On the topic, I found this informative: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1963?amount=1
“ $1 in 1963 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $10.21 today, an increase of $9.21 over 61 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.88% per year between 1963 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 920.69%.”
Also: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1964/demo/p60-04...
“ The median income of all families in 1963 was about $6,200; but for families headed by college graduates, the median was $9,700. The median for all families was about $290, or 5 percent, higher than in 1962. Consumer prices rose during this period by about 1 percent; therefore, not all of this amount represented a net gain in purchasing power for the average family.1
Median family income in current dollars has more than doubled in the postwar period (from about $3,000 in 1947 to about $6,200 in 1963). This rise was accompanied by a gradual upward shift of families on the income scale. However, consumer prices have risen substantially during this period so that only about three-fifths of the increase in current-dollar incomes represented an increase in real income. In terms of constant (1963) dollars, median family income increased from $4,200 in 1947 to $6,200 in 1963. This increase was less pronounced than the increase in current-dollar income, but it was nevertheless substantial.”
Averages are lossy to begin with.
My whole point is using multiple indicators to build an understanding.
You can keep repeating yourself but you only come off as naive.
Truer words have never been spoken. Fiscal conservatism died with Reagan.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/e...
Democrats controlled the House the whole time, so how’d he manage that?
> while running on a hideously bigoted platform
What a remarkable assertion.
Out here in the wider world, American elections are more terrifying every time they come around.
Their goal is simply to live their life as richly as they can at the expense of those they consider less than themselves. They are the wealthy and they act accordingly.
Why anyone sees Republicans as anything else boggles my mind.
Anyone who isn't a billionaire and is voting Republican may as well be a turkey voting for Thanksgiving.
pretty wild to think that surplus was in part driven by the internet boom. now we have some kind of stock market boom while the federal deficit is 10% of total GDP and national debt is growing by a trillion dollars (a million times a million) every 100 days or so.
The first is a kind of economic engineering with trade-offs and conditions and acknowledged edge-cases, the second is a brand supported by some rather culty dogma.
Which is why Italy and France have such strong economies, right? What’s really standing in the way of economic growth is that the government isn’t paying for people to get free degrees in left wing studies.
remember not to conflate a strong economy with an economy that is worth living in. you can possess minimum paid jobs in order to make profits for shareholders and never see a dime of that wealth yourself, but alas, you live in a strong economy.
Do they? PPP they all have lower disposable income than the US and they are not even at the top in Europe (including social transfers). Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands are above Norway and Sweden is even lower than France.
It’s not true Scandinavian countries have more spending power. The OECD keeps very detailed economic data. The US has the highest PPP disposable income in the OECD: https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di.... It’s about 67% higher than Sweden and Denmark.
Now you might say, but Swedes and Danes live longer and are happier. That’s true! But as far as I can tell, Americans would rather live shorter lives and have more TVs and trinkets. My parents came back from traveling in Australia. My mom was ranting for weeks about how small and close together the houses are and nobody can get really rich. We are immigrants from a third world country. All of my family members that have come here think that “making it” means living in a McMansion and driving an SUV. I don’t know if it’s something in the water, or the people who come here are just that way, or maybe a bit of both. But it’s worth contemplating that Americans are making rational choices based on their particular utility functions.
Then you pulled in "libertarian" out of nowhere. Which is an obvious set up for another strawman, so lets lean into it. Whats a "libertarian"?
You can be wrong without being a strawman. When every example you have of X is Y, it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y" — when you're wrong like that, it's a black swan.
Sometimes yes, but not always.
> but if every example you have of X is Y
Is that actually true though? Are you not assuming perfect rationality on behalf of the poster, and that they have an adequate sample size, which tends to be subject to who the individual associates with.
> it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y"
That depends on the truth of the matter.
>when you're wrong, it's a black swan.
Only if the initial guess was correct.
You may be describing appearances. That which cannot be seen does in fact exist, it just doesn't seem like it because it exists in a different realm, and how our culture is trained to think about such problems spaces.
No it doesn't, user exclaims their ignorance and your follow up emboldens their ignorance does not make a QED.
> When every example you have of X is Y, it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y" — when you're wrong like that, it's a black swan.
Either way, I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth, I hope you don't go around proclaiming you're the arbiter of all that's right in the world.
The very thing you quoted demonstrates that mine allows for people to make errors without condemning them as deliberately weak setups.
> I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth
If you do not like how your words are perceived by others, you should consider choosing them more carefully.
Despite your lack of appreciation, this comment is one which I am still only able to read in a way which suggests that you are stuck with this false dichotomy:
> No it doesn't, user exclaims their ignorance and your follow up emboldens their ignorance does not make a QED.
No.
> If you do not like how your words are perceived by others, you should consider choosing them more carefully.
Lets see, you deliberately trolling and being bad faith is somehow my issue. Interesting.
> Despite your lack of appreciation, this comment is one which I am still only able to read in a way which suggests that you are stuck with this false dichotomy:
No. You lack the fundamentals.
It all comes down to the cost of housing, at least in the UK where housing has been ridiculous for over 20 years. That housing is driven up to soak all available income by artificially constrained supply.
All available income has increased on a household basis because of egalitarian reasons -- more women work now, which means that more women have to work now. The excess income is lost to housing costs.
It seems to me that the whole equality propaganda mostly comes from less desirable women who would have a much harder time finding a highly valuable man that would be able to bring a lot to the home (either in the way of money or skills, craftmanship, etc). They wrongly determined it would be better for them if they could be like a man. But reality doesn't care much about feelings and what happens is that those women still get the less desirable man and if they go at it solo, they find out the hard way that there are many things a man provide that are very costly if you have to pay for it in the market. One thing too often overlooked is the importance of a man in children upbringing and there are some nasty statistics about single women raising kids that pretty much depict that very painfully.
In the end it doesn't matter, everybody's got much poorer for it, the only winners are the bourgeois women who started it all, who already had a lot of power in the first place. But I guess it was the intended result even if it came at the expense of all the lower social class...
Well, maybe 25% for the budget deficits. The Fed is responsible for 75%. They keep over-goosing the economy. They keep saturating the money supply. That devaluing is what inflation reflects. That is your money is worth less (and appears like prices going up).
That does not indicate that there are secretly a lot more coal miners, it just indicates that people are clinging to and showing off an identity that they like and want to be represented by.
I would rather disagree with GP's:
> My point is that inflation isn’t abstract and it isn’t a law of nature. It’s a deliberate approach to stealing your prosperity while you cheer it on.
A lot of the inflation, including how suddenly a single-income household isn't a viable option for most people in the West, is market working as intended - quickly consuming any surplus money, should it suddenly become greater than 0 on average, and slowly eating into any value that isn't bare-minimum strictly necessary to move a product.
However, when a person is making a post saying "don't trust those dodgy manipulated numbers" and offering alternative numbers, their post is a lot less convincing if their numbers are also dodgy
For example, during the pandemic the UK government set itself a target for covid testing, then proudly announced that they'd hit their target - but it turned out they were not counting the number of tests processed in labs but instead the number of test kits sent out by mail regardless of whether they were received, returned, or processed - allowing them to declare success before increasing lab capacity. It's not outright fraudulent, but it's questionable and errs in a politically convenient direction - that's a dodgy number.
And as I understand it, the claim in this discussion is that the government changed the definition of inflation, in a way that made the number lower? And that it now doesn't accurately reflect what it purports to reflect?
Sounds like dodgy manipulated numbers to me.
What class has shown absolutely insane growth in wealth and income in the face of what looks like crippling inflation?
Your standard retiree on the other hand who holds a lot of bonds that got absolutely hammered by inflation and rising interest rates is not doing so well.
That's not necessarily true. Per FRED (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25FEUSM156S), in 1963 about 44% of women aged 25-55 were in the workforce. That's obviously much lower than the ≈96% rate for men, but it implies that the average couple had closer to 1.4 incomes. The comparable rate based on today's labour force participation rates would be about 1.66 incomes.
The single-income family may have been the norm, but it was far from a rule. I think that our popular perception of life in the 60s has been filtered through media portrayals, which all tend to reinforce ideals as commonplace norms.
We just dont know what % of those were single mothers, widows, divorcees or single women, etc.
Is a child with a paper route 'in the work force?'
> This is a ridiculous exaggeration: the average US household was 3.7 people
The avg figure in your rebuttal doesn't well reflect the commonality of large US households in the 20th century nor their change during that time.
According to US Census data, the % of US families with 4 or more children fell 10fold during 20th century.
Early 1900s: About 35%
Early 1910s: About 26%
Early 1920s: About 23%
Early 1930s: About 19%
Early 1940s: About 18%
Early 1950s: About 21%
Early 1960s: About 21%
Early 1970s: About 10%
Early 1980s: About 5%
Early 1990s: About 3%
Early 2000s: About 3%
Early 2010s: About 3%
This is a ridiculous exaggeration: the average US household was 3.7 people in the 1960s, not over 6[1].
There are good reasons to hold politicians to task for recent abnormally high inflation. But this comment is more of an atavistic fever dream of the past than an expression of those reasons.
Edit: another source puts it at 3.3[2].
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183657/average-size-of-a...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...