I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
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Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#2I spent the last 2 months building ideagames.fun : satirical browser experiences about work, money, and modern life.
The Middle Class Museum is a guided tour of things that used to be affordable. Starter homes. Pensions. Blockbuster Friday. Each exhibit has a "Today:" line.
"Today: $450,000. You are renting Gary's basement." Built in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS — no frameworks, no backend, no database. Runs entirely in the browser.
Would love any feedback on what works and what doesn't.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#3Not adjusting for inflation and quality really damages the integrity of the comparisons, as does cherry picking your base examples.
Taking your first, the $47K 3 bedroom starter home with a yard. In 2026 that would be $200K (cumulative inflation is a little over 4x[1]); picking a random US city[2] and looking on Zillow[3] I find that...yeah, you can get a comparable home today.
There are certainly arguments to be made about tradeoffs, quality issues (though those aren't as obvious as you might initially suppose[4]) and so on. But just listing unadjusted price comparisons like this is disingenuous.
[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1980?amount=1 [2] https://www.randomlists.com/random-us-cities [3] https://www.zillow.com [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4C62HC1HSo
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#4Pensions used to be free and great, until the company stole from the pension before they went bankrupt and you were left with nothing.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#5Pensions used to be free and great, until the company stole from the pension before they went bankrupt and you were left with nothing.
Pensions used to be great when you had final salary ones.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#6Pensions used to be free and great, until the company stole from the pension before they went bankrupt and you were left with nothing.
Yeah that must have sucked tbh
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#7Inflation adjusted?
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#8Obligatory HN web design complaint: this uses horizontal instead of vertical scrolling, which is fine-ish, but does not work when using the scrollwheel.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#9Not adjusting for inflation and quality really damages the integrity of the comparisons, as does cherry picking your base examples. Taking your first, the $47K 3 bedroom starter home with a yard. In 2026 that would be $200K (cumulative inflation is a little over 4x[1]); picking a random US city[2] and looking on Zillow[3] I find that...yeah, you can get a comparable home today. There are certainly arguments to be mad…
Thanks for the feedback. The whole experience/site is mainly satirical/humorous. It's not inflation adjusted cause I didn't want it turn into a finance piece tbh, but you're definitely right, if inflation adjusted most cards need to be re-built to account for inflation and better judge what we're getting today vs what we used to get
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#10Obligatory HN web design complaint: this uses horizontal instead of vertical scrolling, which is fine-ish, but does not work when using the scrollwheel.
Thanks for the feedback , will work on this today.