Not adjusting for inflation and quality really damages the integrity of the comparisons, as does cherry picking your base examples.
Taking your first, the $47K 3 bedroom starter home with a yard. In 2026 that would be $200K (cumulative inflation is a little over 4x[1]); picking a random US city[2] and looking on Zillow[3] I find that...yeah, you can get a comparable home today.
There are certainly arguments to be made about tradeoffs, quality issues (though those aren't as obvious as you might initially suppose[4]) and so on. But just listing unadjusted price comparisons like this is disingenuous.
Just "adjusting for inflation" isn't good enough. Minimum wage was $4/hr. Now its $8. An elementary school custodian could afford a mortgage, a car, support a family of 4 and go on vacation on just that single income. They had healthcare and a pension. You could work over the summer and pay for a year of college at a state school.
Yes, the house now is more energy efficient. The car is safer. But if the price of everything went up 4x-10x, and the median income only went up 2x, AND you have to pay for more things that used to be included, then everything is more unaffordable, inflation be damned.
"An elementary school custodian could afford a mortgage, a car, support a family of 4 and go on vacation on just that single income. " Can I ask what you are basing this off of? I'm fairly skeptical of this claim.
The head custodian at my elementary school (in the 80s) was a friendly guy that loved talking with the kids. He'd talk about his life, ask us if we did anything fun over the summer, and tell us where he went with his wife and kids. The school was in a small town in the rural midwest, not particularly affluent, but not poor either.
The elementary school where my kids went (in a much more wealthy district) doesn't even have a custodian that I'm aware of, just a 3rd-party cleaning service that hires immigrants for as cheap as possible, and I'm sure doesn't offer healthcare or even full-time work. They have too many highly-paid administrators to afford a custodian.
Ok so you're moving the goalposts here. What you said was a custodian (who I'm assuming did a lot more than just clean) and now you've switched to a head custodian and are comparing him to contract workers. So you're comparing two different jobs in two different school districts. Now is it possible that they've eliminated or reduced those positions? Sure, but you haven't actually shown that at all. Like I could easily counter with the fact that the school my wife teaches at still has a head custodian but I don't know what his family situation is and we'd just be trading anecdotes. So do you have any actual evidence for your initial claim? Because the overall stats with wages and prices are the opposite from what you claim.
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Not adjusting for inflation and quality really damages the integrity of the comparisons, as does cherry picking your base examples.
But then they also need to make sure to also match salaries to inflation too.. Because wages have not kept up with inflation, which is the reason for most of this..
Thanks for the feedback. The whole experience/site is mainly satirical/humorous. It's not inflation adjusted cause I didn't want it turn into a finance piece tbh, but you're definitely right, if inflation adjusted most cards need to be re-built to account for inflation and better judge what we're getting today vs what we used to get
Not adjusting for inflation makes it look completely stupid.
There's one good effort - comparing a car to the salary of a car-worker. But it only has half the comparison (what are today's car workers earning?). That's the comparison that Marx would recognize: how long do the people making something have to work to buy the thing they made?
The reference to Marx and (implicitly) the labor theory of value renders the GP unserious. Just looking at the people doing the assembly (and not all the people in the supply chain), ignoring the time aspect (I doubt there's any product that costs more than one of the people assembling it would expect to make over the time it would take them to single-handedly create the product from scratch), and so on.
It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.
> It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.
It may be so, but those feelings are part of the disconnect and they themselves cause all sorts of problems - or benefits, if directed appropriately, e.g. the IKEA effect is part of the same thing: we put in effort so we think the result is worth that effort.
Marx being wrong doesn't mean trade unions didn't rise for much of the 20th century on the basis of similar feelings, being in error didn't stop the USSR being one of the world's two superpowers for about half a century.
If the employees are satisfied their labours will bear fruits then they historically have not minded much that billionaires skim the cream; but when they are not satisfied, revolutions come. Those are messy and unpleasant, but they come anyway.
Sure. Lying to people and telling them they're somehow oppressed just because other people are more successful than they are can be used to stir up a revolution and get a lot of the useful idiots killed.
That's why it's important to call the nonsense out.
When someone's making billions and the goods and services they get you to pay are functionally mandatory even if theoretically avoidable, with costs going up because someone somewhere has apparently cornered the market, is it even a lie?
People asking "Why can't I afford a car from 9 months salary when my dad could? Why is a house 10x my salary not 3x like my dad's? Why can't my partner and I afford kids even on two incomes when our parents managed it on one?" don't want a series of ten hour-long degree-level lectures on economic theory to be able to understand the real answer, especially not when there's clearly a bunch of very rich people who keep loudly telling them that they ought to be happy because some stock index has gone up (when they don't own stocks) or that they've moved up the value chain (which if true doesn't answer why cars and houses are less affordable).
Give them an answer about Baumol's cost disease (easy to understand without much economics study), and suddenly you're back to Marxism but with different language, where Marx's "means of production" happen to be inalienable to the human form (or at least have been so far, plumbers are not yet quaking in terror at the videos of androids falling over while attempting to open a dishwasher).
Yes, the house now is more energy efficient. The car is safer. But if the price of everything went up 4x-10x, and the median income only went up 2x, AND you have to pay for more things that used to be included, then everything is more unaffordable, inflation be damned.