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MIT Living Wage Calculator

livingwage.mit.edu

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Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#171

Post by bumby »

SideQuark wrote: post #138
monsieurbanana wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any adult with a full-time job should be able to afford a studio or small apartment. Probably making concessions on the location depending on where they want to live. It's not a matter of being young or not

In the US, this is trivial to do. Theres plenty of states where unskilled entry lever wages easily allows this life, for most of the locations, with the exception of extremely high cost city centers. Pick IL for example. Min wage $15, so $30k a year income fulltime. Most every adult that’s worked even a little should be able to earn decently more than min, which is for completely unskilled, new workers. Median il wag…

Part of the issue is those smaller cities don’t offer a large supply of job opportunities. So people are often not able to pick and choose their location.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#172

Post by blobbers »

etchalon wrote: post #35
prepend wrote: post #10

I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children. Many young people I know live on much less than this. This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. Thes…

"Living wage" means the ability to live, not scrape by with the bare minimum possible.

Is a family of 4 in a 2BR considered living wage? Because they have rent at $3600 for a family in silicon valley... which seems impossible. I paid more than that when I graduated from college with a roommate 20 years ago.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#173

Post by prepend »

etchalon wrote: post #35
prepend wrote: post #10

I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children. Many young people I know live on much less than this. This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. Thes…

"Living wage" means the ability to live, not scrape by with the bare minimum possible.

That’s what I think when I hear the term, too. But these numbers are not just living, but living at a pretty high standard.

I would expect living wage to mean the amount one needs to be able to live out your life fairly decently and with dignity. I think many do so without having pay this high.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#174

Post by bumby »

NewJazz wrote: post #67
Larrikin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does eating pretty well mean to you? Maybe you don't even if you think you do? We don't know without your budget or a receipt from your typical grocery run

Also some folks are just smaller than others.

They do try to account for this in their method. Men, women, and children of different ages all have different amounts of assumed food intake

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#175

Post by brendoelfrendo »

gs17 wrote: post #73
prepend wrote: post #10

I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children. Many young people I know live on much less than this. This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. Thes…

> For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. These are both way more than is necessary. Even on the smaller things. "Internet & Mobile" for where I am jumped out to me. Based on the difference between 1 adult and 2 adults, it's $582 per person-year for mobile (which I guess isn't far off if you get a good new phone every 2 years, it's reasonable enough) and with that subtracted, inte…

I am but a single datapoint, but the $100/month for home internet hits quite close to home. I currently pay $130 for Spectrum's gigabit cable internet plan. Their website offers it for $70, but that's only for the first year; they have raised that price by, apparently, $20 per year I've been a customer. We do not have fiber and my only other ISP option is a DSL provider that maxes out at 40mbps for $30. So sure, I can save about 75% on my internet bill by opting for internet that is 4% of the speed that I currently pay for. And this is in a rapidly growing suburb. I think $100/month is easily the case for places like my home, where local broadband monopolies still exist mostly unchallenged.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#176

Post by prepend »

lp4v4n wrote: post #82
bumby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I’ve eat pretty well, and my household food costs are almost half what the calculator shows. Similar for vehicle costs etc. After looking at the method, I think the calculator probably has some bias towards “what society has convinced us we need”. To a certain extent that is a relative and subjective perception problem, and one exacerbated when you live in a society with a lot of consumer debt.

The yearly cost of food for one person without children in the county of Los Angeles(I selected an expensive area on purpose) is showing 4,428 USD. That's about 12 dollars a day. I don't even live in the United States but that value looks pretty low if anything.

I can easily cook all my meals for $12/day.

I don’t consider daily or even weekly restaurants part of a necessity for life.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#177

Post by hackable_sand »

kevinyang222 wrote: post #127
beambot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, indeed, what 9-9-6 means: 9am-9pm (12hrs) * 6 days per week.

9-9-6 is also not full productivity for 9-9-6. Office workers will eat lunch, take a 1-2hr nap in the afternoon, and also eat dinner with their coworkers within the common 9-9-6 rhythm. It still takes a significant chunk of time, but the actual working time butt-in-chair is closer to 54 hours

You lose productivity doing 996 anyways so how can you maximize past that?

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#178

Post by ericd »

kibwen wrote: post #167
prepend wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s obviously not required based on the evidence of many people who live and thrive without. $9000/year is a ton more than just having a car.

The average total cost of car ownership in the US in 2025 was about $12,000. $9,000 is already a huge underestimate of what the average person is paying.

That US average includes a lot of new, loaded, financed, comprehensively insured F150’s, not some reasonable minimum.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#179

Post by zozbot234 »

bumby wrote: post #171
SideQuark wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, this is trivial to do. Theres plenty of states where unskilled entry lever wages easily allows this life, for most of the locations, with the exception of extremely high cost city centers. Pick IL for example. Min wage $15, so $30k a year income fulltime. Most every adult that’s worked even a little should be able to earn decently more than min, which is for completely unskilled, new workers. Median il wag…

Part of the issue is those smaller cities don’t offer a large supply of job opportunities. So people are often not able to pick and choose their location.

This is an underappreciated argument for basic income/UBI: you need a lot less of it since its very existence enables recipients to move to lower cost of living locations.

(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#180

Post by jandrewrogers »

bumby wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, I found some of the costs like food and food to be inflated. When I looked at the methodology, some is based on consumer surveys so it may be more reflective of over-consumption. In other words, it prices in what people want or what they’re used to, not what they need. The counterpoint is that maybe some wealthy countries should be pricing in a higher quality of life, but the “living wage” then becomes a…

Anecdotally their numbers are significantly higher for my city than what I actually spend in some categories. I am not frugal by any stretch of the imagination, you would have to be pretty careless and/or irresponsible to hit some of those numbers. On the other hand, the living wage is below the actual minimum wage in some cases.

If you look at US BLS and Federal Reserve studies on such things, they make a distinctions between what people actually spend on ordinary expenses and when people can no longer afford those categories of expenses.

An interesting artifact is that incomes across the 15-40th percentile range in the same city don't save much money but still have enough money to pay for all ordinary expenses. That is a wide range of incomes for people nominally spending their entire income on the same things. What actually seems to happen is that average people spend excess income on upgrading their lifestyle until they hit the 40th percentile, at which point the average person starts saving some of their additional excess income.

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