[loeg]

Purchasing power is up, actually.

Life expectancies are not a conventional measure of "the economy" but also (IMO) likely to improve in the medium term with widespread use of GLP-1 drugs.

As far as young people -- I'm not sure. There is certainly a Taylor Lorenz adjacent crowd of "doomers" but I don't think they're representative of the median young adult.

[anvil-on-my-toe]

No, purchasing power is down. Costs of living have gone up more than median wages. How much gold can you buy with USD today vs. 10 years ago? Less because the USD is worth less than it was. How much housing can you buy with $100,000 or with 1,000 hours of labor? Less housing.

Young people are objectively doing bad. Not trying to be depressing, but economically, behaviorally, health-wise, (at the median) they are worse off than their parents.

[loeg]

> No, purchasing power is down. Costs of living have gone up faster than wages.

No, you're wrong on the facts. CPI-adjusted wages are up.

[peteforde]

Not only is he wrong, but folks with his worldview consistently ignore the dramatic improvement in what it means to be alive today vs any time before.

It's incredible how much purchasing power the average middle class person has when you look at what you're buying and what you're able to buy compared to previous generations. The power and functionality of consumer devices like computers and TVs to the fuel efficiency and cleanliness of transportation options have all drastically improved, but people tend to become numb to how amazing things are very quickly. Magic becomes mundane in days or weeks or months, which is really sad.

It also completely ignores how valuable it is to have a mobile supercomputer in our pocket, wirelessly and globally connected to every other computer, with access to the sum of human knowledge. To not factor this stuff in is to completely skew any real perspective of how far we've come.

There are people who are excited to see global poverty and child mortality plummet, and there are those who whine about anecdotes and artificial metrics. It's true that houses are less affordable, but there was no reality in which earnings were ever going to keep up with the housing bubble which is fueled by an entirely different set of perverse incentives.

TL;DR: yes, things are pretty good, actually. And trending towards better every day.

[xnx]

Agree. No amount of hedonic adjustment in calculations accounts for this.

[busterarm]

Taylor Lorenz is also 40 and spoiled. Not a young adult, she's middle-aged.

I agree with your sentiment though. I just want to point this out because Taylor is a dogshit human being.