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Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

macroaffairs.com

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Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#41

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

3pt14159 wrote: post #10
taurath wrote: post #3

I wonder how much higher it would be if medical costs were taken out. Housing is the biggest problem for my generation, but it gets almost no traction nor solution.

Housing is largely a problem to do with interest rates and mortgages inflating the land. The actual construction materials themselves (at least here in Canada) aren't too bad. I keep wondering why someone doesn't kickstarter a town. It has all the right incentives. Make guidelines that enforce density in the core and do common sense things from day 1, like wire fibre to every domicile.

Because a collection of homes and buildings isn't a town. You need the buildings to be occupied by employers offering jobs and relevant services and you need the people in the homes to have those jobs. That's not something you can kickstarter.

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#42

Post by scarface74 »

organsnyder wrote: post #11
pkaye wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all prescriptions are for expensive medicines. I'd say many of them are generic drugs which cost pennies per day.

In many cases, drug companies come up with ways to keep prices high. For instance, asthma drugs are reconfigured with different delivery mechanisms that allow them to get new patents for what are essentially long-ago-discovered drugs. For instance, the CFC ban in 2008 caused generic albuterol to go off the market: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unlikely-victims-...

The work around I used when my asthma was worse to save money waa to use a nebulizer. The albuterol tubes were cheap.

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#43

Post by School-Cotton »

ttul wrote: post #14
dylrich wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make ~$90,000 a year and are barely getting by with no debt or children? Where do you live?

In the Bay Area, $90K is not sufficient. A one bedroom might cost $3500/month - that’s $40K of your net income.

You can’t build wealth on $90K in Monaco either, but that says something about Monaco, not about “capitalism”.

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#44

Post by IncRnd »

tjpaudio wrote: post #34
IncRnd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a great example of using statistics to create a conclusion that fits a narrative, based upon statistically insignificant behavior. This article is entitled, "Over the Past 5 Years, Inflation for Millennials was 14% Higher than for Baby Boomers". Yet, we find out in the last paragraph, indeed in the final sentence, that there is virtually no difference between groups over a longer, more significant period of…

Their use of the word significantly in this context does not refer to statistical significance. The percentages you are referring too are just basic metrics based on the last years data, not something that was t-tested. The longer time period changes the starting index, it doesn't really make this type of analysis more or or less statistically significant. As the author alluded, this could mean that economic mechanis…

You are making a statement about statistics that isn't correct. Statistics is collecting and analyzing numerical data, which is what this article does. That is a truth, regardless of it being a different sort of analysis than what you believe to be the only model of statistics.

That is also orthogonal to what I wrote, which you seemed to intentionally misunderstand in order for you to argue.

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#45

Post by ProfessorLayton »

ttul wrote: post #14
dylrich wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make ~$90,000 a year and are barely getting by with no debt or children? Where do you live?

In the Bay Area, $90K is not sufficient. A one bedroom might cost $3500/month - that’s $40K of your net income.

90K is comfortably above the median per capita income literally anywhere in the Bay Area:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_locations_b...

I'm not saying 90K is a lot, but it is complete hyperbole to say it isn't sufficient to live in the Bay. 90K is right up there with the highest median household incomes.

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#46

Post by scarface74 »

aphextron wrote: post #2

I feel like technology has led to such an efficient form of capitalism over the past 20 years, that there's no room left for any possibility of social mobility. It's this system where there is just enough room for you to live and get by, but never get ahead. Prices for everything are so efficiently optimized at this point that there is no more "wiggle room" for a working person to build wealth. The basic necessities…

The median wage is $37K (https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/). That means you are making about $110K as a single person you can’t live off of that?

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#47

Post by refurb »

ojbyrne wrote: post #17

"Over the past five years" - I feel that in order to formulate "a historical price index per generation" you need to look at inflation over the entire life of the generation. Baby boomers went through the seventies, when inflation was significantly higher than now.

I was coming here to say that. Inflation rates in the double digits is something millennials have never gone through.

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#48

Post by majormajor »

smichel17 wrote: post #39
xtian wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are making $90k and living in SF you should be looking at studios or for roommates, not at one bedrooms. A one bedroom in a city like SF is a luxury.

Isn't that kind of the point of the original comment? That cost of living rises by location in almost perfect parallel to wages? So even though they make a relative lot of money, their standard of living doesn't actually increase much.

Wages don't rise exactly like that. There's a threshold under which it doesn't make much sense at all. If you're making under 100K - and certainly under 50k - I wouldn't be surprised if you could be much more financially comfortable in, say, Dallas. Chop your rent budget in half, lower your tax burden, you'll probably get a bigger chunk of monthly spending money.

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#49

Post by CompelTechnic »

IncRnd wrote: post #28
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #18

This is a great example of how you can make up anything by aggregating unrelated statistical measures and then mislead people with a new definition on top of another woozy commonly used definition.

It's also a great example of using statistics to create a conclusion that fits a narrative, based upon statistically insignificant behavior. This article is entitled, "Over the Past 5 Years, Inflation for Millennials was 14% Higher than for Baby Boomers". Yet, we find out in the last paragraph, indeed in the final sentence, that there is virtually no difference between groups over a longer, more significant period of…

I think the way that percentages were expressed in the headline was intentionally deceptive- 14% seems like a lot of inflation in 5 years! That makes for good clickbait. But the percent that is being talked about is the comparative difference between groups, per the line:

Over the past five years, millennials have seen their goods become 8.7% more expensive, Generation X 8%, and baby boomers 7.6%. This means that the price increase for millennials was 14% higher than for baby boomers.

Re: Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups

#50

Post by scarface74 »

aphextron wrote: post #21
joefourier wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live, and what on earth are you spending your money on? Housing may be absurdly costly in many cities but $5.5k a month after tax (assuming you're American) is enough to do much better than "barely ok" almost anywhere. Are you significantly in debt or living above your means?

>Where do you live, and what on earth are you spending your money on? Bay area ~$5,000 net monthly $2500 Rent/PGE $1000 Car/Insurance/Gas/Parking/Phone/Internet $500 Food/Clothing $500 IRA That leaves ~$500 monthly discretionary income, which I usually try to save as much as possible but inevitably gets eaten up by all the stupid little things in life that cost too much nowadays. I can't even imagine supporting a fam…

There are plenty of major metropolitan areas where the salary vs cost of living make a lot more sense.

I live in one of the 25 most affluent counties in the US and just bought a brand new build 5 bedroom 3.5 bath house 2900 square feet for a little over 320K.

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