The standard of living has gone up IMHO bc of increased efficiency in the face of dwindling resources. We don’t all live in stone mansions with servants, but a nice apartment built to code as cheaply as possible with electricity, AC and a roomba is by some measures a better life than anyone on the planet had 100 years ago. As a builder, you make more money too.
Car insurance is legally mandatory if you drive a car. If your income is predicated on being able to commute by car (as it is for many Americans, though hopefully a trend toward remote work will ameliorate this somewhat) then your insurance is no more optional than your gas.
People also talk about smartphones as though they're a luxury item, but for most intents and purposes owning one can be viewed as required. Tons of services, including your bank, require a cell phone for authentication, if not to use their services at all. Everyone from your boss to your spouse has an expectation that you can be reached most if not all of the time. I try to avoid being reachable at all times, but this is a luxury I can afford because I'm relatively well-off and technologically adept, and I still can't get around 2FA requirements for everything.
So like, if that stuff is bought with "disposable income", is rent?
And the median and average for disposable income is a lot higher in the US than in Europe. US disposable income is only comparable to the most affluent nations of Europe: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland.
Americans waste an enormous amount of money on consumer garbage. Until recently it was very common for households to have $150-$200 / month cable or satellite TV plans. It's still common, just slightly less so thanks to Netflix etc. $200-$300 family smartphone plans are common.
Americans also flip in and out of cars frequently, losing huge sums of money doing it. And they buy ridiculously over-priced new vehicles, which they keep for relatively short periods of time.
Please please don't redefine economic terms to suit your intuitive belief about what a word "should" mean because you are wading into an area where you don't know the agreed upon terminology. That impedes communication.
If you want to refer to income after paying necessities, then this is "discretionary income".
Our standards are way higher these days cause the truth is we're all spoiled.
I wont make the comparison to 100 years ago (as you did) because that was a period of time including 2 world wars and the great depression., But adjusted for inflation, people generally have LESS discretionary income now than they did in the 60s. Again, this is hard to corroborate with official poverty statistics due to changes in the cost of living (and conversely, the provision of benefits such as food stamps), which are frequently petitioned to be amended.
Over 12% of americans have such low discretionary income they have to rely on food banks - a figure comparable to the 1970s.
10x more people in the UK are accessing emergency food from food banks than they did 10 years ago.
It is a terrible state of affairs, to be honest. Please dont use disposable income :)
Maybe you should check your privilege. Your 50% discretionary income is FAR from the norm.
Median income is less than 45k (gross - this means before tax, etc) - than means 50% of the population earn LESS than that. 25% earn less than 24k. 10% earn less than $9k...
These people cant afford a small house, let alone a big one...
Just to be clear so there's no ambiguity. I don't care about the poor in america. I seriously could care less. My entire family immigrated to the USA in the 90s and none of them are poor. They all self made themselves into upper middle class lives within 20 years. Meanwhile Americans born in America with every advantage and privilege just whine all day and want more more more for nothing.
Also sick and tired of constantly having social justice internet warriors tell me I'm privileged when I'm literally self made from zero. It's not privileged when you work your way up from fast food to six figures tech work. that's called "earning" things. Please learn the difference.
Honestly, your lack of awareness is quite astounding - but it appears that you are overentitled as well as privileged, so that kind of makes sense.
Im sorry you care so much about my opinion.
Also, there is still a price ceiling. If they charge too much, people will choose the cheaper alternatives even if they aren't as good.
You can given enough time. Your second point is more likely the real reason. These jobs might seem to pay lots from the outside but if you dedicated the same time to a more boring job like management you very quickly make a lot more money with almost unlimited room to bump your prices.
This is from a German perspective, but here this is absolutely untrue. Masters earn a hell of a lot of money and business is basically limitless, even for masters. Being charged 120€-150€ per hour plus drive for a master and an apprentice is not unusual.
Add to that that they start earning 5-9 years earlier. Sure, they start lower, but they have a lot of time to catch up as well as save money. In my circles, these guys drove awesome cars while us students survived still survived on ramen (or parents).
Lastly, you can absolutely scale your business. If you go on to be a freelancer or even make your own company and hire people, you can get very far, if you intend to do so.
Sure, the absolute top of white collar workers might earn more; eight digits is probably not going to happen. That being said, that's the 1% of the 1%. Here in Germany, 100k€ per year is already a really high salary and to get there in white collar work, you'll need to make quite some career jumps. For masters, on the other hand, this is absolutely doable if you don't suck at your job.
100 * £10 > 50 * £19
It plays into the other really: you have to multiply your fee by more than the reduction in volume to make more money; if you break even on the trade, in a way that's great, less work same money, but now you're not practicing.
So there's a trade-off there, and for it to be obviously worth it, there really has to be a significantly outsized boost to fee compared to reduction in number of people prepared to pay it, that just isn't going to happen unless you had it really wrong to begin with.
(Maybe if you're already on the very high designer end you can suddenly go 10x or more as a result of being 'discovered' or going 'viral'? But not lower on the ladder, like the difference between DIY shop 'it works' vs. bespoke; carpenter vs. joiner; as discussed above.)
Crown molding and things went out WAY before any of these supply chain issues you've brought up from the last 1-2 years.
The cost of trim wood is exponentially more than it was 50 years ago, and on top of that you cant find anyone who knows how to make custom ornamented trim.
It was most likely CNC made and hand assembled. The guy doing the assembly would have no clue what to do without the CNC’d parts. The guy designing the CAD files would have no clue how to assemble the CNC’d parts. Neither of them know how to install the cabinets in your bathroom. This used to all be done by the same guy.
Plus
It's not the cost, it's the availability. I'm currently in the process of a home renovation. If you want a master craftsman to build you say, kitchen cabinets, you may have to wait years for them to be available.
Or you can go to the store and buy custom built cabinets from a factory and have them in a few weeks.
It's the same with the outside of the house. You can build a generic outside with supplies from Home Depot, or if you're really fancy the contractor's supply depot, or wait years for a master to do a custom job for you.