The question is where. Couple decades ago rent in Munich was like 3x lower. While salaries were insignificantly lower with overall lower living cost.

Couple decades ago Germany had electronics industry. Now it’s gone. More industries are following.

Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. Now it’s introduction into WW3 with active war in Ukraine and hybrid attacks everywhere in Europe.

It depends heavily on location. Indian colleague has completely different world view and is proud how India is progressing.

Just because GDP isn't a measure of affordability or security or industrial strategy doesn't mean it's not useful. It means you should also have measures of those (which in fact do exist because economists are not idiots and do fully understand these kinds of problems).

That progress in India comes as an excuse to weaken their democratic institutions. The fallacy is that Modi is to praise - the progress comes mostly because of enormously positive global trends developed in the past decades, the ones that are now being threatened.

> Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars.

A bit of nuance, they ended in 1999, however the whole thing is still influencing Europe negatively and is not as isolated as it seems. Not just there are now seven countries instead of one to consider and negotiate with, a couple of them are utterly disfunctional. Further, two biggest chunks are deeply sunk into nationalism. Far too little effort had been made back then to try to reform the place into a functional system.

Progress in India is due to policy in India. The idea that India can handwave it's successes and failures on external forces might have been well justified in 1955, but in this century they get to choose. Best hope for the anti-Modi-policy crowd is maybe it isn't Modi's policies specifically.

In fact, in the vast majority of cases (including North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, India & South-East Asia) progress is entirely about countries choosing how quickly they are comfortable with improvement happening. Africa and the Middle East it is a combination of policy choices and cultural problems. Arguably foreign interference - although even then policy and strategy tends to be the bigger thing over time.

> Progress in India is due to policy in India.

This is an extremely bold claim. Always was, but especially in today's world it is. I am not saying that Modi's policies are bad, what I am trying to say is that he is basically playing the game on the easy mode. He has access to the unprecedentely dynamic and resilient global economy _and_ he has access to cheap Russian resources Europe doesn't want to buy anymore. All Modi needs to do is not do anything really stupid - the economy will perform well unless clubbed to the head.

And that is all fine, and I am genuinely happy for India. My problem is that Modi is using that easily achieved success to erode democratic institutions - and that will become a problem in the long-term, as it always historically has, everywhere.

Russia wasn't the group that stopped selling oil to the Europeans, the Europeans refused to take it and have a military policy of arming people to blow up the means of transporting that oil to Europe. They're very proud of not using Russian oil. Modi could have joined in with that, he had a lot of people asking him too. Doing nothing (if he did nothing, again - I have no idea about the details of Indian policy) is a rather decisive policy given the pressure the Europeans have been putting on people.

The world has been in easy mode for 70 years now. Any government can choose to sit back and let people get wealthy. It is literally so easy that even the communists figured it out.

Whats the point of this progress which is completely destroying nature and giving people all kinds of cancer, India's oligarchy is more destructive than any other country on Earth. Indians used to be the most naturalist people in the world and now look at the state of the country.

Obviously it depends on your point of view. That entire region (India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) still has a lot of work to do.

Renting for me generally sounds like a bad deal. On the same period the stock grew even more (ex: S&P x4.5 from 2000). So, if you want to say that if you lived 30 years ago in Munich AND did not save anything you would have lived better, I will have to answer that it was just delaying the issue of not being able to save - the ones that were able to save (maybe not living in Munich, maybe other ways), might at some point come and buy something in Munich. Accumulating wealth too much into some hands was the issue decades ago and remains an issue today. Just that decades ago people might not have been aware...

The electronics industries of a couple decades ago were producing stuff that are incomparable to what we have today. Taking that into account, I would say today is "better".

> Renting for me generally sounds like a bad deal.

It always is but not everyone has the option of buying. It takes investment and not everyone's parents are wealthy.

Renting is actually a better deal, financially, in Israel compared to purchasing. Rent is cheaper than the mortgage payment, by hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a month, in a society where the average price of housing is more than 14x the average annual salary but most people are highly emotionally compelled to purchase housing as a symbol of stability and wealth creation - an emotional decision instead of a financial one.

As always, local circumstances matter.

We calculated when buying the house near Munich that we pay around 140000€ more than renting our flat forever with moderate rent increase. At the moment of signing we needed bigger apartment. Few years later we see, that despite heavy construction in the old house we will save at least 200000€ as buyers. Rents in German cities are out of control. Probably it’s different in regions with solid real estate supply. Here’s nothing.

Indians are generally too patriotic to trust and its like talking to MAGA sometimes.

It's definitely not the best we have though. People have created all kinds of metrics which measured things in better ways more relevant to our human goals. It's an entire genre of publication in economics and some of them are very popular. It's a choice to ignore them.

Also, see what djtango said. It's not that simple.

Similarly it’s a choice to ignore all those KPIs that are confounded.

Being pedantic about how we measure progress might create the impression that it’s not about the progress but instead about being right.

Well, being right is better than being wrong, which is what happens when you claim that GDP as a measure of progress is valid. It simply doesn't measure what matter to the majority of humans, which has been argued endlessly already.

It's the best that has been used by a society that didn't later collapse though.

That's hardly a relevant response considering no society have used any of the ones I am speaking about in the way that you mean. The OECD, UN, IMF and others use many of them as secondary metrics though.

I just find the "what have the romans ever done for us?" argument to be scary. It leads very quickly and easily to struggle sessions and the terror.

I'm all for trying things for sure, but it has to be done in very small scale and over significant time scales.

"THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Sure. And that longer and older terror was the lack of free markets and science. Exactly the thing the kids these days want to remove because "what did the romans ever do for us?".

All of those except for access to knowledge were better in the U.S. 20-30 years ago even though GDP per capita "grew" even in real terms.

If you take access to knowledge to mean post-secondary tuition, it was also much better 30 years ago

20 years ago? probably not significantly different accept at the margins (i.e. we tamed HIV and now have ways to defend against pandemics) but other than that is life much different?

Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations.

A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite.

Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...

> Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...

This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50.

"Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age."

"Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age."

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...

If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.

Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated than particle physics. Not to mention the data is political...

The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.

The problem with countering lived experience with data, is that whatever data you can provide, it's very unlikely to capture the exact sentiment you're addressing. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try, of course. But one should be very open to the possibility that things are happening outside of your specific data.

The most infuriating example, to me, is the overuse of GDP. As if that should tell us everything.

No, it shouldn't tell us everything, but if someone makes a very data-oriented claim ("millenials will be the first generation poorer than their parents") and you return with data that shows the opposite, you can make a claim that the data is poorly gathered, etc.

But pivoting to the "but it's not my lived experience, bro" is weak.

If you made the claim that "millenials have it harder than their parent" then we're talking something where experience can be more useful.

Yes, but I guess I'd say that we should not attempt to capture an exact sentiment in making policy decisions. The bigger the decision, the more people are involved and affected, and the more people, the greater the variation in their sentiments. It simply doesn't make sense to try to somehow please each individual to address something like housing affordability in the US (or California, or Los Angeles, or even Monterey). The only way to do that is to aggregate sentiments into data. In doing so you lose precision about those sentiments, but that's good, because some of that precision is measuring idiosyncratic stuff that shouldn't play a role in solving the problem in question.

It's funny, I say the exact same thing about crime in NYC.

Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.

That's silly. People have wrong impressions about a lot of things. Your "lived experience" (you can just say experience, okay?) can be wrong.

Who exactly has the "lived experience" of being a member of two different generations?

Assuming this is an earnest question - the lived experience is that for some people, they are less well off than their parents. This is a big enough phenomenon that it has been measured and AFAIK is well accepted as a fact. So being poorer than your parents isn't about living the experience of both your life and your parents.

Although anecdotally my father moved to the UK with my mother with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and by 27 my dad was able to afford his first property in London start a family, all without a uni degree and hadn't even yet finished his accountancy training. He did that without any family help and in fact was sending money home. This has always helped provide a bit of colour of how things have changed

That's mean wealth, not median wealth. Mean millenial wealth at 34[0] is $345,000 and median millenial wealth at 38[1] is $130,000. Given that inequality has been rising steadily in the US over the past 30 years, the mean and median wealth of Gen Xers and boomers were almost certainly closer to each other than for millenials.

0: your source has mean at 34 in 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of... 1: the best I could find was median at 38 in 2022: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennia...

Yeah, but how does millennial median wealth compare to boomer median wealth? That's the question.

I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Millennials are 30-45, roughly.

There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.

Just a couple of decades ago a common working stiff could buy their family a nice home in any US city.

If you are talking about the 1960s or so, there also were 150 million fewer people in the US? That matters for housing costs.

Some places like Austin, which haven't gone down the NIMBY zoning route, are still somewhat affordable.

Clean water was a one-time thing and more driven by state action than GDP growth. Fittingly, right now the AI bubble is making access to clean water worse for some, fracking did so too. Nutrition? GDP growth made food harder to access for many people before it got better - city laborers had worse food access than farmers. Still today people are living in food deserts. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" showed what kind of food unfettered GDP growth actually delivers.

And mere decades ago, life was more or less the same, if not arguably better in many ways.

It's utter trash, it was good when we had industry focused economies instead of service focused ones.

Everybody mocked Russia for having the same gdp as Spain. As it turns out your economy is much stronger when it's focused on heavy industries, steel, mining, oil, &c. Than when it is focused on tourism and other services

One produces value, the other generates money, when shits hit the fan you need energy, the drunk brits coming in your strip clubs aren't that useful anymore

Oh yes sorry, I forgot that Russia is super successful in Ukraine and Europe is on the brink of collapse because it ran out of energy!

That's not my point at all

Do you think Spain would fair better than Russia against Ukraine ?

Actually yes. Ukraine is far easier to invade for Russia. Geography is super flat. You can drive in from anywhere. Easy to supply thanks to sovjet rail. Spain is very mountainous and a pain in the ass to invade. How would Russia supply their troops that are completely rail dependent?

I get your point. Spain would fail miserably.

But you’re not taken into account how many men Russia is losing to maintain that level of aggression. It’s compensating its small GDP with humans.

Spain would never do that and thus fail.

Russia is fighting the war exactly how I would expect an economy of that size to fight a war. Slow attrition coming from an inability to overwhelm their enemy decisively and fast.

How exactly is their economy "strong"? By what measure? You cannot really eat tanks, that is what made life in the Soviet Union unsatisfactory as well.

Current price of Ural oil is some 9 dollars above their breakeven costs. As the classic says, not great, not terrible.

Pointing to Russia as a functioning economy is comical.

Industry focused economies are going to continue to come under pressure due to automation. The US for example has a lot of industrial output, but shrinking industrial jobs. And that’s a good thing. Sending people into coal mines should never be a long term plan.

> Pointing to Russia as a functioning economy is comical.

idk man, France's economy minister said he would bring "russia on its knees" economically, 3 years later it's still not anywhere close to being a reality, the minister isn't here anymore tho.

Put half of the sanctions on spain and it would fold in a month

That may be less a matter of him being wrong per se than of politicians loving to make grandiose and inflated pronouncements.

Depends if you look at Spain in isolation.

On its own? Sure. (Although to be fair to Spain, they've invested heavily in solar and high-value agriculture in recent years).

But seen as part of a system with Germany and perhaps the UK (no longer part of the EU, but was better for both when they were), it's a valuable part of quality-of-life in the overall economic bloc.

Where would you rather live? Spain, easy.

Who would win in a war? Russia, easy.

Some will read this as an argument against the Spanish lifestyle. On balance I prefer to read it as an argument against war.

> Who would win in a war? Russia, easy.

Really? Russia has not even done all that well against Ukraine, a much smaller economy.

What sort of war? I agree Spain could not successfully invade Russia, on the other hand Russia could not invade Spain either. No working aircraft carriers so their air force would be operating from very distant bases (even if they were allowed to pass over the countries in between), limits on ability to land large numbers of troops, etc.

> no longer part of the EU, but was better for both when they were

I do not understand why you even mention that as the EU does not have a military, NATO is relevant and the UK is in NATO.

Its a matter of opinion. I think the UK is at least as well off (growth has been similar to comparable economies like France and Germany since Brexit) without even seeing the long term benefits AND the EU is better off as the UK was a major impediment to the political integration the Euro zone needs.

> Really?

Spain army's is 1/10th of Ukraine's and basically haven't been in anything close to a war in decades, so yes, really and easily lmao.

Ukraine alone produces more military drones per month than the entire EU per year btw.

> Spain army's is 1/10th of Ukraine's and basically haven't been in anything close to a war in decades, so yes, really and easily lmao.

They do not have a border with Russia so how could Russia get their army to Spain?

Ukraine has armed forces geared to fight a land war with Russia. How do Ukraine's air force and navy compare to Spain's?

> Ukraine alone produces more military drones per month than the entire EU per year btw.

Because they are in a war. You cannot compare fully geared up war time production to peacetime production. What was Ukraine's drone output prior to the current Russian invasion?

I’m certain that if Russia somehow managed to attack or invade Spain, they would not be standing alone. I can’t imagine the French will be as content to sit around twiddling thumbs when their neighbor is lit up.

Sure but again that's not my point, my point is that people use GDP to compare all kind of things while it is a completely outdated metric that doesn't really tell you anything about anything unless you use it to compare similar economies or compare the development of a country year after year.

Right but the services sector is more than running strip clubs for tourists. Spain just doesn't export any services other than strip clubs apparently. The US doesn't have this problem. The Financial Services market is the largest in the world.

It hasn't been the best for a long time, and economist have long proposed alternatives, but gdp and gdp per capita seem to be the easiest to calculate and convey.

People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth, housing costs, tuition costs, healthcare costs, jobs).

In advanced western countries that is. If you compare Nigeria from 2000 to Nigeria today, sure, maybe...

> People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago

Are you just saying this thinking no one will ask you to back it up with data? Care to quantify what "so much better" actually means?

Better job prospects for more people, lower inflation, cheaper healthcare, cheaper housing (actually affordable housing), less obesity, better school programs, more distributed, less controled, and less corporate internet and web, higher fertility rates, less clouds of war and civil tension, more political legitimacy and better political climate, better nutricion (official stats show obesity at an all time high and rising - despite all the health influencer slop), less impacted rural areas and small towns, and many other stats besides. And a more stable global order too.

Most of those apply both here in Europe and the US.

And that's without even getting into more subjective QoL stuff, from cultural production to the widespread depression and the loneliness epidemic.

What? Access to knowledge was better 3-4 decades ago? You're telling me that people had better access to knowledge in 1986 than they do today?

Infant mortality was 10.4 per 1,000 live births in 1986 in the US. It was 5.5 I'm 2023.

Life expectancy was 74. Now it's 78.

The crime rate peaked in the US in 1991.

Life isn't perfect now. Housing needs to be a lot more affordable, for one. University costs in the US are insane, for another.

But to paint this as no progress? Come on.

Yes, look at the massive 'success' of Vail, Colorado.

Yes, the bottom 90% have had their lives improve a little. But nowhere near the same as the top 10%.