[smaudet]

What crack was the YTber on?

Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value...

Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...

[swiftcoder]

> Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...

I'm pretty sure "stuff" in this context is mostly manufactured goods, and those have fallen in absolute price. Examples abound in the tech sector: even adjusted for inflation, a MacBook Neo is the cheapest Mac ever released, and so on...

[rayiner]

Manufactured goods, food, and clothing. Note that we tend to think of these things as not being a big deal, but that’s colored by the fact they’re so cheap. In 1970, a wall mount AC was about $400, when the median family income was under $10,000. Lots of people simply could not afford one. Today, a wall mount AC is still $400, while the median family income is over $80,000. People dismiss the fact that an AC unit has gotten 90% cheaper in real terms. But you wouldn’t do that if everyone in your family was huddled around a single AC unit in one room during a southern summer, as was very common in the 1970s.

[inigyou]

Average temperatures were also lower in 1970 and we didn't put as many of the jobs in places where you absolutely needed an AC.

What's average income less average house price? Has that gone up or down?

[rayiner]

> Average temperatures were also lower in 1970

Yes, but not enough to change whether you want AC or not: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/washington-dc/yea.... In DC in 1970 you had 98 days above 85 degrees. The year before was 80 and the year after was 71. Last year was 72 and the year before was 93. There are more warm days, but you wanted an AC in the DC area back in the 1970s too.

> and we didn't put as many of the jobs in places where you absolutely needed an AC

I don’t think that’s true. The south and mid atlantic was always a huge share of the population. And the midwest was a bigger share than today, while the temperate west coast was a smaller share. You need AC in Chicago too: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/chicago/yearly-da.... Even in the 1970s in Chicago you had 30-60 days over 85 every year.

[vel0city]

> The south and mid atlantic was always a huge share of the population.

The population share of the South and West regions of the US have grown while the population share of the Northeast and Midwest have shrunk.

https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=gr...

What are the fastest growing metro areas in the US these days? DFW, Austin, Houston, Phoenix, Orlando, Atlanta, Raleigh, Tampa, Nashville. Which ones are in the cooler parts of the country?

I agree overall its not like half the population moved to the Sun Belt, but a pretty large amount of the population growth in the US has been focused on the hotter parts of the country.

You're pointing to days over 85 as days you need AC. To me that's pretty warm, but not unbearable. Days where it never goes below 80F for a week or more at a time, or places with extreme humidity mixed with such high temperatures, now that's a place where you need AC.

[rayiner]

> Which ones are in the cooler parts of the country

There are very few “cooler parts of the country.” Europe’s “no AC” culture was because, until the 2000s, almost everywhere had less than 15 days a year over 30C (85F). There’s only a handful of cities like that in the U.S., such as San Francisco and Seattle. Even in the northern latitudes the U.S. gets really hot. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, averaged about 50 85F+ days a year in the 1970s. Boston and Minneapolis were in the 30-60 range during that decade.

To put that into context, Germany over the last decade is seeing 15-20 30C+ days a year. It hit 30-31 only in two years recently, 2018 and 2019. Those years had 7,000-8,000 deaths each year. Germany’s epic heatwaves killing thousands of people was a mild summer in Cedar Rapids or Boston or Minneapolis even in 1970.

The U.S. is just a very hot country, even in the northeast and upper midwest. AC is a huge, lifesaving standard of living improvement almost everywhere in the country. And we shouldn’t take for granted the developments that enabled 88% of the country to have access to that technology.

[TimorousBestie]

To your point about high humidity exacerbating heat, I think it’s relevant to consider wet bulb globe temperatures (WBGT) instead of air temperature. It’s more objective than heat index or the ad hoc “feels like” metrics. Above 30-35C WBGT, humans start dying without intervention.

In the United States at least, days with high WBGT have increased and more places experience them. I hear the same is true also in Europe.

[smallmancontrov]

Durable goods have deflated compared to wages while health care, housing, and education soared. If you are given the job of spinning this (or take it upon yourself in a bid for access), focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter is how you do it. "Think of the iPhones! Never mind that rent in a mid-rate city is 1 iPhone and 2 big screen TVs every month!"

[rayiner]

It’s true there’s a spin in that direction. But I think there’s also a tendency to take things for granted in the other direction because they have become so cheap. Food and clothing used to make up significant line items for ordinary people. I remember in the 1990s seeing ads for discount cereal (“it comes in a bag on the bottom shelf but it’s just as good as the branded stuff!”). When was the last time you saw a commercial like that?

A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. In 1970, which was when boomers were about the same age as Gen Z is today, only a third of americans had air conditioning. Today it’s almost 90%—basically only the people in very temperate climates don’t have it.

[hollerith]

Most working-class and many middle-class American women made their own clothes until the 1960s. It was too expensive to buy ready-made clothes.

A company named Simplicity prospered by selling patterns: the woman would tell the company what style and size she wanted, then the company would send her a package consisting of instructions and pieces of paper in the precise shapes needed to make the garment. The woman would attach one of the pieces of paper to fabric with pins, then use lines and symbols printed on the paper to know where to cut, then attach the next piece of paper, etc.

[Xirdus]

The food also became qualitatively different over the same period. We're not eating the same meat, bread, fruits, cheese etc. that our grandparents did at our age.

Durable goods became much less durable, too. Furniture is the biggest one I'd say - they're just not built to last anymore. Whether it's planned obsolescence or just extreme cost cutting, we aren't comparing apples to apples here.

[xyzzyz]

Yes, the furniture became less durable as it became much cheaper. You can still buy durable furniture, but people just aren't interested in it for the most part.

[Xirdus]

But the durable furniture you can still buy is now several times more expensive than 30 years ago, much more than the inflation. Apples to apples, they became less affordable, not more. If you add up the cost of replacing everything every so often, the downtime caused by the replacing, and the periods where your possessions are a little broken but not enough to replace them - there's a strong argument that lower prices caused our quality of life to go down, not up.

[xyzzyz]

I don’t think it’s true. I have been recently to a store here in Virginia that specializes in furniture made by Amish in USA, and while significantly more expensive than IKEA/Wayfair sort of stuff, I doubt that it was significantly more expensive than similar stuff 30 or 50 years ago.

[smaudet]

> A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted.

Like the previous poster mentioned, I'm not sure that's really such a quality of life improvement.

First of all, food. I don't know where you shop, but the cost has definitely doubled, even tripled.

Second of all, the idea that it's some "good" that these things are "cheap" relative to wages - before they may have been expensive, but they were also investments. It doesn't really matter that much, because you can save to obtain them, and don't need to worry about re-obtaining them. Being in a situation where durable goods are cheap, but cost of living is high, means that you are disproportionately struggling - you can't save anything, any good that these products provide is outweighed by it being too expensive to live...

[sarchertech]

What is the time period for you numbers?