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MIT Living Wage Calculator

livingwage.mit.edu

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Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#231

Post by JamesBarney »

lp4v4n wrote: post #141
JamesBarney wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC. If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted. Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples. College and healthcare was much cheaper, and they got a lot less of it. We're benefiting greatly from the increase in…

>They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC. But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well. >If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC…

>But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.

I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you're mostly buying the land.

> Car technology in the past was worse, we know that. Cars were more affordable though.

Car ownership in 1936 was far below what it is today.

> Like today then.

No, groceries were far more expensive. You can buy far more gallons of milks, eggs, lbs of ground beef, or potatoes at today's prices with todays median wage than you could in 1936 on the 1936 median wage. We have records of how much people made, and the cost of basic staples. This isn't something you need to guess about you can just google it.

> Young people are rotting at home unable to go ahead with their lives because wages nowadays are not enough to pay for a house and a family. Why do people try to deny this obvious reality? Productivity didn't benefit everyone equally and people in the past had more opportunities to build a life inside a standard that was socially acceptable.

Because 100 years of data says that this is a difference in expectations vs people being poorer. Yeah housing is more expensive than it should be due to regulation but despite that people are still much better off.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#232

Post by JamesBarney »

lp4v4n wrote: post #230
labcomputer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cars were more affordable though. Eehhhh... I really don't think that's true. First, adjusted for inflation, new car prices really aren't that different than they were 10-30-50-70 years ago. You have to compare like for like, no cheating comparing a modern luxury car to Ford Pinto. For example the cheapest car in 1970 cost about $2000, with no frills like a radio, passenger wing mirror or floor matts. That's equiva…

>Because it is not at all obvious that that is, in fact, reality. It doesn't help to complain about easily-disprovable things like the affordability of cars. Well you can just search "why are cars so expensive" and then you will find dozens of articles like the one below. I'm not American but I have the impression that cars were a kind of milestone in the life of young people in the past and this disappeared due to a…

The American media writes articles about what gets clicks not what is true.

If you don't believe the enormous amount of freely available data on the internet. I am American, I had grandparents who were American. Poverty was a whole different beast in the 1930's compared to today.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#233

Post by [deleted] »

overgard wrote: post #212
mothballed wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in a blizzard ridden area using just a 250cc motorcycle, year round, including riding it on the interstate. Layer enough layers, use heated gloves, etc you can easily get by with just a ninja 250, you're not going to burn more than $3-4k a year on that no matter hard you try. You don't actually need a car unless you have a child or a tradesmen with tools or something like that, a small displacement motorcycle…

"You don't need money if you just do this recklessly dangerous and uncomfortable thing." (don't worry about how to pay the ambulance bill when you hit some black ice..)

[deleted]

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#234

Post by lp4v4n »

JamesBarney wrote: post #231
lp4v4n wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC. But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well. >If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC…

>But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well. I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you'…

>Because 100 years of data says that this is a difference in expectations vs people being poorer. Yeah housing is more expensive than it should be due to regulation but despite that people are still much better off.

People would raise a family on a single income. Boomers would work brain dead job and afford more than what a white collar worker can today, not to mention you could change careers when you wanted. Land was dirty cheap. People had multiple houses. You could find a job right out of highschool.

Nowadays people work dead end jobs to never be able to afford anything. Social security is being bankrupt by retirees who are collecting much more than they contributed and millennials and zoomers are repeatedly told they are not going to be able to retire. A degree became just a piece of paper. Any job interview has at least 3 stages. Childcare, education, etc ridiculously expensive. Houses and rent are ridiculously expensive.

>I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you're mostly buying the land.

You're completely out of touch. Even apartments are super expensive nowadays. I would gladly live in a house without A/C.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#235

Post by jandrewrogers »

lp4v4n wrote: post #219
jandrewrogers wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I can easily eat for $12/day even in Seattle. There are days when I probably spend half of that. We aren't talking beans and rice here, these are diverse satisfying meals. It does require you to cook though.

I don't doubt you can eat three meals with 6 dollars, but it's crazy how solipsistic people are when it comes to food. Not everybody can buy food in bulk and cook at home. A 10 oz ham sandwich will probably cost you more than 2 dollars even if you buy everything at the supermarket. I don't know why people are so reluctant to admit that 12 dollars a day is not much for groceries.

I don't buy anything in bulk, that isn't a prerequisite.

There is no getting around the fact that $12/day buys a lot of good groceries even in expensive cities. Cooking is trivially learned, especially these days with the Internet. The people claiming that eating on $12/day is challenging are really saying that they can't support their affluent lifestyle on $12/day. Which is true! But it reeks of learned helplessness.

As someone who lived decades of their life in real poverty, I find most of the discourse around a "living wage" to be deeply unserious. Things that are completely normal and healthy in low-income communities across the US are presented as unachievable despite millions of examples to the contrary. Living well as a low-income person is a skill. It is obvious that many people with strong opinions on the matter don't have any expertise at it.

The only reason I still regularly eat the same kind of food as when I was poor is that it is objectively delicious and healthy, cost doesn't factor into it. I can afford to eat whatever I desire.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#236

Post by jltsiren »

legitster wrote: post #205
jltsiren wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Living wage" means what a household needs for a dignified life, not just for bare subsistence. If you need roommates because you can't afford an apartment on your own, you are poor by definition. That's probably the most universal definition of poverty that has ever existed. As long as there have been houses, the baseline household has had a housing unit of their own. Households that have to share housing with other…

> Households that have to share housing with others have always been characterized as unusually poor, no matter the continent and the millennium. Historically speaking this is incredibly wrong. Nearly every culture evolved from some sort of shared communal longhouse to individual clan homes, to extended family homes. The idea of individual private rooms actually comes about explicitly from Manors in the late medieval…

You are missing the point.

This was about households rather than individuals and housing units instead of homes, and privacy is unrelated to the discussion. For example, longhouses typically had internal subdivisions that functioned as housing units. A household that cannot afford a baseline housing unit is unusually poor, regardless of its size.

In a developed country, the baseline housing unit most households can afford is typically an apartment or a house. Households that cannot afford one are unusually poor.

Someone who forms a single-person household and doesn't earn enough to rent an apartment is poor.

Single-person households are often poor, especially when the person is young. Living wage estimates for such households tend to be higher relative to typical wages than for larger households, as the idea of a living wage is largely about rising above poverty.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#237

Post by pyrale »

wtcactus wrote: post #184
Sadzeih wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France is not an oil nation. We have 35h weeks and 5 weeks of paid vacation as well. Edit: Also, the US is a damn oil nation. It has nothing to do with oil, and everything to do with politics.

Yes, and your government takes 57% of the total GDP to themselves, rely on an external power (that’s less and less friendly) for their protection and are on the track to their 6th prime minister in less than 2 years (is it 6th? I’ve lost track) because if they try to increase the retirement age above 62 (in their pay as you go unmaintanable system) people come down to the streets to burn down businesses and destroy p…

> your government takes 57% of the total GDP to themselves

That's a lot of blackjack and hookers for the ministers, if you really believe that "the government" takes 57% of GDP for "themselves". No wonder we're at out 6th PM, they must fall like flies with the amount of drugs they have to snort in order to siphon this much money.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#238

Post by lp4v4n »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #235
lp4v4n wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt you can eat three meals with 6 dollars, but it's crazy how solipsistic people are when it comes to food. Not everybody can buy food in bulk and cook at home. A 10 oz ham sandwich will probably cost you more than 2 dollars even if you buy everything at the supermarket. I don't know why people are so reluctant to admit that 12 dollars a day is not much for groceries.

I don't buy anything in bulk, that isn't a prerequisite. There is no getting around the fact that $12/day buys a lot of good groceries even in expensive cities. Cooking is trivially learned, especially these days with the Internet. The people claiming that eating on $12/day is challenging are really saying that they can't support their affluent lifestyle on $12/day. Which is true! But it reeks of learned helplessness…

I used to live 80 minutes from my workplace and I had to get there by public transport because I didn't have a car, cooking at home and taking my food to work was not always possible, especially during the summer. And I used to live with three other flatmates and we shared a small fridge. I'm not making this up, it was my life a few years ago. I ended up spending more than what I wanted eating out because preparing my food was not practical or sometimes not possible.

>The people claiming that eating on $12/day is challenging are really saying that they can't support their affluent lifestyle on $12/day. Which is true! But it reeks of learned helplessness.

I guess I was affluent and didn't know it.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#239

Post by BizarroLand »

bumby wrote: post #210
bradlys wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all full time jobs should at a minimum pay a true living wage where one can live comfortably, save for emergencies, etc. If the job cannot pay that then it shouldn't exist. There are many ways to accomplish this beyond simply raising wages. Better government programs, lower the cost of housing/medical/transportation/food/etc. (these are surprisingly simple but many vested interests don't want this to happen),…

I’m not against that idea but there are some knock-on effects we should be careful of. For example, it will make it hard for younger people to get a job. If I have to pay a teenager the same as someone with a decade or more of work experience, that teenager probably won’t get a job. With a lot of these discussions, we need to be careful about the seductively simple solutions.

If the minimum was the actual minimum, then why would the person with a decade of experience ever work for it?

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#240

Post by not_alexb »

JamesBarney wrote: post #231
lp4v4n wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC. But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well. >If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC…

>But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well. I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you'…

> I don't know many people who would rather live in a house without climate control than an apartment. A house from 1936 with no improvements is worth very little. When purchasing a house like that you're mostly buying the land.

Plenty in Seattle.

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