A townhouse can still be had for <300k in Baltimore
Yeah, I am pretty sure that you can buy a house for less than $450k in multiple cities, commentary is meant to be humorous for most part
I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
41–50 of 105 posts
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pensions used to be great when 0.1% expense ratio target date funds were not available. It makes no sense to give someone else control of your savings in this day and age.
I think it depends on your financial literacy, I know a lot of people who have no idea how to invest their money, you would be surprised how many people would be more comfortable with someone else managing their life savings for them
You are absolutely right to want a pension in addition to just regular savings, because a pension has huge tax benefits. (UK)
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#43This is straight up AI generated economic disinformation. Are you seriously claiming that computers cost more in real terms today than 20 years ago?? Some of these goods (housing) do cost more, but a lot of these examples don't make any sense.
Most people would prefer housing to a fancier computer.
The productivity gains from fancier computers haven’t accrued to workers either.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not adjusting for inflation makes it look completely stupid. There's one good effort - comparing a car to the salary of a car-worker. But it only has half the comparison (what are today's car workers earning?). That's the comparison that Marx would recognize: how long do the people making something have to work to buy the thing they made?
Is the implicit expectation that people making something should have some correlation with their ability to buy that thing? The assembly-worker making a Civic and a 7 Series BMW are doing effectively the same thing, but the BMW assembler shouldn’t be getting paid 3 to 4x.
The reference to Marx and (implicitly) the labor theory of value renders the GP unserious. Just looking at the people doing the assembly (and not all the people in the supply chain), ignoring the time aspect (I doubt there's any product that costs more than one of the people assembling it would expect to make over the time it would take them to single-handedly create the product from scratch), and so on.
It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#45Even with these cherry-picked examples, plug in how things actually were. That $8,200 station wagon with at 48 month loan and the terrible 80's loan rates of 10-12% would be like $750/month now. Most of those cars wouldn't make it to 50k miles without a major repair. There were almost no safety features, seat belts weren't required to be worn and you could drink and drive. This weird fetishization of the past is a me…
Agree, but if we take a wholistic approach, most things were more affordable. This is a satirical take not a literal financial comparison and I designed it to be that, but I think no can disagree that life in 80s and 90s was way more affordable.
Some things yes and some things no. It is not and cut-and-dry as you think.
Look up the inflation adjust prices for a computer or a "big-screen" TV and realize almost no one pays anything near those prices for any consumer good. On the other hand there are a lot more people in the US and it is not like land is sprouting up from nowhere, so the price of land is a lot more.
Most things though fall into what people's personal preferences are. Cars have more luxury, house are bigger and have better finishes, movies are huge spectacles, one person can't watch 8 infants, you get more than an aspirin from formerly untreatable diseases; roll all this back and prices will drop.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#46Some of these felt very cherry picked. E.g. 8% interest rate in banks? That probably means mortgage rates were 10-15%, where as they are now 5-6%
$0 pensions? Thats just a lie? The pension comes out of your paycheck. Its literally a line item on your pay stub.
Also this site would be better if you overlay inflation or something to highlight when/where costs rose. E.g. using the CPI inflation calculator the $7400 for a new car would be $28k today. $28k wont buy you a F150 today (starts at ~40k) but its a good chunk of the way, and there are other cars you can buy for $28k easy.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#47Not 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…
Just "adjusting for inflation" isn't good enough. Minimum wage was $4/hr. Now its $8. An elementary school custodian could afford a mortgage, a car, support a family of 4 and go on vacation on just that single income. They had healthcare and a pension. You could work over the summer and pay for a year of college at a state school.
Yes, the house now is more energy efficient. The car is safer. But if the price of everything went up 4x-10x, and the median income only went up 2x, AND you have to pay for more things that used to be included, then everything is more unaffordable, inflation be damned.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#48Even with these cherry-picked examples, plug in how things actually were. That $8,200 station wagon with at 48 month loan and the terrible 80's loan rates of 10-12% would be like $750/month now. Most of those cars wouldn't make it to 50k miles without a major repair. There were almost no safety features, seat belts weren't required to be worn and you could drink and drive. This weird fetishization of the past is a me…
People didn’t finance cars on 4 year loans back then. 3 years was the max, so even with 10% interest that’s only $60 extra a month for 3 years.
You're right, a 4 year loan in the 80's basically didn't exist.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#49This is US centric, but you can show this to anyone in any major city in the western world and they will nod. The problem is global. Any time you are told the problem is immigrants in your country or that your local politicians didn’t build enough housing - that’s not the root cause. The root cause is the inevitable centralization of all wealth in corporations who can dodge taxes. This affords them the ability to acc…
Yeah, I actually live in Toronto, and this was one the design decisions I was thinking about before building this, it's just that more people relate to the US. And I agree with the reasons you listed, immigration imo can be controlled, like what I see here in Canada, they seem to control the flow based on economic state and demand year to year.
Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
#50Even with these cherry-picked examples, plug in how things actually were. That $8,200 station wagon with at 48 month loan and the terrible 80's loan rates of 10-12% would be like $750/month now. Most of those cars wouldn't make it to 50k miles without a major repair. There were almost no safety features, seat belts weren't required to be worn and you could drink and drive. This weird fetishization of the past is a me…
Focusing though on the cost (you know, no one is going to prevent you from wearing a seatbelt) where is the equivalent today? A used Ford Focus off of Craigslist? A double-wide in a trailer park?
As another pointed out, I think we're "fetishizing" the affordability of the previous decades, not the cigarette smoke in the restaurants.
As per cherry picking: housing, transportation, education… These are kind of important. If it had only been, say, giant TVs I would agree it is cherry-picked.
Perhaps you think the examples themselves (Ford F-150, etc.) are what are cherry-picked?