51–60 of 314 posts
Isn't it a natural consequence of capital growing faster than wage?
This doesn't make sense at all to me. They're comparing income in constant 2022 dollars with the CPI. That's saying "if we adjusted historical salaries for inflation, then assumed that the constant 2022 dollar numbers were actually nominal numbers for each point in history, then people would've been able to buy much more stuff back then". Which is true, but not very meaningful. The whole point of the constant 2022 do…
The proliferation of payment plans. Everyone can "afford" a flagship smartphone. Only 36$ per month Everyone can afford a car only : 340$ a month. numbers add up fast digging themselves into a hole
If some are rejected directly by the banks for getting these loans, then the banks can still get them by setting up a BNPL (Buy-Now-Pay-Later) competitor / service with even higher interest rates. Either way, the banks still win.
So you will own nothing, and you will be very happy. Even if you can't afford it, the banks will be very happy to charge you interest and you will still be happy.
The scam of the century.
At least they can buy cheap TVs, right? I wonder if we can finally accept that just because things like phones and TVs got better faster than purchasing power got worse, doesn't mean that it hasn't been getting worse for a while. I'd even go so far to say that technical progress in a couple areas has hidden some pretty stark declines. Or at least allowed some people to point at shiny things getting better when compla…
The caption is "wages are up 80% but that didn't keep up with living costs" - you cannot draw that inference from this graph. This graph actually shows that in fact wages grew faster than inflation.
Housing is another red herring, of course, because the average new American home is 2x bigger now than it was in the 70s - and the average American family is like 10% smaller. Broadly, 1 square foot of the 'average' American home costs exactly the same as it used to in the 1970s. [1] So yes, housing is more expensive in big cities but that's because of zoning as Mr. Andreessen will tell you. Outside big cities it's still zoning, which requires minimum setback, garages, square footage, etc.
In fact if you look by cohort, inflation-adjusted, millennials are doing roughly as well as other generations did at their age. [2]
Their flagship claim that folks have 86% less purchasing power now holds zero water. The poverty rate remains basically unchanged since the 70s. [3] You'd think there'd be a lot more people in poverty if they only had 1/10th the buying power no?!
Some things are more expensive (college, healthcare, 1 sqft of house in a big city, new houses outside of town) and yes, productivity growth far outpaced wage growth - but wage growth kept pace with inflation. That means folks are just the same off, instead of the better off they could be. [4]
[edit] If you really slice it by decile, the bottom 10% of millennials is much worse off (like 15%) - that's what it looks like when you massacre the social safety net. But millennials as a whole are just as well off as previous generations.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa...
[2] https://ofdollarsanddata.com/no-millennials-arent-poorer-tha...
[3] https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff...
At least they can buy cheap TVs, right? I wonder if we can finally accept that just because things like phones and TVs got better faster than purchasing power got worse, doesn't mean that it hasn't been getting worse for a while. I'd even go so far to say that technical progress in a couple areas has hidden some pretty stark declines. Or at least allowed some people to point at shiny things getting better when compla…
What good is cheaper tech if we just use that to add more features and keep the same price? You could get a TV for less than $50 if it had the same features and processing power as it did in 2002. Same for computers. Imagine how cheap we could make a car that only has the features we had in the 90’s? Even if you include the mandatory passive safety upgrades.
...having better technology, and therefore higher living standards?
This doesn't make sense at all to me. They're comparing income in constant 2022 dollars with the CPI. That's saying "if we adjusted historical salaries for inflation, then assumed that the constant 2022 dollar numbers were actually nominal numbers for each point in history, then people would've been able to buy much more stuff back then". Which is true, but not very meaningful. The whole point of the constant 2022 do…
They've specifically pulled out only the categories that have risen faster than inflation, and didn't include any categories that have fallen relative to inflation. So it's guaranteed to get this result.
My parents are boomers and frequently talk about the 2020s being 70s dejavu. My father entered his 20s in in 1968, and the tail end of his 20s in a deep recession and purchased a modest home in 1976 at a blistering 14% on 30 year fixed. His experience in the Midwest did not match with the assertions in the article.
It has been shocking to me to see how cheap and effective healthcare can be in other countries, from an emergency visit to the hospital (in the US: I got a $50k bill for one emergency surgery) to an eye test and new pair of glasses (US costs running $500-$1000, although startups have chipped away at this). In the US, healthcare is effectively a collection of cartels -- an enormous parasite that will be nearly impossible to rip off our soft underbelly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What good is cheaper tech if we just use that to add more features and keep the same price? You could get a TV for less than $50 if it had the same features and processing power as it did in 2002. Same for computers. Imagine how cheap we could make a car that only has the features we had in the 90’s? Even if you include the mandatory passive safety upgrades.
I'd be first in line for a new car that only has the features of cars from the 1990s.