[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.

[no-name-here]

From googling just now, color sales exceeded black and white by the 70s. However, new black and white models were still being introduced even into the 90s in the U.S., particularly in the budget or portable segments, and were still being sold new into the 2000s.

[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.

[jltsiren]

I think there is enough evidence that millennials had a slower start than their parents. They were worse off by many important metrics (home ownership in particular) in their 20s, but they've largely caught up by 40. Younger generation X was impacted in the same way, which is why you don't see much change since the 2000s.

The number of homes built by decade was relatively flat from the 1950s to the 2000s. When you adjust for population, it becomes clear that housing construction has slowed down over time. When the supply of new housing becomes scarce, it tends to favor the highest bidders: large single-family homes and financialized schemes such as market-rate rental complexes.

[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?