Re:Ask HN: What is really wrong with the US economy, really?
by jseliger on Thursday February 27, 2014 @06:24PM
(#7316036)
If he's actually in proper Seattle and not the surrounding area, the nearest affordable housing might be dozens of miles away from where he works, increasing his transit costs considerably.
As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, Matt Yglesias's book The Rent Is Too Damn High is good on this subject; increasing rent is not some law of nature but a result of development restrictions in many metropolitan areas, which got started in earnest in the '70s and the results of which are getting worse every year with population increases and rising returns to knowledge creation (see Steven Berlin Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City for more on both).
Re:Ask HN: What is really wrong with the US economy, really?
by mikeash on Thursday February 27, 2014 @09:09PM
(#7316821)
It's difficult to see that point when the example given is so out of the ordinary. It's rare to be unable to save substantially on a six-figure salary while single. Whatever causes him to be unable to do so, it's unusual, and thus a bad place to start if you want to discuss general economic woes.
If he's actually in proper Seattle and not the surrounding area, the nearest affordable housing might be dozens of miles away from where he works, increasing his transit costs considerably.
Health insurance keeps getting more expensive, and if his plan isn't great he might be shelling out thousands of dollars a year to hit his deductibles, especially if he's not in great health.
'Sounds like a budgeting problem' is missing the point, which is that the set of unavoidable expenses - things you have to pay - keeps getting bigger and bigger, but incomes for a big chunk of the US don't grow quite as fast as that.