Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

kyla.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–107 of 107 posts

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#101

Post by johnnyanmac »

treis wrote: post #84
landryraccoon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to say you're very out of touch. This rosy picture is objectively wrong when it comes to housing. Start with the fundamentals - construction has gotten more expensive. Unlike virtually every other industry in the US, it actually costs more to build residential housing per square foot (inflation adjusted) than it did in 1960. Construction workers in 2025 are *less efficient* than they were 50 years ago, desp…

This is what I mean by pervasive negativity. Well all those things got better but what about this other thing? And this thing is nonsense too. Boomers aren't immortal. Eventually they will die and whatever housing constraint there is will turn to surplus.

> Well all those things got better but what about this other thing?

This is peak "let them eat cake". A person needs to live out of their car because they can't afford rent, but hey. They can buy a flat screen TV for $200 now!

Things are inverted, and not for the better. You can make all electronics 10x more expensive if it measn we can reasonably expect rent to be 30% of average income again. That means you can actualyl save up for luxuries. Or invest and live frugally. As it is now, it's the worst of both worlds.

>Boomers aren't immortal. Eventually they will die and whatever housing constraint there is will turn to surplus.

Sadly, no. The "great wealth transfer" is not going down to the next generation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephcoughlin/2025/06/02/the-g...

They are either selling it off and living it up, or Healtchare is going to eat into it. Either way, don't expect the boomers dying off to magically reset the economy.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#102

Post by johnnyanmac »

joe_the_user wrote: post #22
treis wrote: post #12

It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative. I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there…

I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile. Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhou…

It's something I note a lot about detractors on HN. They don't think in people, they think in "things". And the "important things" are ones they take for granted. If they secured a house from the tech boom of the 10's before everything went to shit, then they are completely insulated from the idea that "things are harder to get".

Then there's the job aspect. I guess Hacker News is more older millenial/Gen X, so they are on the sticky side of this "sticky job market". If they are done job hopping, they won't feel how bad it is out there.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#103

Post by treis »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #101
treis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I mean by pervasive negativity. Well all those things got better but what about this other thing? And this thing is nonsense too. Boomers aren't immortal. Eventually they will die and whatever housing constraint there is will turn to surplus.

> Well all those things got better but what about this other thing? This is peak "let them eat cake". A person needs to live out of their car because they can't afford rent, but hey. They can buy a flat screen TV for $200 now! Things are inverted, and not for the better. You can make all electronics 10x more expensive if it measn we can reasonably expect rent to be 30% of average income again. That means you can actu…

>This is peak "let them eat cake

Nonsense. It's these 5 things got way better and the one thing that maybe got worse is going to get better later because it's a cyclical market.

This is what I mean by unrelentingly negative. The world is way better by almost every measure than when I was a kid and the discourse focuses on the few ways it's not.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#104

Post by conception »

qaq wrote: post #77
conception wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. What does it matter the actual physical atoms? A mole of gold costs more than a mole of carbon. How much you can “deploy” with 500m differs. Maybe you’re trying to say if they actually liquidated their wealth to spend any sufficient fraction their paper wealth would disappear but that’s the point of pulling out the value without liquidating.

I am saying people imaging that significant portion of paper wealth could be converted into tangible things for regular people like housing, infra etc.

This is actually pretty easy to get data on, e.g. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primar...

There are many studies on the various tax cuts for the ultra wealthy and how that has (purposefully) starved the government and limited its ability to provide tangible things for its citizens.

And that’s ignoring all the various tax avoidance schemes.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#105

Post by ajross »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #91
ajross wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution They actually aren't. Median income is measured as a median for a reason. Poverty line statistics are taken at the low end. Local CPI and price data is taken and reported. And all of those numbers are, indeed, getting better and not worse. I repeat this everywhere this subject comes up, but the real reason things look like they're getting…

There's some truth here, but it seems to be missin occum's razor. Homes got more expensive, income did not increase as fast. You can say two things are happening at once. The line for minorities is moving up and the housing market is moving up faster (much faster). White people, moving up not as fast as either of the two. I still blame housing the most here, though.

> Homes got more expensive, income did not increase as fast.

That's true, but not nearly so much so as people tend to believe. Median home price expressed as a fraction of household income is up about 38% since 1985: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NXLF

That's significant, and worth talking about. But it's not justification for the ridiculous hyperbole people like to throw around on this. Note that median real income (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") is up by almost the same fraction over the same time period: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Which is to say, impact on disposable income from housing costs is negligible, especially since so much other stuff is cheaper now.

So basically no: "I still blame housing the most here" is just wrong per the numbers.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#106

Post by kjkjadksj »

jerlam wrote: post #38
kjkjadksj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actual…

The personal automobile is the cause for most of these problems. The US gutted many of its cities by widening streets and removing public transport, and newer cities are simply not built to any comparable density because they are built with the car as the primary mode of transportation.

At least in LA transit was never really removed. The streetcar system evolved into a bus network that is far more comprehensive today than the streetcar system ever was. What changed was really income levels. Already by the 1920s streetcar systems were in decline as the used car market started kicking into gear and making a direct transport option affordable to most all working people. To this day it is still highly affordable to have a car. There are used car lots advertising $0 down $50/mo financing with merely holding a job at all being enough to qualify for that financing. "Tu trabajo es tu credito" painted on the walls.

Other places you see more transit use usually come with significant cost barriers to driving for most of the working population. In nyc this includes bridge tolls and paying for parking.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#107

Post by kjkjadksj »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #25
kjkjadksj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actual…

Is that a new thing, though? Or could it go back decades to a time when Americans didn’t feel their country was decaying? Already in the 1960s Los Angeles was depicted as immense sprawl where people drove long distances for everything.

I'm not sure when it started per say. I just think its really odd how you have this pocket of very high income people and no one is bothering trying to cater to that demographic, but instead to the demographic that cleans their house or mows their yard. E.g. the flats of beverly hills fill with taco trucks during the work day specifically for the housecleaners and landscapers to get their lunch. Maybe this high income class of people just puts on very low demand for goods and services relative to lower income classes of people.
Post reply on HN