[coldtea]

>We can see, too, that these bifurcations are driven by a shift from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance.

To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality.

It's a world where a 10-20% can afford the "whatever" (e.g. best phone, live in NY/Bay area, university degree, etc) and the rest have to scrap by and increasingly pinch pennies (while still doing some desperate wealth-signalling purchases, like poor urban blacks that buy $200 sneakers to feel like they have something nice and can participate in the kind of society they see in ads).

Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a signle-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on. And living in NY or the Bay are was still very affordable (to the point that both areas had large artistic / bohemian communities living there, and not of the latte sipping urban wealth variety, but the penny pinching / stick it to the man / junky variety).

[Jonanin]

500 years ago, only 1-2% could afford "whatever" and the rest had to scrap by and pinch pennies. I'm not sure we're moving to a world of less evenly distributed wealth.

[coldtea]

Only we're not beasts. Wealth is social and relative based on the era.

E.g. nobody feels like a champion as a unemployed homeless in LA, or a single mom making ends meet hand-to-mouth, just because 8000 years ago other people lived in caves, died at 30, and where often hunted by wild animals...

The change compared to not-so-distant decades, when a single-income middle class family had a job for life, could afford a house, and college education for their kids -- compared to living paycheck to paycheck is more relevant to whether we enter a world of more inequality, than what they did in the caves or the wild west.

[NeedMoreTea]

Now compare 60 years ago with now.

[Godel_unicode]

Statins, anti-retrovirals, common availability of antibiotics, treatment for TB, vaccines for many population-decimating (in the traditional sense of the word) viruses.

Everyone has a super computer in their pocket, the vast majority of human knowledge is available in your hand for free all the time, you can video chat anyone you want anywhere in the world in HD for free, world-leading educators post hundreds of hours of video lectures online for free. You can get O(every song ever recorded) instantly anywhere you are for $10-$15/month.

In my opinion, what we're seeing is that things split into two categories: generally free or almost free, and expensive enough to be out of reach of most people. The thing that is really exciting is that things are moving from the latter to the former very quickly. The problem specifically with education is that expectations (everyone must have a degree!) Hasn't kept up with reality (degrees are no longer the only/best marker of skill!).

[Retric]

The real costs for most people in the US is artificial. Housing, internet, and healthcare in the US is 2-5 times what it is in most countries because of systemic corruption.

Consider, 15 minutes of a doctor’s time making 300k total compensation directly costs ~40$. Meaning your copay is often the actual cost of the services rendered and you need insurance to cover overhead.

[Godel_unicode]

> because of systemic corruption.

Citation needed.

> 15 minutes of a doctor’s time making 300k total compensation directly costs ~40$.

So the nurses, administrators, technicians, lawyers, accountants, janitors etc that are needed to allow that doctor to see you don't factor into that cost? I'm not saying the pricing of healthcare in the States makes sense, but neither does the argument you present.

[thesagan]

I sense that awareness of U.S. corruption has been increasing.

One watchdog group has been tracking it's position, as mentioned in this WSJ article: https://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2019/01/29/u-s-seen-...

And then there's that now-infamous Princeton study, which has been cited many times: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

[Retric]

I simply put an actual price tag on a doctors time. Dentists and Doctors both need receptionists, janitors, deal with insurance, and have an office etc. However, compare a few bills and a few different situations and some clear differences show up.

If you want an actual examples a famous one is the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation issue. Each individual little bit is not a big deal, but they compound with inefficiency growing at each step.

[coldtea]

>Citation needed.

After a trillion dollar bailout on the real estate bubble (where banks propped house prices for more than a decade), and widespread studies of healthcare inflated prices you need "citations"?

It's like some bizarro world where to speak of something well established you also need to prove the universe exists all the way to modern history...

[NeedMoreTea]

Things are also moving the other way at unprecedented speed - the expensive ones: housing, medical care, education. None of which is discussing the comparative inequality of the two periods.

Are you saying inequality is required for that list of innovations? If so, on what grounds?

We came up with contraceptive pills, eradication of polio, visited the moon, transformation of aviation and personal transportation, domestic appliances - including TVs, washing machines, dish washers went from unaffordable luxury to in every home. Doesn't seem like the pace of innovation has increased, just moved to a different field compared with the period of lowest US inequality. If anything it's slowed markedly.

So why didn't these innovations need inequality?

Nit: antibiotics were commonly available 60 years ago, they just weren't yet abused by stupid uses in agriculture.

[atemerev]

Most of these things were coming as a side effect of the huge Cold War era military industrial complex. We’ll get it back soon enough.

Additionally, yes, the US society in the 50s-80s was pretty egalitarian and full of opportunities — as long as you were white, male and heterosexual.

[coldtea]

>Additionally, yes, the US society in the 50s-80s was pretty egalitarian and full of opportunities — as long as you were white, male and heterosexual.

It was full of opportunities for all kinds of people, not just "white, male, and heterosexual". That's when the civil rights movement and the feminist movement flourished too and ensured the rights for women and blacks.

People born after some age seem to remember some bizarro version of history, when it was all oppression with no redeeming qualities, and if you were a woman or black etc you were as good as dead. People think we made some huge strides in the 00s, probably because they have no experience of the 60s to 90s. That main strides have been done for gay/lesbian rights (and even those were increasingly more permissible after the 70s and the sexual revolution).

Though all of the above are beyond the point. As if to have those other things (affordable housing, college and healthcare) that the 50s-80s enjoyed, you need to also have racism and sexism... How does that compute?

[brain5ide]

Not that it's required, but it's the effect of progress. Individual progress requires focus. With these new options being available every single day, those that have scarce resources have more and more problems with optimising the for their best outcome.

On a poker table, one that has more chips, has advantage over one that has less. Doesn't make it unfair.

[michaelmrose]

At current trajectory I won't be able to afford medication to keep breathing in 5 years with all due respect FUCK YouTube, coursera, and Spotify.

[coldtea]

>Statins, anti-retrovirals, common availability of antibiotics, treatment for TB, vaccines for many population-decimating (in the traditional sense of the word) viruses.

Those are technological innovations, not really relevant.

We could have had smartphones and anti-retrovirals AND affordable education/housing/healthcare/job prospects.

Like how people in the 50s and 60s could enjoy all kinds of technological and social innovations compared to 100 years before (electricity, TV, improved medicine, vaccines, etc) AND have cheap college tuition, affordable housing, etc.

Spare some catastrophe technology is monotonically increase -- it advances with new inventions.

So not really relevant as to whether we are more or worse off than the 50s and 60s in economic aspects.

[Godel_unicode]

You don't think what you get for your money is important in a discussion of economic advancement? It sounds like you decided on an answer, then went looking for a question which fits it.

> We could have had smartphones and anti-retrovirals AND affordable education/housing/healthcare/job prospects.

How can you possibly know that's true? Where are these example economies that have US-level innovation but also has the wealth distribution you crave.

[coldtea]

>You don't think what you get for your money is important in a discussion of economic advancement?

No, I think technical progress is not important in a discussion of economic advancement. The economy can go up and down, but technical progress only goes forward (spare some catastrophe).

Even in the Great Depression or WWII, technology advanced just fine.

>How can you possibly know that's true? Where are these example economies that have US-level innovation but also has the wealth distribution you crave.

US had US-level innovation AND that "wealth distribution I crave" in the 50s-70s.

[tsimionescu]

Well, an example would be the US in the 50s,60s and 70s.

[paulddraper]

> Those are technological innovations, not really relevant.

Those are extremely relevant, especially the source for those invocations.

E.g. I could believe the USSR achieved greater income equality, but I'm skeptical it would have produced those innovations.

[coldtea]

USSR was run by a party elite, devastated with millions dead/imprisoned in their purges, devastated with millions of dead in WWII, and starting from an agrarian economic base much behind the US of the time (1917) to begin with.

Without those aspects (but keeping equality more or less same, e.g. like Swedish style democratic socialism) it could be a very different story.

It's not like inequality produced them. If anything, today with rampant inequality we have far fewer innovations (and the US has far worse infrastructure, roads, etc) than in the golden post-war era up to the 90s.

[michaelmrose]

Better than 500 years ago but worse than 50 years ago seems like a bad standard to strive for.

[specialist]

What do you think our society's Gini Coefficient should be?

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

[jrochkind1]

Probably the "normal distribution" of pricing/purchasing didn't apply 500 years ago either, in pre-proto-capitalist Europe or anywhere else.

[iheartpotatoes]

Cute, but facts?

[coldtea]

You can surely search for 3+ decades of books, studies, and articles on the declining US middle class, stagnant wages, increased housing/college/healthcare costs, etc, right?

[iheartpotatoes]

Isn't it funny how when you ask for citations, the other person flips out and says do it yourself? Like, I have to spend my time figuring out if you actually did research or pulled something out of your ass? Sorry bro, got better things to do with my time than your work for you.

[zeroonetwothree]

In 1980 median house price in SF was $200k. Median US household income was $17k. So it wasn’t exactly affordable and of course the Bay Area is much more appealing now so it makes sense that relative prices have risen.

In Manhattan rent in 1980 was around $1200 for a one bedroom, so it’s not even significantly different.

[coldtea]

"Average rents may have been pretty high, but crime rates were high and many parts of New York were more than gritty. As such, there were a lot of cheap places to live, especially Downtown and in Brooklyn. The Lower East Side offered a lot of options for the $300 price range; June 1982 ads show a Ludlow Street studio and a two-room East 2nd Street apartment (in a "well kept locked building") both for $275. For a real bargain, one could rent a four-room unit at 332 East 4th Street for $295. Across the river, a "charm 4 rms" on a "beaut blk" near BAM was listed for $325, while units in a Williamsburg walk-up were asking $275 to $325."

[ip26]

Ah, the weak-on-crime approach to creating affordable housing?

[paulddraper]

Sounds bad (?)

[kristianc]

> In Manhattan rent in 1980 was around $1200 for a one bedroom, so it’s not even significantly different.

A 1BR in Manhattan is around $3500 now. Have salaries really tripled in that time?

[jrochkind1]

Well, more or less, yes, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Indexed_Monthly_Earnin...

But it does seem to me that rentals in Manhattan have gotten a lot less affordable since 1980. (Manhattan in the 80s was not a particularly posh place, at least not throughout. There was probably more divergence in rents between neighborhoods in the 80s than now). It would take some more specific investigation than national median wages to investigate that. (Note, though, the median income in Manhattan specifically may have outpaced inflation as lower-earners get priced out).

But, as far as inflation and wages, yeah, inflation year after year means salaries in the 80s seem like very low numbers to us now.

[roenxi]

> To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality.

> Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a single-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on.

Is the right word inequality? There aren't less college places, houses in NY/the Bay, etc in the world than there were in the 80s. By extension, the problem is not enough new wealth creation rather than inequality.

I'm open to being wrong, but at a guess there aren't all that many rich people who consume more than 2 degrees, live in 2 houses, etc. There are those that do, but they are relatively rare. Mostly they just get first pick from the existing stock, except in housing where they buy but then rent out in my experience, so it isn't exactly removing stock from general availability. If the rich disappeared tomorrow, would that free up enough resources that the poor could all have "whatever"?

I've no answer, but rhetorically I doubt it. The rich physically can't consume that many resources in absolute terms.

[michaelmrose]

The resource they consume is wealth. It's disingenuous to claim that a wealthy person does not consume more resources. Houses are a particularly poor example.

A wealthy person may have a 2. 5 million mansion and a quarter million dollar vacation home and own 3 rental homes.

They may trivially capture some of the resources available for others housing by buying up the housing supply and renting for more than the cost of the mortgage while fighting to maximize the value of investment by limiting the supply of new housing.

With 40% of their neighbors paying rent to people like them and some living on the street it's hard not to qualify the situation as unequal.

[roenxi]

> They may trivially capture some of the resources available for others housing by buying up the housing supply and renting for more than the cost of the mortgage while fighting to maximize the value of investment by limiting the supply of new housing.

You're focusing on accounting, which is fine and all, but there are two scenarios here:

(1) There are 10 houses, 10 people live in them. Everyone owns their own house.

(2) There are 10 houses. 10 people live in them. All the houses are owned by 1 person. 9 people rent.

From an inequality perspective, obviously one scenario here is grossly less equal than the other. From a what-is-phyiscally-happening perspective, these situations are roughly identical.

The $2.5 million mansion you mention is potentially a nice house that is the same physical size as a $700k house in the country. My point here is although the situation may be grossly unequal, but part of the issue here is what actual, physical resources do we want the rich not to be using?

Eg, do we want to take away vacation homes from people and subdivide it into government housing? How much stock does that create? Is that going to solve housing affordability in, say, SF?

This isn't me being disingenous, I'm just genuinely curious why people think inequality is the problem since I personally favor that wealth creation is being strangled by hostile political forces.

Inequality is a problem; it is a symptom of things going badly wrong. But that doesn't mean that reducing inequality cures the disease - it is easy to reduce inequality by forcing everyone to have nothing. We all want to reduce inequality be creating more wealth. Houses, stuff, fun experiences, etc, etc. Is that possible? Is redistribution a valid route? Maybe. It does work sometimes.

[michaelmrose]

When you find yourself proving that 2 + 2 = 17 this is your cue to examine the chain of logic that got you there.

The idea that one person can own everything and everyone is equally well off as if they all owned equal shares is wrong on its face.

In practice in an environment that isn't deeply unequal the landlord creates value by investing capital in maintaining housing stocks that renters may lack or not want to invest. They trade both current money and foregone future wealth for increased flexibility and predictable costs.

In an increasingly unequal one renters have no options because nearly 100% of the value they create for society is captured by others including the landlord or go to pay for their increasingly lackluster survival. In many cases they may end up creating less total value for society and themselves because they can't invest the time and money to maximize their own value.

Your 9 renters example is too small in scale. Back in reality some portion are pushed onto the street, some live substantially poorer lives, families barely see one another because one party or both is gone 60-70 hours per week, people die sooner due to substandard health care, people don't go back to school because they can't work 60 hours to support their family AND go to school. People don't take chances that would improve themselves because they can barely afford to live now. They live in the ghetto because that's all they can afford.

Having an increasing share of the wealth means trivially mathematically that others have less. Only for the upper middle class does that mean they have just as nice a house in a less desirable neighborhood.

Meanwhile in reality in the last several decades 25% more than previously, people take a look at life ahead of them and put a gun in their mouth,forego going to the doctor and end up dying of an infected tooth, or ration their insulin and wind up dead.

[roenxi]

> The idea that one person can own everything and everyone is equally well off as if they all owned equal shares is wrong on its face.

You say that, but it your counter is also obviously wrong. It would be trivial to have a system where everyone owns equal shares of everything - dissolve private property rights and nationalise. On the face of it that isn't a bad idea but when it is tried it fails spectacularly. I'm not aware of any surviving examples where equal ownership has worked without becoming hopelessly corrupted.

So in practice we know that some level of inequality which, if dropped below, does result in everyone being worse off.

As an interesting aside, ~90% of Canada is owned by the Crown [0]. It isn't obvious that this inequality is their biggest problem w.r.t. living standards.

> Back in reality some portion are pushed onto the street ... and end up dying

Yeah all that stuff does sound awful, but you are not going to the meat of what I was asking. Assuming we aren't creating new wealth (because that would be something that could be done now) then the wealthy will have to give something up so that the poor can gain. What is it? If wealthy people stop going on holidays then retrain the hotel receptionists as doctors? Are wealthy people taking more hours of doctor time than they need and so we make them live with shorter appointments?

I don't believe the wealthy are using enough raw resources for to make a difference; there'd need to be a massive redeployment and upskilling program training new people to have higher skills. That isn't obviously an equality issue, it might be an education problem or related to government healthcare policy.

> Only for the upper middle class does that mean they have just as nice a house in a less desirable neighborhood.

You haven't changed the number or quality of the houses, so you're basically suggesting the middle class and the poor swap houses. If the poor persons prior home wasn't an acceptable dwelling, why would it be acceptable to put a middle class family in it? Is there something wrong with the poor persons house? Is the issue that the wealthy are using too much building material so the poor can't do home repairs?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land#Canada

[michaelmrose]

You are being deliberately obtuse and confusing the map for the territory.

Can you really not conceive of anything that could be done to decrease inequality less than literally swapping houses?

Money is an abstract store of value so that we don't have to trade goats and houses.

I suggest we tax the rich to fund a better social safety net, education, and free medical care for all Americans.

[michaelmrose]

Protip: No amount of wealth creation will ever trickle down to the poor people.

We can increase equality by providing free national health care and a social safety net that would allow people to take time off and retrain along with educational opportunities.

Turns out that this works better than giving handouts to the rich.

[pryelluw]

Yes, I think the word inequality is correct. It comes as a result of hoarding wealth.

[bhl]

Is the right word inequality? There aren't less college places, houses in NY/the Bay, etc in the world than there were in the 80s. By extension, the problem is not enough new wealth creation rather than inequality.

Yes, the right word to describe this bifurcation is inequality. It's correct to note that the absolute number of available housing and students going to university are up, but relatively compared, people are finding harder to do both because the number of available spots has grown slower than population growth.

At first glance, this may seem like an issue with not enough wealth creation: why are there not more houses and universities being built? But when you look at productivity versus income [1], the issue is with the unequal capture of wealth not with its creation.

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

[tomrod]

> Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a signle-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on

For some parts of the US, yes, but it would be a generalization error to assume this was a common condition for everyone.

[gshdg]

In that regard, the mid-20th century is an anomaly in human history.

Which is not to say we shouldn't aspire to such a relatively even income/wealth distribution. However, the political will for progressive taxation - which facilitated that level of equality - has been on the wane since the 70's. Possibly related to the extreme American economic dominance in the Post-WWII era, which we shouldn't expect to ever see again.

[closeparen]

Inequality is not “top X%” vs. “the rest.” Every part of the distribution is stretching. Every pair of points is further apart than it used to be.

[coldtea]

Well, middle class now is closer to working class precariousness, than before, so it's not exactly that "every pair of points is further apart than it used to be".

[closeparen]

The differences within middle and working class are also widening.

[jgalt212]

> It's a world where a 10-20% can afford the "whatever" (e.g. best phone, live in NY/Bay area, university degree

not so sure about that line. Many of the whatevs are scraping by.

https://www.financialsamurai.com/scraping-by-on-500000-a-yea...

[throwawayjava]

Nearly every line of that budget screams "luxury", with the exception of two things:

1. The skyrocketing cost of college really does create enormous problems. I'm assuming the family profiled are either doctors or lawyers, because otherwise those $32K/yr payments would only last for a few years at most. (I paid $40K/yr in loans for both my wife and I when I got my first real job, but that happened exactly once... and we weren't buying BMWs or Land Rovers while we were doing it.)

2. Pensions, which have largely eroded away in the private sector, were enormously valuable. The switch from pensions to 401(K)s without a significant corresponding increase in pay is one of the most significant ways in which the real value of take-home pay has declined in the past 30 years.

But everything else could be cut in half, probably without even noticing:

1. $42K/yr on childcare is au pair/"elite" preschool money.

2. $5,000/mo mortgage is pretty high, even for a family of four in a high CoL area.

3. Three vacations a year @ $6,000 a pop. I take more than three vacations a year, but most of them are closer to $500 for a family of 4 (camping/backpacking). The expensive ones never get higher than $3,000. There's "getting away from work for a while" and then there's "flying a family of 4 to Paris a few times a year". The former is not a "luxury" especially for a high stress job, but the latter definitely is.

4. Luxury cars. For $10K they could buy a perfectly functional new car (which would last 10 years) every year. The only way that these are not "luxuries" is if they're required for work.

5. $3K on clothing per year, every year. That's high even for someone who has to dress nicely for work. Yes, nice suits are expensive, but they also last a long time. And your kids definitely don't need "meetings with high value clients" clothing.

6. $1K/mo on "children's lessons". I know how this happens, because I charged up to $100/hr for private tutoring while in grad school. But it's entirely unnecessary. It really is OK for your kid to get a B in an AP course. And if they need $100/hr quality tutoring for every course they're taking, the real world is going to be a rude experience. Also, $1K/mo on "children's lessons" while the kids are also young enough to need childcare is absolutely insane.

[jgalt212]

> 6. $1K/mo on "children's lessons".

In NYC, these fees are necessary if you want to get your child into a "good" public middle and high school. The alternative is to pay $50K/year for private school. So #6 is a valid strategy to cut costs via attending public school--the very opposite of "luxury".

[throwawayjava]

> "good"

Yes. Plenty of perfectly accessible public schools are good even though they're not nearly the best.

Again, access to the elite educational institutions in the country with most of the elite educational institutions in the world is... a luxury good.

Also, as someone who tutored those kids, IMO you're not doing them any favors in the long. If you have to work for a living, then at some point way before "the best public schools in NYC, $50K/yr private schools, or bust", grit >> prep. That sort of prep also has the effect of disabusing them of a clear-headed understanding of their own limitations; which, again, can be a really terrible thing for them in the long.

[jgalt212]

> 2. $5,000/mo mortgage is pretty high, even for a family of four in a high CoL area.

I'll take you task on this one, as a crummy 3 BR apartment in Manhattan is north of $2MM. Interest alone on that is $6700/mo. And I've personally seen number of dispiriting 3 BR's listed for $3MM.

[throwawayjava]

You don't have to live in Manhattan to work in Manhattan. Or at the very least, if you value your walkable commute that much, then why the hell do you need $10K/yr in luxury car expenses?

Also, you can recoup up to $3K of that $5K mortgage by cutting the other luxury goods in the budget.

I guess the point is: any one item on this list might be justifiable. At the very least, each on its own is a totally reasonable luxury to indulge in after decades of not just hard but also smart and stressful work. But the budget, taken as a whole, is hard to describe with any word other than "luxurious".

[jgalt212]

> Or at the very least, if you value your walkable commute that much, then why the hell do you need $10K/yr in luxury car expenses?

Have you ever tried to carry one or more toddler car seats to a rental agent? Even The Rock would balk at that task.

In any event, I appreciate all your counterpoints, but I'd prefer to hear counterpoints from current/former Manhattan parents than a logician without on the ground experience.

[danaris]

But Manhattan is not, I would say, what one should take as an example of "a high CoL area." As I understand things, it, along with Silicon Valley, are the highest-cost-of-living areas in the country, by a significant margin.

[m1sta_]

There is still a lot of cheap housing in the USA. It's just not in the bay area anymore.

[paulddraper]

I bought my first house in 2015 in Utah, about 20 min from downtown Salt Lake City. Was not anything special.

1976 construction, 2000 sqft, 0.2 acre, 5 bed, 3 bath, 2 car garage, average condition, just under $200k.

Glassdoor average salary for "Software Engineer" (not Senior, etc.) in Salt Lake is currently $89k, 14% less than national average. [1]

Single-income house ownership is extremely common here.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/salt-lake-city-software-e...

[throwawayjava]

Mid-tier cities give a lot of bang for your buck -- Salt Lake, Phoenix, the midwestern midsized cities (Cleveland, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Pittsburgh), Atlanta, etc. Even Portland compared to other coastal options.

And even in some of the "very expensive" housing markets, you can still find homes that are affordable relative to income within 40 minutes of downtown areas. Chicago and Boston both come to mind.

The primary differences, as far as I can tell, are that:

1) Niche senior positions are harder to find in cheaper cities (think "deep hard tech expertise"). For example, nearly all of the major corporate research labs in CS (MSR, Google Brain, Google Research, IBM Research, Oracle Labs, ...) are in or around expensive CoL areas. On the startup side, "hard tech" startups are very often more capital-intensive so are even more attracted to geographic VC bubbles.

2) Moving up within BigCos is sometimes more difficult if you're in a satellite office.

[paulddraper]

True on both points.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft don't have any sort of engineering presence in Utah. Though Adobe is majorly expanding here. And operationally, Facebook is adding a huge data center.

[heavyset_go]

Cheap housing exists in areas of low-to-negative growth. As in, those who got out did and those who can get out will in order to find better jobs and a higher quality of life.

[jgalt212]

True, but unless you are a doctor, high wage jobs are few and far between in cheap cost of living areas. Perhaps, that's why they are cheap to live in. :)

[ip26]

I grew up in the bay, and I definitely did not understand this until I left. I generalized my life experience to the whole country.

[Zarath]

> Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a signle-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on. And living in NY or the Bay are was still very affordable (to the point that both areas had large artistic / bohemian communities living there, and not of the latte sipping urban wealth variety, but the penny pinching / stick it to the man / junky variety).

Houses are very affordable in almost every part of the country. Buying a home is really not that difficult.

[BurningFrog]

One reason people could afford to live in NYC in the 80s is that it was a dystopian murderous hellhole. Watch this trailer for the 1981 move Escape From New York for a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckvDo2JHB7o

[CPLX]

While NYC certainly had a street crime problem then, video from a fictional sci-fi movie where New York is converted to a lawless prison island for criminals is a remarkably poor way to support your argument.

[BurningFrog]

My point is that in 1981 you could make a movie on the premise that NYC would be like this in 16 years.

That tells you something about NYC in 1981!!

Or so I imagine(d). You're probably right that my intended message doesn't exactly reach everyone...

[CPLX]

Indeed. Using similar logic one could have correctly predicted the 1949 attack on the Empire State Building by a giant ape.

[badpun]

> Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a signle-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on.

In the US. Meanwhile much of the rest of the world was mired in communism, which created incredible poverty and misery. After the 80-ties when it was finally overthrown for the most part, those billions of people start competing on equal ground with the US, which equalizes the global situation a bit.

[wozer]

The wealth is still in the US, though. It did not go to other countries.

[badpun]

This is about income, and not wealth. Most of these middle-class US families in the 50-ties through 80-ties that you mentioned had very little wealth, and only managed to build it up (via paying off mortgage, saving for retirement) over decades of work and solid income. Now, there's less opportunities for solid income in the US, as they've become more equally spread across the globe.

[Godel_unicode]

It's not the zero-sum game you're making it out to be.

Also, those countries are all far better off now.

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/25-years-r...

[coldtea]

>In the US. Meanwhile much of the rest of the world was mired in communism, which created incredible poverty and misery.

Depends on where of the world.

Most of the rest of the world in the 50s (aside from eastern Europe, USSR and China) was anything but communist.

And even the communist (socialist) parts, where not really about some "incredible poverty" (e.g. in places like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and so on, just substandard middle/working class existence. Everybody there could get a job, healthcare, college education, and a house, for one.

[badpun]

India was also communist. Just India and China alone is already something like 40% of world population. USSR + Eastern/Central Europe is another 400+ million people. There were also many communist countries in Africa and Asia.

As for the standard of living, I know the realities of communist Poland:

- The "everybody could get a house" is complete falsehood, at least for Poland. In fact, almost no one lived in a house - people lived in small, overcrowded flats (2 rooms for a family of 6, 1 room for a family of 4 were not uncommon), and even getting those shitty flats in drab housing projects required serious sacrifices and often years of waiting in the queue.

- As for higher education, only around 15% of population attended university, and not for the lack of wanting - it was clear that far from anyone could go.

- Healthcare was bad, but probably on par with the general underdevelopment of the country.

- Throught the fifties, people worked 28 days a month - yep, they only had a couple of Sundays off and that was it. The salary they got for such exertion was barely enough to cover rudimentary living expenses. My grandmother had to take a loan to buy a winter coat (to not freeze, not because it was pretty), and she paid that loan off over months. Over time, the living conditions gradually improved, but even in the eighties it was mandatory to work every second Saturday IIRC.

- What's probably most important and probably unimaginable for some who did not live under communism, were that obtaining just basic consumer goods was a challenge at times. Tens of millions of people at times stood for hours every day after work just to buy toilet paper or meat. It was an unimaginable waste of human time and energy.

[_0nac]

India as a whole has never been communist, although the Gandhi-inspired self-reliance/import substitution/License Raj era definitely did cripple the economy in similar ways.

Many "communist" countries in Africa and the Middle East were so mostly on paper and they flipped allegiances regularly based on whether the US or the Soviets were offering better carrots.

[bko]

> It's a world where a 10-20% can afford the "whatever" (e.g. best phone, live in NY/Bay area, university degree, etc) and the rest have to scrap by and increasingly pinch pennies (while still doing some desperate wealth-signalling purchases, like poor urban blacks that buy $200 sneakers to feel like they have something nice and can participate in the kind of society they see in ads).

I don't see why "poor urban blacks" buying $200 sneakers is a "desperate wealth-singalling purchase". Maybe they just like them. I don't see how its any different that the 10-20% buying the "best phone" when it provides no greater utility than a cheaper model.

> And living in NY or the Bay are was still very affordable (to the point that both areas had large artistic / bohemian communities living there, and not of the latte sipping urban wealth variety, but the penny pinching / stick it to the man / junky variety).

I would think as neighborhoods become safer and more gentrified, the number of people that want to live there increases and naturally the price to live there increases as well. Comparing crime ridden NYC from 50 years ago to NYC today makes no sense.

[coldtea]

>I don't see why "poor urban blacks" buying $200 sneakers is a "desperate wealth-singalling purchase". Maybe they just like them.

According to economists Banerjee & Duflo: “The poor are skeptical about their supposed opportunities, and the possibility of any radical change in their lives…Therefore, they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible, and on celebrating when the occasion demands it.”

>I don't see how its any different that the 10-20% buying the "best phone" when it provides no greater utility than a cheaper model.*

The difference is that for the 10% that is an insignificant amount, and they still can cover their more basic needs with aplenty left anyway.

[pdkl95]

> I don't see why "poor urban blacks" buying $200 sneakers is a "desperate wealth-singalling purchase".

Far too often sending the right kind of signal is a required prerequisite[1] to e.g. being granted access to a job that might eventually become a better-than-minimum-wage career. Often wealth isn't the intended signal; it's a presentation of having accepted and converted to a group's culture or beliefs.

[1] https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/the-logic-of-stupid-poor...