[harimau777]

While society has gotten wealthier, have average people, at least in America, gotten wealthier? Technology has advanced so there's things that people can own now that they couldn't before, but if you look at things that are constant (e.g. housing) then it looks to me like people have gotten poorer.

[randomdata]

> but if you look at things that are constant (e.g. housing) then it looks to me like people have gotten poorer.

If housing were constant then people would not be any poorer with respect to housing. They would be in the exact same position. But housing is not a constant. The average US house has have more than doubled in size over the past 50 years. The average US home also has one less person living in it as compared to 50 years ago. People today are way richer in housing.

[harimau777]

How can people be richer in housing if they can't own a house. That doesn't make sense to me.

[harryh]

Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

[chipdart]

> Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range.

I don't think your graph says what you think it says.

The graph shows a time series of the rate of homes which are owner-occupied to those that aren't. When the average Joe buys a house, they tend to stick with it for life. However, the graph you linked clearly shows this rate plummeting from 2004 to 2016, with the nosedive amounting to around 6%.

This means that in a short span of a decade, the amount of home owners living in their own home dropped 10%.

You have a small spike around 2020 which I bet was caused by WFO allowing people to live in places cheap enough that they could finally afford their home, but that stagnated already.

Also, it's interesting how such a meteoric drop happens in an indicator that tracks home ownership, which is something people do for life. You need a very radical change in the people's ability to afford a house to see so many people stop affording them in such a quick timespan.

[randomdata]

You can't own social interaction, but some people are rich socially. Rich is not defined by ownership.

[throwawaymaths]

> have average people

You mean median person. If society gets wealthier the average nearly definitionally gets better (modulo population increase)

[schrodinger]

FYI average is actually an ambiguous term that can mean mode, median, or mean.