[bendbro]

Men don't do stuff at home which is evidenced by marriage rates and fertility declining. There is no home to do work in.

> An investigation of median wages can be interesting. The comment only talked about wages in general

Looking at it I find my claim is false.

Median real wages have gone up (excluding the last 5 years or so). I could make an argument from inflation being wrongly calculated (due to stuff missing from the basket, or housing excluded, or shrinkflation, pick your poison) but I'm too stupid for that.

Comparing CPI (which includes housing) to median nominal wages over the past 5 years, it shows cost growth has exceeded wage growth. This though doesn't hold further into the past.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q

[giantg2]

"Men don't do stuff at home which is evidenced by marriage rates and fertility declining."

That's a massive leap to tie marriage rates and fertility rates to some unsupported claim that men do nothing. I suppose all the single men out there are starving and living in filth. This is a very damaging stereotype that has nothing to really do with declining marriage and fertility rates. Many other factors are at play.

[bendbro]

Taking care of yourself is valued at zero. Taking care of a spouse and/or children is valued at greater than zero.

It isn't to say taking care of yourself has no value to you, but it is to say that no exchange of value happens.

[giantg2]

"Taking care of a spouse and/or children is valued at greater than zero."

I'm highly skeptical of how this might be calculated. For example, if you are cooking or doing laundry, it typically includes your own clothes or eating the food. If a kid is involved, they're at least half your responsibility. And whst is the quality of that work? In many cases it's not professional level. Ostensibly, the other spouse has duties to more or less balance it out too, so which tasks are valued higher?

It seems odd to think that all these single people who are doing chores just completely stop when they get married. Sure one party might be doing 2x the cooking, but the other might be doing 2x the maintenance or financial planning. I mean, getting married is supposed to be about taking care of each other and the balance of work is never going to be 1-to-1 as it fluctuates and has different needs at different times. As long as each are contributing reasonably well, they shouldn't be counting pennies against each other. But I guess that's exactly what economists and lawyers are interested in.

[genman]

How much do you cook for yourself instead of eating out when you live alone? Now multiply it by 4 and ask if you still want to do it. Doing laundry takes also 4x more time and children make a lot of mess. But we are discussing about historical differences here where families were even larger and there were no household appliances.

[giantg2]

"How much do you cook for yourself instead of eating out when you live alone? Now multiply it by 4 and ask if you still want to do it."

I've basically always cooked for myself. You're not really multiplying it by 4. You might be multiplying the recipe by 4, but that's generally trivial. And, yes I still do it.

"Doing laundry takes also 4x more time and children make a lot of mess."

Sure, but it's not that much time to start with when the machines do the majority of the work. Then it's just folding and putting away. This is typically a chore that older children should be doing for themselves, and the younger ones have smaller clothes sizes, so it's not really 4x, but maybe 3x since they take up less of a load. There are also differences in how people choose to deal with the mess. Most kids do not need multiple changes every day except for the vanity of the parent wanting them to look really clean. They will get some food or dirt stains, and that should be expected for little kids. This is also the part where we need to acknowledge that the responsibility for the kids is also half of the doers responsibility anyways. So their added responsibility isn't that high.

"But we are discussing about historical differences here where families were even larger and there were no household appliances."

I completely understand that from a historical perspective, just as it was historically the man's sole responsibility to provide financially. I'm saying it shouldn't be a major factor today as long as one person isn't a complete freeloader. I'm also pointing out the differences of opinion, such as quadrupling a recipe vs cooking actually being 4x as long.

[eru]

> I completely understand that from a historical perspective, just as it was historically the man's sole responsibility to provide financially.

That's only a very small section of history for a specific section of the population.

Poor people always had the women doing lots of work. They had to.

[genman]

I think you are very seriously downplaying the extra effort family care takers actually are making. For sure it is not comparable to the historical levels but it still exits. I get your point, but your comment is equally damaging.

[eru]

Thanks for checking!

Btw, many economist argue that CPI overstates inflation. Mostly because CPI has a relatively fixed basked, but people adjust what they are buying if relative prices shift. (Eg if bread becomes relatively more expensive than pasta, people buy less bread and more pasta. The CPI basket does not reflect that.)

A modern alternative is to use the GDP deflator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDP_deflator Basically, it means to use everything that got produced / consumed as the basket for your inflation measurement.

[bendbro]

> if bread becomes relatively more expensive than pasta, people buy less bread and more pasta. The CPI basket does not reflect that

That makes sense. But say bread at $1(2023) is objectively worse than pasta at $1(2023); is there any way to account for that? It seems like a generic form of shrinkflation: without holding the basket constant, how do we know we are getting the same value?

To be fair, it could work the other way and the pasta at $1(2023) is better than the bread at $1(2023).

[eru]

> But say bread at $1(2023) is objectively worse than pasta at $1(2023); is there any way to account for that?

See https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/ and https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans... for how the CPI attempts to control for quality. How well they succeed is another question.

Quality adjustments in inflation data are always something that requires judgement. (Even though they try to minimise that.)

A recent example that was not reflected in the CPI:

During the pandemic choice and quality dwindled. Instead of buying your favourite toilet paper, you just got whatever wasn't sold out. Eating out got a lot worse, when it was possible at all. But if a burger still sold for 2 dollars before or during the pandemic, the CPI did not budge. So official inflation was understated.

Conversely, as we came out of the pandemic quality recovered without that being fully reflected in the CPI. So official inflation was overstated.

---

Because inflation requires judgement, I try to avoid having to rely on it in any analysis.

The discussion we had could mostly be re-formulated in terms of

> How has nominal median pay developed over time relative to nominal per capita GDP?

That framing leaves out inflation completely.

Of course, it ignores absolute advances. And deliberately so!

But those are better left to a separate discussion.