[megaman821]

Even with these cherry-picked examples, plug in how things actually were. That $8,200 station wagon with at 48 month loan and the terrible 80's loan rates of 10-12% would be like $750/month now. Most of those cars wouldn't make it to 50k miles without a major repair. There were almost no safety features, seat belts weren't required to be worn and you could drink and drive. This weird fetishization of the past is a mental illness.

[syel]

Agree, but if we take a wholistic approach, most things were more affordable. This is a satirical take not a literal financial comparison and I designed it to be that, but I think no can disagree that life in 80s and 90s was way more affordable.

[megaman821]

Some things yes and some things no. It is not and cut-and-dry as you think.

Look up the inflation adjust prices for a computer or a "big-screen" TV and realize almost no one pays anything near those prices for any consumer good. On the other hand there are a lot more people in the US and it is not like land is sprouting up from nowhere, so the price of land is a lot more.

Most things though fall into what people's personal preferences are. Cars have more luxury, house are bigger and have better finishes, movies are huge spectacles, one person can't watch 8 infants, you get more than an aspirin from formerly untreatable diseases; roll all this back and prices will drop.

[ihumanable]

I find this graphic a good one https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-pric...

Obviously it's partial (or else there would be a billion lines) but it gives a good broad view of what things have gotten more or less expensive.

- TVs, toys, software, and cellphone services are cheaper.

- Clothing, funishings, and cars roughly flat.

- Healthcare, education, childcare, food, and housing are all more expensive by more than 50%.

So this is the moment we are in, we can certainly find things that were cheaper but your average consumer buys a TV once every few years, they buy food and pay for housing every day.

I don't think people are ignorant of the upsides of this deal, they are just capable of also recognizing the downsides.

[megaman821]

Almost nothing can make labor-dominated services drop though. I guess you could have guest worker visas that pay half the going wage, and there would be a lot of people that take that deal, but most Americans would hate that.

Grocery inflation is not nearly as bad as the food inflation overall, which is driven by food-away-from-home just absolutely skyrocketing.

Billions of words have been spilled about housing, so I will boil it down simply. It is a mixture of policy and preference. It doesn't have to be the way it is, we just need to collective will to change things.

[te_2939485943]

Two of these items, health care and education, have been inflated in America specifically by poor policy choice (some of which was perhaps enacted for good reasons, but had unfortunate effects). So they might be more controllable if there is a will to modify the system (even if, in the former case, it will be difficult and require stepping on many toes that currently benefit from the mess).

The less said about the mess that is American health care, the better. It is the one area where monopoly effects plague almost every part of the system. Whether it is pharmaceutical companies charging monopoly prices for new drugs (knowing that consumers don't directly chose, or directly pay for, what is prescribed)... or often monopolistic hospitals conjuring up obscenely high prices, billed often deliberately confusing and obtusely, designed for insurers to negotiate down... or insurers (a quasi monopoly, since it's what your employer choses, and your employer has limited choice) themselves coming up with confusing plans with a myriad of exceptions, where even a fully insured person can end up bankrupt after a major heath scare.

In practice, the "Bennett hypothesis" (the idea that increased generosity of financial aid leads to higher tuition) is the most likely explanation that I see for high education inflation. Perhaps a symptom of just how loose things were could be seen with the "ITT Technical Institute" type institution that spent far more time recruiting students via slick advertisements and taking their student loan money, versus working with businesses and developing a solid education program that created employable students. A working system would've never let ITT Technical Institute last for as long as it did. I think the expanded loans were made with good intentions, but they unfortunately were not clamped down stringently enough.

It would be interesting to see this chart repeated for other countries. Many of them probably don't have the issue with higher education and health care that the US does, but perhaps one could find other interesting issues. Some of which is not controllable... and perhaps some of which is.

[neaden]

I 100% disagree with this and don't think it is particularly close? Sure there are some specific locations that are much more expensive, and there are some locations that are much cheaper. Overall if you want the same things it is way more affordable today than the 80s and 90s. But our standards have risen a lot and things that used to be considered middle class are now considered poor.

[ozlikethewizard]

Anything that could be considered in the base layers of Maslov's heirarchy is certainly less affordable. Food, shelter, health, education. Sure lots of consumer goods have got cheaper, but if you've got a big TV and no house to put it in are you actually any richer?

[neaden]

Let's take these one at at time

1. Households in 1980 spent a large share of their income on food then today, and CPI tracks food expenditure and it's below wage increases. So this one is a victory for today vs the past.

2. Shelter is difficult because we expect much more today than the past, houses have gotten much much larger. One big issue is interest rates, which were about twice as high in the 80s than in recent times. If you want to buy a small house without air conditioning and other amenities that are now standard you can do it cheaper than what you would have paid back then. So another victory for today.

3. Health is once again hard, because a lot of the increased cost is for things that weren't around back then. We can just call this one a draw

4. Education. This is the one that is most clearly an increase above inflation. Some of this is due to decreased funding by governments, some due to admin bloat, but mostly it's just that labor is getting more expensive and education is a very labor focused sector. So victory for the past.

So overall I have to say you are incorrect, the past was more expensive than now and less affordable for a middle class person. I also have to say I find this whole thing kind of odd, I was born in the 80s and remember what it was like, I would not want to switch places with my parents economically.

[readthenotes1]

My great granddaddy spent the summer of 1918 in a shack on the farm, sequestered by his parents to protect him from the Spanish Flu.

No tv, no radio, no electric lights, no HVAC, no Internet.

It cost nothing for him to live there other than the food delivered by someone paid a pittance to leave a plate on the porch.

Comparing to past prices usually ignores current affordances we take for granted.

I myself suffered from owning a 9-in black and white TV until I was 31.

I'm not sure exactly what the cost was, but I'm pretty sure it was in line with a low end 36-in LED nowadays

[0xffff2]

I'm really curious how old you are. The great grand-dad part makes you think you're my age or a bit younger, but then I grew up very middle class and I don't know if I've ever even seen a black-and-white TV.

[jltsiren]

If you want to buy a small house, you often can't. The rate of new construction has been low for a couple of decades, typically at or below 1% of the housing stock. Because people's preferences change over time, older homes are more likely in places that are not in demand anymore. New construction is mostly large homes and rental complexes due to political constraints. Condos and starter homes people could reasonably buy in their 20s are not getting built in sufficient numbers.

As for air conditioning and other modern amenities, they are not particularly expensive. Installing them can be, if you live in an area with a shortage of skilled labor.

[neaden]

I mean sure, in some places it might be hard to find a starter home. Do you think that wasn't true in the 80s and 90s as well? I can't find the data going back to the 80s with a quick search, but here is one that shows it's been going down since 2000 https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/08/who-is....

The narrative that millennials (of which I am one) are worse off economically than our parents is an attractive one to many people, but the fact is that it's not true, at least in the USA as a whole.

[xnx]

Disagree. Presenting partial information like this distorts and confuses people's understanding.

[syel]

You are right, I think I mention that most experiences on the site are satirical but I don't mention it on the landing page to this experience, will add this today, will also add "not inflation adjusted' until I change the numbers to adjust for inflation.

[ajross]

> if we take a wholistic approach, most things were more affordable.

I don't know exactly what "wholistic" means, but in actual numbers, corrected for inflation and median wage growth, this is 100% the opposite of true.

A few things are more expensive in CPI terms, housing among them. Almost nothing is actually significantly more expensive as a fraction of median income.

And it's really distressingly weird that people can't see this. I mean, if cars were so cheap in the 70's or whatever why did we inexplicably have so few of them?

[JKCalhoun]

Focusing though on the cost (you know, no one is going to prevent you from wearing a seatbelt) where is the equivalent today? A used Ford Focus off of Craigslist? A double-wide in a trailer park?

As another pointed out, I think we're "fetishizing" the affordability of the previous decades, not the cigarette smoke in the restaurants.

As per cherry picking: housing, transportation, education… These are kind of important. If it had only been, say, giant TVs I would agree it is cherry-picked.

Perhaps you think the examples themselves (Ford F-150, etc.) are what are cherry-picked?

[wang_li]

>Focusing though on the cost (you know, no one is going to prevent you from wearing a seatbelt) where is the equivalent today? A used Ford Focus off of Craigslist? A double-wide in a trailer park?

A brand new Nissan Versa for $17,300.

Work for an entire year after high school while living with your parents and saving money so you can attend a state school for <$10,000/year. Don't take out student loans so you can buy a premium laptop, luxury clothes, and travel. Don't get a new phone every one or two years. Don't sign up for 5+ streaming services. Don't buy coffee and toast from cafes.

https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/versa-sedan.html

[megaman821]

Americans just won't buy these "cheap" cars. Almost every American car-maker, and most foreign car importers too, have dropped passengers cars from their lineup year-after-year leaving only SUVs and trucks. Look at what Ford and GM offer in Latin America; small, affordable cars. Every now-and-then they try to bring something similar to the US and it's sales numbers are always dismal. The US is mostly rich (by world standards) and has premium preferences. The huge gulf is between what people say they want and what they actually end up buying.

[prewett]

There was something on here a year or two ago about how increasing emissions standards made it infeasible to continue manufacturing small cars. Big cars had more lenient standards. Also I think Honda quit making the Fit during the pandemic, since parts were limited and the larger cars were more profitable. So I think it's more complicated than just that people don't buy smaller cars.

[jpfromlondon]

It was common (at least here in europe) to simply buy your car, with the proliferation of finance and lease it is now the norm to essentially rent your own car for two to four years before inevitably having to trade it in for another, perpetually on the strap.

This has driven the actual price of vehicles both used and new to astronomical levels under the assumption that you will have it on-plan rather than own it outright.

Major things aside, it's the every day minor erosions in qol that depress me...for example cereal boxes used to be stiffer, chocolate had more cocoa solids, products were on average better quality, to get that same quality requires you to know and spend a lot more, we aren't imagining it, there was a sweet spot somewhere between 2003 and 2016.

[trollbridge]

People didn’t finance cars on 4 year loans back then. 3 years was the max, so even with 10% interest that’s only $60 extra a month for 3 years.

[megaman821]

You're right, a 4 year loan in the 80's basically didn't exist.

[_DeadFred_]

And that major repair? Water pump that dad changed in like 30 minutes. Or engine rebuild he did with friends and some beers or did for the lady down the street for the cost of parts. Do people even help eachother fix eachother's cars anymore? We used to be a society helping. Now it's go to a mechanics shop that normally starts with the process of them seeing if they can scam you.

The fetishization of basic progress is wild. We EXTPECT our society to progress. People went from horses (where they literally had to shovel shit) to cars. 2026 'now we have seatbelts' is some bullshit progress metric for an entire ass society and isn't the 2026 hyped/sold/expected. That you have to reach to pulling up that example (versus my 'shoveling horse shit to having jet airplane looking 1950s/60s cars) shows things kinda suck. In exchange you can't fix the car and have to take it in. You can't just help out the single mom down the street and check out her problem for her. Tires are so expensive they have to go on the credit card and be a planned expense (my parents with hardly any money didn't have to live off credits cards to cover incidentals).

'Guys, things can't be bad, we have these amazing things called seatbelts now (invented in 1959)'.

[megaman821]

Well anything can sound dumb, when you simplify it to something dumb. We have multiple airbags, anti-lock braking, seatbelt pretensioner, collision avoidance, crumple zones, fuel pump automatic shut off, backup cameras, rollover testing, ... Vehicles do an amazing amount of things to keep their occupants alive in a crash.

[_DeadFred_]

Current year - 2026

Consumer vehicle Anti lock breaks - 1971 Consumer vehicle Airbags - 1973 Consumer pretensioner - 1981 Start of crumple zone incorporating - 1950s Consumer fuel pump shutoff /inertia switch - 1975 First roll over testing - 1938 Backup camera - iteration on mirrors/rear window

[FeloniousHam]

+ all the complexity that makes the stuff coming out the backend less polluting

[insane_dreamer]

meh. Yes cars are safer now. But this is about affordability. And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain. You could get second hand cars that would still run for years, and you or a friend could fix them yourself. Drinking and driving has nothing to do with affordability so I don’t know what you’re going on about.

[FeloniousHam]

> And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain.

I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.

My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.

Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.

I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.

[insane_dreamer]

I grew up in that era too (born late 60s). My dad repaired the cars we had, and they definitely lasted a long time. Granted, I grew up in Europe (we had Peugeot, VW, etc.) so maybe the build quality of the US cars was worse--I can't say.

Yeah, they used way more oil than today, and they were more polluting, and they were less safe, and there were less rules (I can remember six of us kids piling into a VW Bug with my dad). But we're discussing affordability.

[_DeadFred_]

I can get to work with oil leaks and burning oil.

The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often? Meaning people could afford to replace them with new ones more often?

[insane_dreamer]

> The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often?

nobody was making that argument

cars weren't replaced more often; people drove the same car for longer than they do now, in part because they more easily repairable