To me this all just looks like a big frothy chemical reaction playing out far beyond any one person's control.

With that view, many things oscillate over time, including game theory patterns (average interaction intentions of win-win, win-lose, lose-lose), and integration / mitosis (unions, international treaties, civil wars),etc.

So my optimistic view is that inevitably we will get more tech whether we want it or not, and it will probably make things worse many for a while, but then it will simultaneously enable and force a restructuring at some level that starts a new cycle of prosperity. On the other side it will be clear that all this tech directly enables a better (more free, more diverse, more rewarding, more sustainable) way of life.

I believe this because from studying history it seems this pattern plays out over and over and over again to varying degrees.

When you say that this pattern plays out, can you be specific?

I don't have time to be precise, but I'll do my best to be more specific.

New system better at organizing human behavior -> increases prosperity -> more capacity for invention -> new technologies disrupt power dynamics -> greed and power-law dynamics tilt system away from broad prosperity (most powerful switch from win-win to win-lose) -> majority become unsatisfied with system -> economics break down (too much debt, not enough education, technology increasingly and disproportionately benefits wealthy) -> trust break down -> average pattern of behavior tilts towards lose-lose dynamics -> technology keeps advancing -,> new technologies disrupt old power structures -> restructuring of world-powr order at highest levels (often through conflict) -> new system established, incorporating lessons learned from the old (more fair, more inclusive) -> trust reestablished, shift back to win-win dynamics (cycle repeats)

In reality it's more messy than this. Also the geographical location of this cycle and the central power can move around. Some places may sit out one or more cycles and get stuck.

Either that or the AI robots kill us all.

Could go either way.

My guess is that whatever actually happens it will be very different than what the average person has imagined could happen (including me).

The majority of people are already doing ”bullshit jobs” and many of them know it too. Using AI to automate the bullshit and capture the value leaves them with nothing.

The AI evangelists generally overlook that one of the primary things that capitalism does is fill people’s lives with busywork, in part as an exercise in power and in another part because if given their time back, those people would genuinely have absolutely no idea what to do with it.

I find your stance kind of confusing.

What do you mean by bullshit jobs?

I've heard the term before I think even read a NYT or Atlantic article about it maybe a decade ago. My hazy recollection were jobs that added no actual value to society.

If this is true, then what value is there for AI to capture?

Also, do you really think that the majority of jobs don't add any value to society? I find that hard to believe in a free market.

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children.

Every kind of a man, or woman?

> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite.

Well, this probably why statistics exist.

Thanks for pointing out this skewed view of economic history common in North America.

The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else. We can see the economic crisis' in the US first in the 70s/80s with Europe and Japan rebounding, then again in 90s/00s with China and East Asia growing, and now again with the rest of the world growing (esp Latin America, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Philippines, etc). Unless US physically invades and devastates China, India or Brazil the competition will keep getting exponentially higher. It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.

> In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.

Don't give them any ideas.

Were there a lot of imports at that time in terms of materials or labor or food? If not, I don’t really see how money flowing in from abroad actually changes the economy in this area. If the wood is harvested in America and the workers are in America and the wood and workers are available, then any amount of money value generated by everyone else will be sufficient to pay them, unless there is a significant stream of imports that need to be paid for (which I’m not aware of in this time period).

What could have made a big difference is if foreign competition arose for American materials and land, which it did. But that is under our control, we collectively can choose whether to allow them to buy it or not, and whether to let people in at a rate that outpaces materials discovery and harvesting capabilities.

We also restricted materials harvesting quite a bit during this time period, for example I believe a lot of forestry protections were not in place yet.

> It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

What does this sentence mean?

I assume the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.

So "social capital" == "education"?

The US has pushed a shit ton of money into education. I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.

Education is part of it. But a lot of the social capital which makes societies prosperous is separate from what we usually consider to be education. On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted but they forget that there are a large number of fellow citizens in the economically disconnected underclass who never had a good opportunity to learn those basics. As a society we've never done a good job of lifting those people up.

The existence of an upper class necessitates the existence of a lower class. You can't just pull everyone up to be above average.

What's your point? I didn't make any claims about averages. We could do a lot more to improve opportunities and social mobility for people caught in the permanent underclass.

But we have. The underclass today has much better lives in many aspects than the highest class from many decades ago. The absolute level of wealth has increased, it's simply that the delta between the high and the low is widening.

Would you rather live equally in poverty or live comfortably with others who are way more wealthy than you? Surprisingly people do seem to prefer the former, though I'd prefer the latter

This is the sort of reductio ad absurdum inverse relationship that never survives a reality check.

You do have to go back several decades for that to be true, though.

In the US at least, progress in life expectancy and real wages has really stagnated in recent decades.

> On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted

I don't see your point.

Those rules does not apply to the upper class and middle class workers have way more leeway regarding that than the lower class.

This seems to be saying that a large fraction of poor people are poor only because of bad habits, which they have only because nobody taught them any better?

There will be some people like that (e.g. middle class kid has terrible work ethic; communicates it to his kid and now that kid has bad habits), but in the large it's more about culture than individual habits.

If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating.

As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the productive white farmers in 2000-2001. One of the key issues charitable foreign people trying to help Zimbabwe addressed was in re-educating the local population in why it matters that all the planting work is done by a certain time of year. The white farmers had all that knowledge, and cultural experience of hard work, and had made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time

The productive decline of the farms is because of the fast-track land reform. Before 2000-2001, there were no effective national programs to prepare the people to run the farms. The opposition party was gaining ground, and so to stay in power, the ruling party rushed the land reform with no preparation.

Not sure how this is a relevant example of a culture that don't value punctuality.

Well, for the reason I said. You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility from everyone involved, but that's just an example of how to reframe things. It's not actually useful.

> You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility

No, the comment you're replying to pretty clearly put the responsibility on the party that "rushed the land reform with no preparation".

And also accurately noted that a nation seizing capital and redistributing it to people who don't know how to use it is rather different from what had been the thread topic of personal skills / useful habits being purportedly unattainable by the lower classes without explicit instruction.

The alternative view would be that differences of culture and values do not materially impact one's chances of becoming financially successful, right?

"The alternative"... no, one of those proposals being false does not require that the other be true.

That comes from growing up in a two parent family where both parents are responsible and hard working and willing to discipline their children.

Government can’t really do much to help with that.

> I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.

This is wrong.

The increase in administrator pay began well after the crises cited in OP.

You could cite spending on the sciences (and thus Silicon Valley), but the spending by the US did not accrue to administrators; and further, federal money primarily goes to grants and loans, but GP is citing a time over which there were relatively low increases in tuition.

Edit: Not at home, but even a cursory serious search will turn up reports like this one that indicate the lack of clarity in the popular uprising against money "[going] to administrators"

https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/who-to-believe-on-u...

For universities, yes. But not for primary education. Administrative bloat is the worst in K-12.

> For universities, yes. But not for primary education. Administrative bloat is the worst in K-12.

First, where is your data?

Second, this discussion is clearly about post-secondary education ("the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.")

Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.

Things that let workers focus on innovation. IT workers in cheaper countries have it much easier while we have to juggle rising cost of living and cyclical layoffs here. And ever since companies started hiring workers directly and paying 30-50% (compared to 10-15% during the GCC era) the quality is almost at par with US.

>>> It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

>> What does this sentence mean?

> Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.

Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?

Cheaper education? Public K-12 schools, the GI bill, generous state subsidies of higher education (such that you could pay for college with the money you made working a summer job).

Free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support? Wages high enough to raise a family on a single income, allowing for stay-at-home moms to provide childcare.

> Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?

Yes, but education system is being dismantled piece by piece at all levels. I work in edutech and our goal is to cut costs faster than revenue. Enrolments are down, students are over burdened with student loans, and new grads can't compete in the market.

Also, do you think kids going to K-12 in the US can compete with kids who go to international schools in China and India? High end schools in those countries combine the Asian grind mindset with western education standards.

> Wages high enough to raise a family on a single income, allowing for stay-at-home moms to provide childcare.

This was a special period of post war prosperity that I mentioned. It was unnatural and the world has reset back to the norm where a nuclear family needs societal/governmental support to raise kids, or need to have two 6 figure jobs. "It takes a village to raise a child" is a common western idiom based on centuries of observations. Just because there was 20-30 years of unnatural economic growth doesn't make it the global or historical norm.

Education is a tough one. Like healthcare, it's highly subject to Baumol's Cost Disease. Technology holds some potential but fundamentally we still need a certain ratio of teachers to students, and those teachers get more expensive every year.

https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/baumols-cost-disease-long...

Education should be well funded. But at the same time, taxpayers are skeptical because increasing funding doesn't necessarily improve student outcomes. Students from stable homes with aspirational parents in safe neighborhoods will tend to do well even with meager education funding, and conversely students living in shitholes will tend to do badly regardless of how good the education system is. If we want to improve their lot then we need to fix broader social issues that go beyond just education. Anyone who has gotten involved with a large school district has seen the enormous waste that goes to paying multiple levels of administrators, and education "consultants" chasing the latest ineffective fad. Much of it is just a grift.

>> Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?

> Yes, but education system is being dismantled piece by piece at all levels.

So? That's not really relevant to the historical period you were referring to when you said: "It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs."

At the time, Americans already had many of the things you're saying they should've invested in to get. How were they supposed to predict things would change and agitate for something different without the hindsight you enjoy?

> This was a special period of post war prosperity that I mentioned. It was unnatural and the world has reset back to the norm where a nuclear family needs societal/governmental support to raise kids, or need to have two 6 figure jobs.

Exactly why do you think it is it unnatural?

I think you should be more explicit about how you think things should be for families. Because going on an on about how the times when things were easier was "unnatural" may create the wrong impression.

Also keep in mind where talking about human society here, the concept of "natural" has very little to do with any of it. What were really talking about is the consequence of the internal logic of this or that set of artificial cultural practices.

> How were they supposed to predict things would change and agitate for something different without the hindsight you enjoy?

By comparing themselves to their counterparts in other countries. By 1955 there should have been alarm bells ringing as Europe re-industrialized. Same with 70s oil crisis but the best that US could do was to cripple Japan with Plaza Accords.

Americans even now have a mindset that nothing exists beyond their borders, one could assume it was worse back then.

> Exactly why do you think it is it unnatural?

Because only two industrialized countries were left standing after WW2 and those two countries enjoyed unnatural growth until others caught up - first the historical powers in Europe then Asia.

> By comparing themselves to their counterparts in other countries. ... Americans even now have a mindset that nothing exists beyond their borders, one could assume it was worse back then.

That's not realistic, except in hindsight. Most people everywhere pay more attention to their immediate environment and living their lives. Not speculating about what is the global economy is going to look like in 50 years, and how would those changes affect them personally.

You're talking about stuff only some PhD at RAND would be doing (or would have the ability to do) in the 1960s.

Without the democratic pressure of common people either 1) having a need or 2) seeing things get worse, no changes like you describe would happen.

> Because only two industrialized countries were left standing after WW2 and those two countries enjoyed unnatural growth until others caught up - first the historical powers in Europe then Asia.

What's natural?

And more importantly: how do you think things should be for families.

The US is not perfect by any measure, but your argument that the US doesn't have innovative nor "high-value" jobs is absurd beyond belief.

Right, because Europe is so innovative.

The mother of invention is idiomatically necessity, not comfort.

Ultimately, increased levels of competition should lead to higher levels of innovation.

Btw, what is "the GCC era" a reference to?

Europe is quite innovative on per-capita basis. Not like US but the workers there have much happier lives and their societies don't have extreme inequality and resulting violence like the US.

China is arguably more innovative than all and has terrible work life balance, but their society is stable and you won't go from millionaire to homeless just because you had to get cancer treatment.

GCC = global consulting companies, the bane of innovation. Outsourcing of all kinds (even domestic C2C) should be banned.

Is GCC an acronym you just now came up with, or is does it commonly mean “global consulting company” in your part of the world?

I ask because, when I do a Google search, the two most common meanings for that term are “Global Capacity Center” and “Gulf Cooperation Council”.

If you accept patent applications as a proxy for innovation, then https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/patent-applications-per-m... suggests that Europe lags behind both China & the U.S.

Also, China is 3rd, behind South Korea & Japan

That & the differing levels of patent application per capita across Europe suggests that patent applications are directly related to work/life balance & perhaps some sort of infonomic aggregation & doesn't seem to support any correlation with quality of life.

You don't understand what's happening in China. Advanced cancer treatments are generally not even available to poor people. Instead of becoming homeless due to medical expenses they just die. The US healthcare system has serious problems with access and efficiency but it's at or near the top worldwide in terms of cancer survival rates.

Chinese society is more "metastable" than really stable. The Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square massacre weren't that long ago. Chinese history going back millennia is full of violent revolutions and civil wars. Xi Jinping has been able to keep a lid on things lately through brutal purges of all other potential power centers but times may get "interesting" again when he leaves power.

>The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else.

The US just renamed "Department of Defense" to "Department of War" and they seem willing to go to any extreme to "Make America Great Again". Threatening to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama already in the first few months of the current administration. Using US military on US soil. There's no line they won't cross. WW3 isn't off the table at all, unfortunately.

So you're saying that working-class living standards are a zero-sum competition across capitalist countries, even negative-sum as competing national economies grow their total output and hourly productivity?

That sounds like a really shitty system.

> Thanks for pointing out this skewed view of economic history common in North America....

> In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.

So, what's your point? That the plebs shouldn't expect that much comfort?

A common maxim across all cultures is to "manage expectations" for happiness.

And while comparing societal standards expand the time horizon to 100 years, not nitpick one specific unnatural era of history.

An automotive engineer in Detroit in 1960 was a globally competitive worker because most of his counterparts in other countries were either dead, disabled or their companies bankrupt.

The equivalent in today's world would be aerospace engineers, AI researchers, quantum engineers, robotics engineers, etc who arguably have the same standard of living as the automotive engineer in 1960s Detroit.

Economic and technological standards evolve - societies should invest in human capital to evolve with them or risk stagnation.

> An automotive engineer in Detroit in 1960 was a globally competitive worker because most of his counterparts in other countries were either dead, disabled or their companies bankrupt.

> The equivalent in today's world would be aerospace engineers, AI researchers, quantum engineers, robotics engineers, etc who arguably have the same standard of living as the automotive engineer in 1960s Detroit.

You know were not really talking about top-end positions like automotive engineers in Detroit in 1960. I think we're talking more about automotive factory workers in Detroit in 1960.

> Economic and technological standards evolve - societies should invest in human capital to evolve with them or risk stagnation.

You need to be more explicit about how you think things should be for the common man.

I hope you understand the concept of relative prosperity - The current equivalent would be a factory worker at Boeing. In 60s cars were innovative in US, now Nigeria can outcompete China in cars.

Times change, standards rise, competition increases. If America wants to remain competitive globally you need to work in the top 1% fields like you did back in 60s, not expecting $25 per hour for flipping burgers (which should have been automated with robots by now).

You need to be more explicit about how you think things should be for the common man.

> It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

Are you aware of the plan Marshall?

Or of Silicon Valley, or Hollywood.

Everywhere else being destroyed doesn't raise your standards of living. The main difference is the difference between post-war East Germany and West Germany. One got socialism and the other capitalism.

I'm not going to engage with you on a debate because you aren't acting in good faith.

Yeah if you bar over 50% of your workforce from working at market clearing wages then naturally the other 50% are going to get paid at their expense. When you underpay minorities and often outright ban women from working formal employment, it's not hard to see how wages for the others remain high.

Well congratulations! We have succeeded in having stagnating wages and stagnating standard of living for everyone now!

Do you want to take a 20% pay cut so I can take the marginal benefit? Who wants to volunteer to be barred from working so I can negotiate better salary?

I have no full time job, so I already took the cut. You're welcome.

Lemme guess, we should bring back Bretton Woods?

Will you volunteer to not work so that I can instead?

> Every kind of a man, or woman?

Why do so many people miss the point on this?

Instead of making this dream true for all the people who were previously excluded, we have pursued equality by making this dream accessible to NO ONE.

> Well, this probably why statistics exist.

Like the statistics on plummeting mental health and happiness, an obesity epidemic, increases in "deaths of despair", and plateauing or decreasing life expectancy?

You're both right. I take your point to mean similar to the disastrous outcome of "no child left behind" act. I do agree with you, but people didn't seriously _intend_ for the result to be everyone lowers to a shit position.

Or maybe you're saying that's always how these initiatives turn out? It can't be helped?

It's important to remember that people are not some homogenous mass.

There were certainly some rich and powerful people who did intend to lower everyone (else) to a shit position.

That's what stuff like anti-union policies are about. Sure, they drape it up in nice rhetoric, but ultimately the intent is to reduce the power (and thereby the material outcomes) of the common the worker.

But of course there were also other developments that had the effect more unintentionally.

>Why do so many people miss the point on this?

Because one party wants to return to those times with the exact same social norms. So it's a dangerous line of thinking to forget that women were walled out of many jobs, or had a huge wage gap when they were let in. As well as minorities only barely starting to really get the same opportunities after a lot of struggle.

>Like the statistics on plummeting mental health and happiness, an obesity epidemic, increases in "deaths of despair", and plateauing or decreasing life expectancy?

Yes. When it affects the majority is only when we start to pay attention.

I think there is something to be valued about historical accuracy.

> Like the statistics on plummeting mental health and happiness, an obesity epidemic, increases in "deaths of despair", and plateauing or decreasing life expectancy?

In the 60ties, suicide rates went UP. Peaked around 1970 and we did not reached their levels.

Long terms statistics about alcoholism rates and drug use are also a real exiting thing. We know that cirrhosis death rate was going up in the 60ties up to 70ties, peaked and went down. It was the time when drinking and driving campaigns started.

Current drug use is nowhere near what it was a generation ago.

> we have pursued equality by making this dream accessible to NO ONE.

Nah, that is not what has happened. Equality is more of an unrelated thing. Business owners and capital are by their very nature opposed to the dream. Even if in a given moment of time they may give concessions, the endless drive for returns and growths means that sooner or later it will always get to the point where we are.

The problem here is capitalism.

I originally upvoted the parent comment. But I changed it.

"The good ol' days" ... yeah, but good for who?

The good old days... that never were!

Life has improved for nearly everyone on nearly every metric. But if one myopically focuses on house purchasing as the only thing that matters and takes anomalous post WW2 period, then sure, things are bad (ignoring the fact that housing space and quality + amenities improved dramatically, but hey, who cares about nuance, we just love to complain!)

> Well, this probably why statistics exist.

How are statistics going to answer this question? Statistics are used to measure things. They don't tell you what things you should be measuring.

A lot of the people who admire the caricatured midcentury economy are probably actually just nostalgic for the '90s. Case-Shiller was much lower, gas was cheap, college was still relatively affordable. The biggest economic complaints of the present day were not as serious then. (There were still affordable parts of the Bay Area!) The subjection of black people and women that existed in the 60s obviously wasn't necessary for those things to be possible.

But each decade's economy is the product of decades past. The policies of the 90s brought us to the present. So we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the 90s, and the 80s are associated with the iniquities of the Reagan administration. Thus you get this misplaced nostalgia for the 50s-70s without really understanding the problems or the progress that society made even as the highest levels of government seemed to drift off course.

> Every kind of a man, or woman?

Exactly.

What about black people or any other minority? Black people couldn't even vote until 1965. Housing discrimination and things like redlining would prevent people from living where they wanted even if they had the money.

What's crazy is that people will jump all over themselves to say "well you could totally live like that at a 1960s level" like that's even a viable possibility today (in the US).

What's that about the falcon and the falconer? The center cannot hold..

People do make it work in the US with tiny incomes and a better standard of living than you’d see in a typical 1960’s household.

I know people raising a family of 4 on 1 income well below the median wage without a collage degree. They do get significant help from government assistance programs for healthcare, but their lifestyle is way better off than what was typical in the 1960’s.

Granted they aren’t doing this in a ultra expensive US city, but on the flip side they’re living in a huge for 1960’s 3 bedroom house with a massive backyard.

Finally a rational comment and not blind hating-complaining. Thank you

According to the census bureau median family income in 1960 was $5,600, which is $58,946.59 in Jan 2024 dollars. It's $83,730 in 2024.

For individual males, in 1960 it was $4,100 ($43,157.33 Jan 2024 dollars) and $71,090 in 2024.

Sources:

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03...

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

The thing is, a 1960s standard of living would be totally unacceptable by almost everyone today. Single car max, no air conditioning, small house or apartment, multiple children sharing bedrooms, no cellphones, no Internet, no cable, no streaming. Local calls only. Children allowed outside by themselves.

I think you're out of touch with what "almost everyone" considers an acceptable standard of living. I know plenty of people who have a single car or none at all, live in apartments living pay check to pay check with no kids at all because they are afraid they can't afford them. They would love to have what you described, minus the no cell phones/internet.

A random idea I had a few years ago was, what if someone started a “recent modern Amish” community, where they just intentionally keep the community’s tech usage either fixed at 1960s or 1990s, or maybe a fixed number of years in the past like 30 or 50 (meaning, the time target moves forward by a year each year).

So the kids growing up now might be playing the original Nintendo NES, or maybe an N64, they’d have phones and even computers, etc.

It could even be a little more nuanced like, the community could vote in certain classes of more modern goods.

I feel there is something unsound with that comparison, because you could also apply it to kings of history, simply by listing things that technologically unavailable or unaffordable.

Imagine transmigrating King Louis XVI (pre-revolution) into some working class professional with a refrigerator, a car, cable TV, etc. I don't think it's a given that he'd consider the package an upgrade.

“Pre-revolution” is doing a lot of work in that sentence

The point is to compare the daily life the monarch would have considered "normal."

"Pre-revolution" is just to preempt any "Hurr hurr he'd be ecstatic not to have his head chopped off LOL."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Louis_XVI

now tell us how they calculate those inflation adjusted dollars-- what basket of goods? prices in which markets?

They've cited and linked their sources. What's the issue?

The "issue" is the comparison is much more complex than people may be led to believe. It's not a simple "adjust the dollars to be the same" calculation.

There are a lot of assumptions that go into making that calculation.

If I tell you that the value of a dollar you hold has gone down or up this year versus last year because of the price fluctuation of an item you never have or never will purchase, such as hermit crabs in New Zealand.

Would you believe your dollar is worth more or less? What if the price of a good you do spend your dollars on has an inverse relationship with the price of hermit crabs in New Zealand? Or what if the prices of the items you do buy haven't moved at all?

The issue is that it doesn't support his preconceived notion that everyone is doing terribly.

Actually I outlined what I believed the issue is before you replied and it's not that.

Your post is just a more verbose version of what I said.

Your "concerns" are all well known and accounted for when calculating things like the consumer price index.

You're assuming my "concern" is that the OP is wrong. Which is why i specifically took the time to talk about value being up or down.

I get you're just pissed off for whatever reason, but I'll still try to explain more.

My point is not addressed when calculating the consumer price index because i'm saying that a single selection of prices and goods to produce a single price index does not tell a person what the value of their money is unless they just happen to be literally the median consumer.

Are you going to sit there with a straight face and tell me you buy every single item that is used in that consumer price index? In every city? You're just not being serious if that's the case.

You're confusing a price index that minimizes the error in measuring inflation when applied to a large varying amount of people with what i'm advocating which is a price index that's personalized to and minimizes the error in measuring inflation for an individual. Other people's buying habits and prices for things in places where they live don't need to go into a personalized price index.

I'm not pissed off.

It's tiring watching people with no idea what they're talking about repeat the same "what about ..." arguments when professionals in the field have spent decades developing and maintaining models that have been proven over that time to be helpful.

It's also not a coincidence that nearly 100% of the people trying to poke holes in those models are people who disagree with the results generated from them, and that nearly 100% of those people don't have a clue about the topic at hand.

Of course a broad based index that is designed to represent the behavior of hundreds of millions of people is less accurate for you (or me, or anyone) personally than a model based solely on an individual's behavior. I don't know anyone on earth who would argue otherwise.

As a reminder, you started off by making a very lazy statement broadly criticizing a post that included well cited economic data showing that the inflation-adjusted median household income has increased substantially since the 1960s, which was in response to yet another terminally online doomer incorrectly claiming that your average American is worse off today than they were then.

You're now claiming that your issue with the provided data showing that people are overall financially better off today than they were in the 1960s is that that data isn't tailored to you (or any other individual) personally? I think that just demonstrates the validity of my original comment, because that's an absurd criticism.

FYI, you don't need to "advocate" for a personal price index. Track your spending over time and calculate it. If you want get much use out of it, you're going to want to incorporate the CPI data for your metro area as well (which exists and is publicly available) so you can both compare your spending to the median and backfill missing data as needed (for example, historical childcare expenses when you become a new parent).

> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. It will just be used to stomp on ordinary people and create even more inequality.

The problem isn't "more technology" (nor is the solution "less) but rather a change in who controls it and benefits. We shouldn't surrender-in-advance to the idea that the stompers will definitely own it.

> The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains.

More like the last 50 years.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

"For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades"

The TL;DR is that in 1964 the average hourly wage was $20.27. As of 2018, average hourly wage was $22.65.

1974 median individual income was $28k 2024 median individual income was $45k

Over 50 years that’s a decent amount of growth. Obviously it could be better but it’s not nothing.

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Sure but pretty sure with your 1974 28k you could buy a nice house, whereas with your 2024 (equivalent) 45k you can buy an OK car, not a house

In theory this graph is already inflation-adjusted.

In practice, I think this shows why economic statistics are borderline lies.

The problem is inflation. We have no way to reliably measure it over any long time-frame. Make the time long enough, and it even stops making sense as a concept.

> "In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children."

In the 1930s, it wasn't possible so what's your point? (History time: What happened on October 24, 1929?) Choosing the 1960s as a baseline is artificially cherry-picking an era of economic growth (at the expense of the rest of post-WW2 Europe and Asia who were rebuilding) instead of an era of decline or normalcy.

> cherry-picking an era of economic growth

But we already did the growth. We didn't shrink back. So we should still be able to get those results.

I will not attempt to make a judgement as to the effects of this, but just so you get an idea of the enormity of the change:

World population:

1960: ~3B

2025: ~8.3B

It was a VERY different world. That growth might not have gone anywhere but it’s not a very significant amount of wealth in today’s terms.

People are very worried about birth rates because for a while it will mean that there will be too few people of working age, which will be a disaster. But big picture, perhaps a correction is overdue, we cannot make people’s lives better if we keep adding people faster than we are growing the world economy.

You always need to put history in the context that the world was pretty empty. Less value was created but there was less competition for resources and it was easier for certain groups to stand out or dominate.

1900: ~1.6B

1750: ~750M

1500: ~450M

1000: ~350M

1: ~250M

Competition for what resources? Food we still have plenty of, green revolution and all, and almost everything else is limited by labor so it should scale fine with population.

Land is the main thing that's limited, but getting a smaller yard doesn't fix much.

> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society?

It has been for the last few thousand years.

That ended in around 2010, IMHO.

Now technology mostly divides and manipulates us, enshittifies things, and works to turn billionaires into trillionaires.

It's not technology that is doing that.

> I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people.

AI healthcare, for example. Have an entity that can diagnose you in a week at most, instead of being sent from specialist to specialist for months, each one being utterly uninterested in your problem.

The AI only works kinda decently for ONE specific field, where you still need to take the xray anyway and need the machine and the operator to do it.

> That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it.

I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hungary, where the government gives massive tax breaks (IIRC they spend around ~6% of their GDP on child incentives), has low birthrates. Europe, East Asia, India, the Middle East, the Americas, basically the whole world except for central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (which are catching up) has low birth rates. Obviously the economic conditions between basically all the countries in the world varies wildly, but there isn't a consistent relationship between those conditions and fertility.

Also within countries, the number of children people have is not always correlated with wealth (and at times in the past 60 years it has been negatively correlated).

Anyway, I find your argument intuitive, but it doesn't seem to align with the data we have.

In which of those countries is it possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children?

I mean that I know of first hand, just the US and Japan. "Possible" being a low bar that just means that I've seen it at least once.

I don't think data with all of those factors (household income, number of earners per household, gender of the earners, home ownership, and number of children) exists for any country. Do you have data like that for 1960s America or is your argument based on extrapolations from watching Leave it to Beaver?

But if we abstract your hypothesis slightly to: fertility is lower now than in 1960 because people are less financially secure now than they were in 1960, I don't think the data we have supports this.

I have seen it all across the EU. Is pretty doable (granted, you have a University title). But you can absolutely buy a home and have a couple of children which will have absolute all they need.

Yea because the average Joe totally has a university title. However in Germany a lot of poor people have many children while a lot of academics have less [0]. It's "doable" also doesn't mean its pleasant. I have checked the rural housing market recently and for a somewhat acceptable house you will have to pay easily ~3k per month given you have a somewhat big start capital. Not sustainable if one person loses their job for a while. Not to say it was that much easier back in the day, the housing market is just beyond fucked for most ordinary people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany

A decent Flat in Germany, for example near Stuttgart, with good connections with train is about 300k. There are credit lines for 25 years with relative low interest rates. For that you are way lower than 3k per month (assuming 0 downpayment). With 2 people working in a household, you can afford that. Granted, you will not be the "typical" german doing 3 times a year nice vacations. But doing a "real" 1 or 2 week vacation once every 2 years is pretty much standard outside Germany, I think.

The price you noted will not buy you a decent flat in the vicinity of Stuttgart with good train connections. At least not for a family. The prices are around € 4.4K/m2. And that's the median. For newer buildings it's up to € 5.5K.

A 30 second search: https://www.immowelt.de/expose/274a3450-a403-4cd8-9ca5-44dc9...

A 10 second look: the garage place for one car is an extra 20k. The heating is 27 years old, so are the bathroom installations and the kitchen. I, personally don't want to sit on a 27 year old loo. To get this on to a modern level - at least another 50k.

Edit: I just checked on the laws etc. 2-wire electric installations are no longer allowed and property owners are obligated to renew them. In this case that would have to be done in the complete house with all other owners. Congratulations, there go another 50k.

That of the 2 wire is just wrong. At this point I do not know if you want to win the discussion or what. I live in a 2 wire-wired house. As long as I do not change the installation, is all ok.

Wann die Änderung verpflichtend ist Bei Neuanlagen: Die klassische Nullung darf seit 1973 nicht mehr für neue Installationen verwendet werden. Bei Modernisierungen: Wenn im Rahmen von Renovierungen oder Erweiterungen gearbeitet wird, müssen betroffene Stromkreise auf ein separates Null- und Schutzleitersystem umgerüstet werden. Bei unsicheren Anlagen: Ist der Bestandsschutz nicht mehr gegeben, weil Mängel oder Gefahren bestehen, die die Sicherheit für Leib und Leben oder Sachen gefährden, ist eine Umrüstung erforderlich.

You can live without a garage. Can't you? In Germany a car is pretty safe in the street. And I assume, you do not have a 50k+ car, if we are discussing "why can't I buy a house"...

Kitchen and Bath look perfectly usable for many years still... That is what I mean. People say "I will not have a house" but what they mean is: "I will not have a perfect house, with completely new bath and kitchen, garage, lots of room for everything, very well located" well, no, you will not. Sorry.

I agree about heating. But 50k is for the whole building, which will probably have reserves, so it will cost you maybe 5k to 10k spread in 6 months or so. And you get state help because you will surely go for heat-pump, means it even goes a little down. So the price goes to 310k...

The point about the bathrooms and tiles isn't about perfectionism, it's about mould. After 27 years of use I'd renovate wet usage rooms to reduce the health risk for my children. The same goes for the kitchen.

If the owner community decides on a heat pump, the wiring will have to be completely renewed. If the owner community decides on a modern oil heating system, the wiring will have to be renewed.

Parking your cars in the street while there is the option for a garage is somewhat antisocial, but let's not moralise. The garage is not optional, it's not sondereigentum or else it would have to be mentioned, so you'll have to pay.

What you are buying with this property is major financial uncertainty. There is a reason for this price.

I live in the middle of nowhere in Northern Germany. A house where you wont have to tear down the whole place starts at 400k. And that's a basic small sub 100m^2 house with no garden.

Sorry but I wont get myself into 40 year debt for a bungalow.

After my father's death we sold our old family home for ~70k€ 15 years ago. It would have been in the 300-400k range nowadays. My salary certainly did not double - triple in that time frame.

Inflation and rich people buying asset class drives everything up

Ill just live for rent and let landlords leech my hard earned money. Gives me freedom to leave whenever I feel like it...

I am already 30, wont have a good start capital at 40 and I for sure wont buy a house that late in life.

How much do you wxpend wvery year on vacation and “going out“

I know plenty of people in germany who repeat continuously that stance, and they recognize they spend well over 10k/year in vacacions.

Ill fly to Japan next year. First foreign country vacation in 14 years. Estimated costs 3-4k. I go to concerts every few months so I spend a few hundred bucks there. Other than that most of my money goes into rent and food. I have some somewhat expensive contracts though. 50€ phone, 50€ internet.

Going out is living life though, I wont reduce my quality of life for decades just so I can afford a house.

But in short, I do barely spend money on vacations.

You are certainly not the type I am referring to. Even if you cut all that, will not help a lot.

Anayway my story: never ever sid vacation abroad.Vacation outside my home only every 2 or 3 years. Never eat out. I have no idea how is it to go to a concert. No expensive hobbies. When I was 40 all of that provided 40k for a down payment.

I do not regret it.

I can manage to save 500-1000€ per month. For me the biggest issue is just the general pricing. Maybe its emotional too, but I have fond memories of my family house when I was a kid and I dont want to buy comparatively a bungalow for quadruple the price.

TBH, if the german economy keeps in this track, at some point the prices will go down... the problem is at that point everything will go down.

You are talking house… I did not say house. I said home, meaning anything, including a flat. Yes, owning land is expensive. So what?

A flat is barely worth it given you still have to bother with neighbors. Those are also 6 digit numbers up here. Not happening. I want a home like my parents used to have. Regular old German refugee home with a nice garden, 3-4 rooms, 2 levels, 2 bathrooms, small cellar. Sounds big, was a rather small house though. Garden had space and a shed to work in. We sold that for 70k 15 years ago and I wont buy a flat for 130k where I possibly have to bother with noisy neighbors.

It's a simple catch-22

- women don't want to leave the workforce because one salary cannot support a family

- yet women remaining in the workforce, since single-salary is infeasible, thusly doubling supply of workers, lowering salaries, which itself makes it infeasible to single-income a family

Not to pick on women, as a feminist if you ask me, all modern men should have to be houseboys to serve their feminine masters. It does suck but it is necessary to benefit the modern women who did not suffer, in so by causing modern men to suffer -- to make amends for the suffering of all women in the perpetuity of history at the hands of all historical men, neither of which are alive today.

Well that's the point, men are refusing to suffer.

There is little incentive to walking in a contract, where you are working all the time, no appreciation, love, gratitude or even a thank you. All the time being made to feel like you are not measuring up. And they'd rather be with somebody else apart from you. That done, you also come back from work and do all the chores you would if you remained single.

And if a few years later the other party decided to break the contract, now they take your home, get monthly pensions(with raises), and get to start the process all over again with somebody else at your expense.

Plus these days kids don't stay back with aging parents to care for them, so having kids appears pointless as well.

By and large, let alone an incentive, marriage and children seem to a massive negative for men. Hence I wouldn't be surprised low marriage and birth rates all over the world.

Why would you want to do all this? When you can work, keep the money, and spend it for your pleasure by staying single?

Except that it is men who complain constantly about wanting to marry and have kids while women are much more content being single and have friends.

You dont have to pay alimony of the wife worked thw whole time. That complain is funny in the comtext of men demanding to return back to time where alimony arrangement was necessary protection.

Even in marriage, it is more of women who initiate divorce are report higher hapiness after the divorce. Men report lower hapiness and are more likely yo want to marry again.

Its in the nature of men to work and provide. That's how men seek fulfilment in life.

But if you dial up the pain in the process men will bail. This shouldn't be surprising.

Perhaps the most primal biological set up of all, the very basis of evolution is response to stimulus.

> Its in the nature of men to work and provide. That's how men seek fulfilment in life.

i'm sorry, what? it's ingrained in men to be worker-drones and every man sees this as his fulfillment?

yikes. as the kids say, 'touch grass'. translated for older people, "maybe expand your world-view and don't extrapolate your idea of a man to all of men."

Men are workers. Not all work needs to be a "worker-drone", but yes, all men are built towards some form of work, and that work typically is around an item of sorts.

Men can work all sorts of ways, and that can include raising kids. Women tend to be a lot less happier leaving their kids to go toil with the dirt.

> Men are workers

What are women, then? Baby-machines, cooks and cleaners, which I guess you don't see as work?

I mean it's not the first time I encounter a dude with the same opinion as you have, but every time I'm surprised by the casual reductionism of our societies. Men make work, Women make baby. Men hard, Women soft. Men strong and powerful. Women weak and emotional.

> Men make work, Women make baby. Men hard, Women soft. Men strong and powerful. Women weak and emotional.

On average those are true though, men work more, women take more care of children, men are harder than women, men are stronger than women, and women are more emotional than men. On average.

It is fine for women to be manly and men to be feminine, but that doesn't negate the fact that most women are feminine and most men are masculine.

Agree to Disagree, I've spent enough time of my life to discuss this exact topic. Men® are Men® and Women™ are Women™, so be it. On average everyone is exactly the same, as long as you look at the same gender. Wait, what's gend...forget it.

"All people are the same" argument basically negates thousands of years of history, basic human knowledge, etc. Biology impacts quite a bit. For example, if your family comes from Asia, chances are your more prone to lactose intolerance than European-based areas. It's also why most Asian dishes don't have any sort of cheese or dairy - there was no real history of that type of agriculture compared to Europe. To ignore all this and throw it out so that people can pretend to be the exact same is to throw all of history out the window, and to pretend that we're not standing on shoulders of giants that helped craft modern civilization as we know it.

Men are Men, and Women are Women. But Women wanted to be like Men, so they did, but Men don't like Women as Men, and Women are shocked to learn this.

Now people don't even know what a Woman is.

> But Women wanted to be like Men, so they did, but Men don't like Women as Men, and Women are shocked to learn this [...] Now people don't even know what a Woman is.

even though i did write that i am done with discussing this topic with people, a sliver of hope was was in my mind. maybe if i continued engaging, you would make a clearer point. but you started by comparing racial, geographical quirks of different cultures to a 50/50 gender split over the whole world. more asian women and men are lactose intolerant, but surely 99% of their women are obedient housewives and 99% of the men are workhorse providers. globally, of course, in every culture. that's just the way things are, respect history, yo.

then you decided to go on a rant about women specifically wanting this and that. and then decided to top it all off with some nice transphobic(call it what you want) bs.

i don't have the energy to seriously reply to this, and even if, it probably wouldn't matter anyways. cheers, Man®

> Except that it is men who complain constantly about wanting to marry and have kids

Easy to want that when "have kids" just means "impregnating your wife". Bet most of them would balk at the prospective of a 2 decade long 24/7 childcare duty routine if they had to do it themselves. Plus, if they really wanted to raise kids, many in orphans would benefit from a parent

You can spot a guy who 100% contributed to his divorce a mile away.

Basically a glowing LED billboard.

A woman who intentionally went corporate and avoided having kids, and wasted her maternal instincts on someone else's profits, will suffer when their body clock catches up to them, and the company leaves them behind.

You can't go back and get pregnant. And your marriage probably ended in divorce already anyway by now, which is a whole more amount of suffering.

Why do you feel the need to tell others how to live their lives?, frustration with your own?

I'm not telling them how to live their lives. I'm just predicting the path that is made based on the choices made.

Everyone is on a journey, and the path their journey takes is partially the choices made. People are allowed to think hard about their choices, and the choices of others.

If they want their path to go their, so be it, and but it's cruel to not discuss the ramifications of choices made.

what if you are wrong in your conlusions and thinking?

Ordinary men have wifes and two children in all those countries. You are also projecting American lifestyle "buying house without family help is necessary" on countries "hungary" where this was not an expectation for a really really long time. Like, generations.

Two of my friends with relatively ordinary jobs have stay at home spouses. The cost of daycare is so high that it would basically eat up one of their salaries, and this way they get to actually spend time with their children, which they find to be more filling than a BS career.

It is definitely doable in the US, and I would imagine most Western countries as well. My knowledge outside of them isn't current enough to speak for the rest.

It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved. People will never own a house if they didn't have skin in the game by 2021. Salaries are not rising to match housing price inflation.

Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down.

More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no diversity of supply, and builds aren't undercutting the market yet.

> It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved.

Why? Almost everywhere a majority of people (and certainly the majority of voters) are already invested in housing and do not want their investment to loose value.

> Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down.

People are more willing to spend an ever-growing share of their dual-incomes on housing, which drives housing prices modulo interest. So interest has no actual effect on housing affordability, since it doesn't influence how much people are willing to spend. If you lower interest, prices are simply going to rise such that people spend the same % of their income on housing. If you increase interest, prices will (eventually, slowly, since this is a seller-dominated market) fall to match.

> More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no diversity of supply, and builds aren't undercutting the market yet.

New builds will never be cheaper than existing housing stock. Low-cost new housing is a mirage; new housing is premium by construction.

It doesn't help that new builds seem to focus on the high end for housing (because that is where the profit is). If we keep building more expensive housing it shouldn't be surprising that the average cost of housing increases.

People buying their first house almost never got new housing - ever. They’d buy a starter home, which was older, needed some work, etc.

A big issue here is expectations - people are complaining because they can’t buy their own standalone house in a good neighborhood right next to work - while work is in a high demand, high pay area.

Also, well paid work is centralizing, so so the gradient is getting steeper (or was, pre-remote work).

Guess what, that was never the norm!

But a lot of people did buy in what were at the time low demand, high supply, areas that later became high demand areas! Like early Los Angeles.

Also, everything is getting more expensive relative to ‘hour worked’ because of centralization of capital, and more work force participation.

It absolutely helps - people who move to high end housing free up other, cheaper apartments (recent economic paper has clearly showed that this works, you can easily find it)

No, what doesn't help is that the new builds aren't nearly enough. If they were quantitatively sufficient, it wouldn't matter if they all targeted the high end, because the people moving in to it would be pulling demand away from other existing units, with a ripple effect across the whole market.

What many people don't realize is how badly the total housing inventory has fallen behind what is needed for the population since the Great Recession.

> If you increase interest, prices will (eventually, slowly, since this is a seller-dominated market) fall to match.

That may “fix” home prices but not the important thing to most, monthly payments.

Diversity in property means condos with various configurations, rowhouses, townhouses, multiplex (duplex, quadplex, sixplex).

Where I live, the local government decided to remove zoning thereby allowing more varieties of properties.

Price comes down in the sense that the missing middle provide options between condo to townhouse to detached

> house prices [...] need to go down heavily.

As a layperson I have a feeling that's not going to happen. The working class has too much wealth tied up in their homes because US society and the government have encouraged people to treat it as a store of wealth instead of a box that shields them from the weather. People talk constantly about "getting on the property ladder", "buying more land because they aren't making more of it", "having a landlord side hustle", etc. A house is a lot more tangible than stocks so people without knowledge of finance feel much better about investing in one (understandably so - also forget about Social Security). Combine this with associated government tax subsidies and mortgage underwriting programs and you've basically created a situation where home prices can't do anything but go up.

Look at the amortization table for the proposed 50 year mortgage: borrowers wouldn't be making a dent in the principal for a good 10 or 15 years. The underlying assumption here is that people would make money via home price appreciation, i.e. speculation, not from creating an actual store of value. We already kicked this can once when the 30-year mortgage became a thing 60 years ago.

Of course one can't draw the current trend line into infinity because of affordability but I highly doubt it'll go down appreciably. I also don't know enough to have a solution to this problem - any ideas?

The uneven demographic curve shows that many elderly current homeowners will have to sell over the next couple decades due to death or moving into assisted living facilities. That will increase supply and reduce demand, although the impact will vary widely by region. Don't expect any major price reductions in popular areas but there may be further collapses in certain rural and economically stagnant areas. You can look at Japan for a preview of how that plays out.

Tax planning can help here. By converting the house to ownership by a tax-advantaged trust , a family absolutely can continue to extract rent from a former property without selling. Doubly so if the mortgage is paid off.

Sure, that can help affluent families in some cases. But many elderly people will be forced to sell (or reverse mortgage) their real estate holdings in order to pay for long-term care. Fees at decent assisted living facilities are often in the $8K per month range now so the only way to afford it is to sell the family home.

> More supply isn't helping much either,

that's because "more supply" hasn't been anywhere close to enough supply, judging by historical housing needs by population age demographics. More supply is absolutely the key thing missing, but it needs to be a lot more supply.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-ex...

There are millions of vacant homes in the US. There's even a fun little infographic that breaks it down by state https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/vacant-hous...

Not all of those empty houses will be places people want to live in, but I'd bet a fair amount of them are perfectly fine places people would love to call home if they could only afford them.

Problem is that in case of divorce, the stay at home partner financially suffers the most

What do you mean, they typically get half the assets and a sizable chunk of the other partner’s salary in alimony that they don’t need to give up if they do become employed, and then if childcare is needed typically this would be an extra child support expense that both parties pay for even if the erstwhile stay-at-home parent has full custody.

How would the stay-at-home parent get a bad deal here?

If you can't afford childcare, getting half of the assets in a divorce doesn't amount to much. Divorce lawyers don't work for free either.

If they're happy to do it to 1970s standards, probably most of them. The standard of what an ordinary life looks like has gone up a lot. Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job - much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot. It is worth remembering that in the early 1900s there were a lot of houses that didn't even have electricity.

The trends [0] are clear. As society offers people more comfort they have less children. Often radically so, having a GDP per capita of above $30k basically means that people stop having enough babies to hit the replacement rate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

This ridiculous lie needs to end.

I can get a microwave for ~$60.

I can get a decent used cell phone for ~$100.

Appliances are a little more expensive, but I can get a washing machine for ~$300, less if I go to facebook marketplace.

But in my area, a victorian house that's litterally crumbling with no central cooling and not up-to-code wiring where you can't run a hair dryer and coffee machine at the same time?

$180,000

Cost of rent at a similar quality house half the size?

$1600/month

Modern comforts are not the reason people can't afford to live.

It's fascinating and depressing how despite me being in a different country on the other side of the world to you, if I swap the $ for £, your comment is still accurate based on the current situation in the UK.

the 1 bed attic apartment I lived in london - rent 1550 - cost to buy £300k.

that's when I knew it was time to leave the uk.

at least the us & most non eu countries have cheap power. which means better standards of living.

Modern mindsets are. 100 years ago you passed as a good parent if your kids weren't all mental asylum cases due to how their home and role models looked like, you didn't beat them regularly to pulp to vent off frustrations, didn't run away, weren't raging alcoholic and just let them grow up on their own, with some input from mother. Some survived, some didn't.

Try to do it now - what about pregnancy leave? Post-birth leave even in situation with no health complications for mother and child? Creche? Pre-school? Post-school activities? Frequent visits to doctors. And so on and on. When are we supposed to do so with our active even if just normal careers? These are massive costs even in Europe, must be absolutely crushing in US.

People come home at the evening, drained from work. Who can efficiently handle well more than 2 small kids on top of all that and other duties that life daily puts on each of us?

There are studies showing that happiness of parents peaks with 2 kids, and 3rd is already a dive into less happiness for most and it doesn't stop there. So massive financial, time and energy costs to reach even replacement rate are not worth it.

We have 2 kids and somehow managing without nanny or parents nearby. 2 families of peers who have 3 kids are almost impossible to get together with - they are barely managing somehow, most of the time, always late by an hour or two to any meeting. Its really a massive jump in complexity. For more, you properly need a nanny or close family helping out massively, it just doesn't work with 2 people working without hitting burnout or two.

But then its delegated parenting - why even bother with more kids if you don't raise your own kids, donate sperm or an egg if you just need to tackle a checkbox in life. Parenting needs are more than fulfilled with 2 kids. If state needs more it needs to create something better than 2-3 decades of nightmare to raise them for regular folks. State help even in Europe (or lack of it) is not something motivating to have more kids.

You've forgotten electricity, depreciation and the need for the house to be wired up to support all the gear. The figures you're quoting are just the price for a one-off purchase, not the total cost of ownership.

> But in my area, a victorian house that's litterally crumbling with no central cooling and not up-to-code wiring where you can't run a hair dryer and coffee machine at the same time?

> $180,000

I'm not familiar with the market you're talking about. What is the median wage in the area that we're comparing $180,000 to?

This is all real numbers from ny recent job search. It was in a rural area in Indiana, a reportedly low COL state. So anything close to a city would've been way more expensive.

> You've forgotten electricity, depreciation and the need for the house to be wired up to support all the gear. The figures you're quoting are just the price for a one-off purchase, not the total cost of ownership.

Cost of total rewire was quoted $30,000. We didn't end up buying that house, but 30k is honestly a drop in the bucket when you're talking about numbers as huge as 180k. So no, the inclusion of electrical wiring is not some big expense that's making housing unaffordable. And houses had electricity in the mid-to-late 20th century... You know, back when it was reasonable to expect to be able to buy a house on one income without even a college degree.

Our electricity bill is usually ~$200/month. This is not what eats most of our paycheck. Our mortgage is far and away our biggest expense.

If houses still costed 20k (a price that many older folks have told me they bought a house for), even with a full rewire bringing it up to $50k, some kid working at Walmart could own a house. Now both renting and buying are prohibitively expensive, and it has nothing to do with modern amenities.

Housing costs are outrageous, far beyond the rate of inflation. That's why many can barely pay their bills. Not because we have electricity and washing machines and and microwaves.

> Cost of total rewire was quoted $30,000. We didn't end up buying that house, but 30k is honestly a drop in the bucket when you're talking about numbers as huge as 180k

It's 15%. That is a substantial chunk of the whole.

> Our electricity bill is usually ~$200/month. This is not what eats most of our paycheck. Our mortgage is far and away our biggest expense.

Your mortgage is what, 20 years? $200 x 12 x 20 ~= $50,000, and around 25% of the mortgage principle. We've found 43% (almost a half house) of the cost so far in the electricity alone. Wiring it up and running the grid aren't cheap. I've always suspected it is illegal to build & sell a house without electricity otherwise there'd probably be a brisk market in them as a cheap option, the savings potential is there.

But that isn't the point, I can't tell if $180k is large or small without a median income to compare it to. If people in the area are earning $90k/yr then it might technically be cheap. A ratio of 3 I think is usual for the 70s.

You said

> If they're happy to do it to 1970s standards, probably most of them [could support a family on one income with an ordinary job].

Our house has the same electrical wiring that it did in 1969. The couple that sold us the house told us they bought it for $20k, which means a cashier could have afforded it back then, but now it's too expensive. Therefore, the fact that it has electricity has no bearing on whether it's prohibitively expensive for most people, and I can make a similar argument for any house built in the mid 20th century.

>Your mortgage is what, 20 years? $200 x 12 x 20 ~= $50,000, and around 25% of the mortgage principle. We've found 43% (almost a half house) of the cost so far in the electricity alone. Wiring it up and running the grid aren't cheap. I've always suspected it is illegal to build & sell a house without electricity otherwise there'd probably be a brisk market in them as a cheap option, the savings potential is there.

Practically all houses had electricity in the 70s. So this is already contradicting what you said earlier if you're citing electricity as the reason no one can afford a house on one income.

>It's 15%. That is a substantial chunk of the whole.

It doesn't matter if it's substantial. I'm only saying it's not so much that it's the reason no one can buy a house and support a family with an ordinary job.

Median income doesn't matter to my point. Housing prices have skyrocketed to the point that most people can't buy a house on one income. No one who's paying attention can deny this fact with a straight face, and your claim that it wouldn't be true if people lived by "1970s standards" is easily proven false by the fact that houses that were built in the 1970s with all the exact same amenities are still overpriced way beyond inflation.

The fact that a Victorian house that's falling apart to the point of being dangerous was listed ANYWHERE for $180,000 serves my point.

Fair enough, call it 50s lifestyle then. I looked it up and if we're talking about the US as a benchmark then turns out [0] the 70s was when women were basically finishing the process of integrating into the workforce. That wasn't an era where one man could support a family. Families were working with a duel income.

Point is that one working man isn't enough horsepower to support a family to modern living standards and never has been. The standard that one person could support was low and in practical terms has only improved over time.

> Median income doesn't matter to my point. Housing prices have skyrocketed to the point that most people can't buy a house on one income.

It matters a lot, that can't be asserted that without considering the ratio of income to house prices - the median income, in nominal terms, has skyrocketed too. Whether the median income or house prices rocketed more and by how much is quite material. If male full time earners are making $90k/year in an area, for example, then a $180k/year house could be said to be quite affordable to a single-income family.

If house prices in my area dropped to $180k then people would be talking about how wonderfully cheap housing had gotten and how great it was now that every young couple could afford a house.

> So this is already contradicting what you said earlier if you're citing electricity as the reason no one can afford a house on one income.

I don't think I actually said that initially, but the numbers you've quoted have convinced me it is at least partially true. The electrical costs appear to be comparable to the amount of money that the house cost according to the numbers you suggested. That is a significant factor in what people can afford. If they avoid almost half a house's worth of expenses then that will go a long way towards being able to afford a house.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/demographics/women-labor-force.htm

They bought it for $20K in 1969, or am I misunderstanding?

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ suggests that’s almost exactly $180K in 2025 dollars…

According to Hans Rosling correlation was more between education level of women and the number of children: the higher women are educated, the less children they decide to have.

Another potential framing is that the higher women are educated, the more they get to decide.

Also - the more education men have, and the higher income they have, the less they want to join the military.

It’s a similar type of issue - of course individuals don’t want to submit to a painful process with high risk and sometimes dubious value to them individually if they have other choices.

Most places in the developed world aren’t currently drafting large portions of their population for military service - and a large portion of the population says they’d fight it if they did. Maybe at some point, they wouldn’t have a choice - or the choice would be made very expensive for them to make the other way.

I suspect it will be similar for birth rates too.

// Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job

If we completely ignore the commonplace role of the maid, nanny or domestic helper — women in 1965 spent the same amount of time on child care and only about 10 more hours on housework a week than women in 2011. According to the 1870 census, “52 percent of employed women worked in ‘domestic and personal service.’” From 1870 through the mid-1900s, that percentage only increased.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/decline...

//much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot

The CPI accounts for these as 'hedonic quality adjustment'.

It's always convenient to benchmark this against 1970s onwards as it was the first year that data on race and ethnicity was included in the income statistics. However 1970 is also a recession year which bottomed out the market and eventually led to an oil crisis for most of the decade.

Adjust for inflation to 2023 and its inarguable.

New house: $23,450 -> $174,468 Average Income: $9,400 -> $69,936 New car: $3,450 -> $25,668 Minimum Wage: $2.10 -> $15.62

And is the summary version that it is just as easy for someone to support a family now as in the 1970s? I'm a bit lost on what view you're invoking those statistics to support.

In which periods in human history has that been possible? In the parts of the world with the highest birth rates is that possible?

>> In which of those countries is it possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children?

It seems impossible to do this in 2025 with white collar work because so much of it is tied to HCOL cities (except for hedge funders, FAANG workers who got lucky on timing, bankers, some lawyers.)

From what I can see amongst friends and family -- it is possible with blue collar trades jobs where you can be selective on where in the country you can live and where you have some level of ownership of your practice. There are numerous affordable locations in the country.

I can confirm -- based on how difficult it is to get an appointment -- that my tree guy, electrician, and plumber all make more than me as an executive. Some of these workers further force payments in cash, so they are probably not even paying tax on all their income.

0

This documentary goes into a lot of detail on the causes worldwide: The Birth Gap - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2GeVG0XYTc

I just watched this. While I completely disliked the heavy emotional focus and bias of the presenter (for example: no interviews with people who don't want children were held, particularly not men), the data seemed solid. There's a peer review pending - I'd like to look at that when it comes out. If the conclusions are solid, we would have to change our societies and economies in such a fundamental way - I don't see that happening in the next 50 years, if at all.

Thanks for the link, it was interesting.

A generous welfare state (like the Nordics or Switzerland) does not necessarily mean that the middle class is well off with lots of resources for kids. Usually it's the middle class (+upper class) that pays for the generous welfare state, but gets almost none of the benefits. You don't get/need the welfare, if you earn enough to be considered middle class.

If by ”Nordics” you mean the rich oil kingdom of Norway, sure. Everyone else has been cutting back on welfare for the last 20 years.

My former friend in Finland finished med school, "for free", while living in a really nice apartment "for free", receiving ADHD medications "for free", and then went to a business school "for free". He has not worked a single day in his life and he is in his very late 20s.

Your former friend is leaving something out from that story: family financial support. Working class kids rarely go to med school and business school.

Besides, it is not possible to finish med school without working a couple years as an intern.

Apart from the free appartment, that's the same as most countries in Europe.

University is not free in most countries in Europe though, is it?

It is or it’s heavily subsidized and what you pay for is the admin costs typically, which end up <$1000/year.

I got downvoted, and you replied this... when tuition is not free in most European countries, at least not for higher education. In my country, med school used to cost over $18k, which is probably higher now.

Also the very hidden caveat of low or no tuition fee in some other countries is that you study in their language, not English.

You might be confusing Switzerland with something else. Switzerland is low tax, private and expensive healthcare and childcare.

Expensive to have kids is a symptom, not a cause of the issue.

Fewer kids == more investment per kid == more competition for high quality everything == more costs.

Also, more workers in the labor force (aka fewer SAHM’s, etc) == more competition for labor == lower cost for labor (vs historic trends) == can buy less with an hours labor.

The ratio of pay for an hours work to a daycare hour is at historic highs, and there is a reason for that.

If you look at women’s participation in the workforce and overlay it with ratios of worker pay vs buying power, it’s a pretty obvious correlation. There is a reason that labor has been losing ground since the 70’s, and it’s largely because birth control means that women can put off having kids (while still meeting needs like having sex and being in relationships) in order to work and make money and be independent.

The issue here is - whatcha going to do about it?

Most women I know eventually want kids, but then they get screwed by all the younger women who don’t yet want kids making the market, ahem, not very amenable.

And they’re caught in the rat race, which is its own kind of miserable, especially when everyone is competing for the same slots, instead of the roughly half that was the historic norm.

There really is no free lunch though - plenty of horror stories from before too.

Deficit spending central banks and treasury finance the welfare state, we're not on a metal standard anymore.

Birth rates correlate negatively with education of women. I read somewhere that this is one of the most robust findings in all of social science (and when I asked Gemini just now whether there was such a correlation, it said the same).

There’s a (positive or negative) correlation between birth rates and dozens of factors, because over the period birth rates have been falling, the world has changed dramatically. Issue is we don’t know what is causal. education also correlates with all kinds of other factors like income, type of work, marital status, and political views, meaning birth rates are also likely correlated with all of these factors.

>Issue is we don’t know what is causal.

Is it really true that this is not known? Although I only claimed correlation (and am thus surprised that I was downvoted twice, as that claim is obviously true), based on the famous "robustness" of this observation, I strongly suspect that confounding factors like those you mention have already been analysed to death, and found not to eliminate the explanatory power of women's education.

At least, checking these confounders seems an obviously valuable and interesting avenue to explore. If it hasn't been done yet, I wonder what social scientists are doing instead.

> I strongly suspect that confounding factors like those you mention have already been analysed to death

I doubt it, because the xUSSR is an obvious counterexample.

Access to condoms is probably a bigger factor.

I agree that access to birth control is a strong factor and likely heavily confounded with women's education. I think there will have been examples of women's education but lack of birth control (e.g., predominantly Catholic nations, especially early on), not sure if there are many examples in the other direction though.

Unfamiliar with USSR -- is the birth rate high there despite lots of educated women?

Having many kids is often because of a necessity like cheap workforce for the family or high child mortality.

Kids can be fun but also can be really exhausting.

How many kids are really born just for having am offspring and not because of other reasons.

If people can consciously decide to have or not to have kids my bet is on falling birth rates.

For stable population you need two kids per couple and first could be an eye opener that children are a lot of work.

I have a partner and we are the age where we need to decide if we want to have kids or not.

Genuinely curious - what are some reasons to have kids aside from “just having offspring”?

Might sound cliche but it might shape you to become a responsible person from pure pressure.

If you are jumping around from project to project, odds are that lack of commitment stems from lack of pressure.

No one wants pressure though… it’s hell.

> America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates.

While that's true, things are much worse here than they were in several different dimensions.

Financial security to young people has been highly correlated all over the world for many decades.

I don't buy that at all. Young people in Russia and next door Finland have equal levels of financial security? What are you basing this on?

But let's say I did accept your premise, I still don't think financial security drives birth rates. In 1957, almost 10% of teenage women gave birth. Do we think 1957 teenagers were having babies because they were all homeowners with secure, well paying jobs?

The best explanation I've heard for the falling birth rates of developed countries is that the cause is a massive increase in social expectation on parents.

It used to be that whether your child made it through childhood was up to God due to the massive number of risk factors beyond the parents' control. Those risk factors are much more easily mitigated in developed countries, so now the responsibility rests solely on the parents, and that's why kids can no longer go outside.

A lot of this stuff about baby boomers vs now is based on how remember things. The data is more complicated. Example: The average home in 1960 was like 1600 sq ft, now its like 2800 sq ft. Sometimes we are comparing apples to oranges.

I am not trying to blunt social criticism. The redistribution of wealth is a real thing that started in the tax policies of the 1980s that we just can't seem to back away from.

But a lot of people are pushing gambling, crypto, options that are telling people that they have no hope of getting ahead just by working and saving. That's not helpful.

> The average home in 1960 was like 1600 sq ft, now its like 2800 sq ft.

Statements like this are not particularly meaningful unless there is actually a supply of 1600 sqft houses that are proportionally cheaper, otherwise you're just implying a causal relationship with no evidence.

Supply is driven by demand unless there is a monopoly in house building (there isn't). If this wasn't the case, one could quickly become a billionaire by starting first company that build small houses that are supposedly in demand but not provided by the market

This is developers maximizing profit per lot.

All this means is there are enough buyers who can afford 2,800 sqft houses to keep builders from wasting a lot on a 1,600 sqft house. There could be a lot more people who want a cheaper 1,600 sqft house (including some of the 2,800 sqft house buyers!) than who want 2,800 sqft houses, but the market will keep delivering the latter as long as the return is better (for the return to improve for 1,600 sqft houses, see about convincing towns and cities to allow smaller lots, smaller setbacks, et c).

> All this means is there are enough buyers who can afford 2,800 sqft houses to keep builders from wasting a lot on a 1,600 sqft house.

So there's a limited supply of lots (or of permission to use those lots).

Exactly. Zoning laws affect lot sizes, remove them as in Houston or most other countries and the problem disappears.

Rural America often doesn’t have “zoning laws”. That hasn’t stopped my home price from more than doubling since 2012.

There’s multiple factors. Another is the zero interest rate era which inflated all asset prices. Money has been insanely cheap for a long time.

Zoning laws still influence rural prices! People fled expensive cities to more affordable rural areas due to city zoning, and that drove up prices in short term, as construction lags demand. Other factors (material costs, construction labor costs) had influence too

You're still presupposing that there's a linear (or at least linear enough to be significant amongst the myriad other factors involved) relationship between square footage of house and cost. And that that relationship extends arbitrarily downwards as you reduce the square footage.

It's one of the main factors. And it can be reduced to almost nothing if a small single family housing zone is turned into a skyscraper providing accommodation for thousands

> Supply is driven by demand unless there is a monopoly in house building (there isn't).

There is, however, a monopoly on issuing building permits.

Bingo! And that's on government. Remove (or relax) those now by decree and rent prices drop tomorrow

Government? Or the people? These are local government issues, they're not that far detached from the people who elect them.

Well, people and local government in most other countries have no option to set expansive zoning restrictions. It's the rules set up on higher level that enable this system

Why build a 500k house on your expensive lot when you can build a 1.5M house. Capitalism does not in any way optimize for the middle class

By the same token, why stop at 1.5M and not build a 15M mansion? Or 150M palace? Because you need to build what will meet the demand, not just most expensive thing ever that nobody will buy. Capitalism is the most effective mechanism to satisfy market demand for every group, if unrestricted by well meanjng but poor regulation that distorts the market

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it.

Most of the people I see working in tech can easily afford this. Maybe not private schools or McMansions but the basics are pretty easy. Sure if you're a humanities major with health problems its tough.

This is far from true. Aside from Valley pay, which also has Valley housing costs, a "tech job" will barely pay for healthcare and housing for one, much less healthcare and housing for four.

Median dev salary in USA is $133k, most likely with healthcare already. You can easily afford a mortgage on a median home which is about $24k/yr.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/

https://www.calculator.net/mortgage-calculator.html?chousepr...

The median dev doesn’t work in a city with a median cost of living. The jobs are concentrated where there’s a high cost of living.

We will be able to build even bigger super yachts for billionaires now though. Bezos can have his own personal cruise ship.

I'd say the most mundane thing I use chat GPT for is to tell me which deeply nested menu some option is in for software I don't use very often.

I feel like most people would get value out of that.

Most recent example from a few days ago 'How do I change settings around spacing for "heading 2" in a document?'

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children.

That wasn't true in the rest of the world.

The US had a unique position due to ww2 that was bound to errode.

I find it funny to compare horror stories from my parents/grandparents to this...

The main problem there is soaring housing costs which have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with extremely restrictive planning regulations that make it impossible for the housing supply to keep up with population growth.

We're disappearing up our own assholes made of misery, loneliness and consumerism.

If you want a picture of the future: imagine a robotic boot, stamping on a human face that's begging for more techno-stamping, forever.

This is an excellent metaphor, so don't take this as criticism merely an observation, but it skews heavily towards the techno-utopian narrative that scam artists like Altman and Pichai keep harping on. Your techno-dystopia makes the same fatal assumption that tech matters much at all. The internet has become television. That's it. It's not nothing but it damn sure ain't everything, and it's just not all that important to most folks.

> The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains.

Make it 50 years https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children.

And that was all because they needed to show to the communist countries how much better capitalism was.

Now communism is gone so there's no need to show off.

"work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children"

Have you considered that there's more to human existence than to pay a mortgage and women are not something you keep in your house to watch after your offspring so they can do the very same when growing up?

I'm not sure what you're responding to, or why you're responding in such a hostile way. The wife can be the breadwinner, too.

Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life. Who wants a society in which couples don't have time to parent their children or manage their household?

It's a fact that seeing to your children's education and social life, cleaning, cooking, and all of the other non-sexy activities of running a household are a full-time job. It doesn't need to be the wife that does that, but it's best when somebody in the family can.

> Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life.

I'm with you but I think we're in the minority nowadays. "Progress" seems to mean paying someone else (who cares a lot less about your children than you do to) to raise your children starting from the moment that maternity leave ends. But at least you get to live close to a big city, and I guess our GDP is a little higher.

That's not the point being made. Whether you're into the traditional marriage/family social schema or not (and personally I'm very much not), it's still something that most of the population wants, that society expects and relies on. The fact that it's not something achievable anymore is clearly a big problem.

> In the 60s it was possible for a man ... with a wife and support two or three children.

This is borderline sexist.

> and the plummeting birth rates show it

Those or, IMO, mostly due to the invention of the pill.

The benefits of economic growth flows largely to people who owns land and non-reproducible privilege.

This the real reason why billionaire exists, not because they have a lot of money, though that help, but because they were able to build modern monopolies. The solution is to tax, dismantle, or regulate them, and that includes land.

Georgism and LVT proposals are starting to see a slow resurgence in the political landscape.

Why was it possible for a man in the 1960s to have an ordinary job, a family, and a house? Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? Is there some sector of society now that prospers proportionally more at the expense of others?

The answer that immediately springs to mind is that women, ethnic minorities, and the urban poor all did relatively badly in the 1960s. With the latter two categories, for every apple pie home with a sedan and two kids there were umpteen other drafty tenement flats with malnourished families sharing a bedroom:

British tenements

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/feb/02...

NYC tenements

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/06/07/tenement-homes-new-york...

It’s not one thing or another — many factors have contributed to what feels like change this way or that over the years — but I try to never forget just how abominably crap life used to be for quite a lot of people, and just how much better it is these days.

> Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now?

The common theory I've heard is that the rest of the developed world was still recovering from WW2.

That is a common explanation, but it kinda implies the world just sat on its hands for 20 years after WWII. I suspect it's just a distraction from the high tax rates and relatively progressive policy at the time, to instead say "it can't happen again".

You're going to have a difficult time arguing that the economy was good for white men in the 1960s because it was bad for everyone else. Prosperity is not zero sum.

Perhaps it has more to do with the lower ratio of people crippled by household debt to pay for housing, healthcare, and education. There's nothing more K-shaped than debt, which is a lever for those with wealth and a weight for everyone else. It's a combination of bad policy and greed that put us where we are.

your point isn't necessarily wrong, but using an NYPL overview of tenements which all pre-date WWII to exemplify anything about the 1960s in NYC is disingenuous.

The work an ordinary job and support a house, wife and two kids thing is down to economic policy rather than tech. Houses have been treated as financial assets where you have to restrict supply to keep the prices up.

You could build a manufatured house for ~$60000 or a couple or years salary like https://siphouse.co.uk/product/insulated-summer-house-with-v... if it wasn't for planning laws preventing it.

or https://www.claytonhomes.com/homes/36TRU28684RH/ Maybe 2x that for govt sponsored high rises like they have in Asia

That may look basic but is similar to what you could get in the 1960s. I mean what do you actually need?

I think we may need a return to slightly more lefty policies - still free enterprise but everyone has a right to a reasonable home and ok income (healthcare etc)

> Because to me it looks like the opposite.

It's neither. None of that is about technology, and it's not the first time in history that it happened either.

And if AI somehow replace a third of the workforce, it's still not enough of an structural change to make technology a cause. If it goes way above that, it can be different, but it's not right now.

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children.

The book Capital in the 21st Century comes to the conclusion that this is a historical anomaly due to World War II (and really only in the US, and really only for white families in the US). Don't take the anomaly of the past and treat it as the normality of what people in history experienced.

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it.

Wasn't like that in 1800s, or the 1910s, or the Great Depression, etc.

World Wars happened and all of the industrial nations got bombed to hell and lost a generation or two.

The US didn't have that happen and was able to provide unprecedented prosperity for the Greatest Generation and Boomers because it would take 30+ years to truly rebuild and grow their population.

Sure enough the wheels started falling off in the 70's and 80s, and only technological growth kept the US on top. And that's slipping.