It’s not my fault that people can’t prioritize and strap down.

Because they're not willing to make the tradeoffs that come with a $200k to $400k house. I don't even think there are houses for $400k though, even before 2020.

Of course there are. Just not in the hot spots on the east and west coast. If you go outside of those you can get ridic cheap.

I meant where I live.

you can do this for any snapshop of time, it is only now that socia media makes events that decades ago would have gone ignored, major news.

Ok, try doing that in the late 90’s and see what happens.

> if inflation was actually much greater than they've claimed you would see a gradual immiseration of the population.

Have you been watching the news lately? Keep watching. Violence and deaths of despair are skyrocketing and will continue to.

I don’t believe that. Any data sources?