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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

#61

Post by wang_li »

Lots of problems with this. The noted lack of inflation adjustment. The savings interest item ignores the fact that loan interest rates were 10%+ when you could get a good rate on your savings account. The student loan one is just wrong, the average student loan debt in 2026 is $43k. You ignore the point of the avocado toast (what used to be called the latte factor) simply so you can make some pithy comment. If you don't buy $14 toast 5 days a week, you can save $3500 per year. If you do that for 5 years you have a great addition to your downpayment for a home. Or you can use the money saved to buy a brand-new Nissan Versa, a perfectly fine starter car for a young couple with 1 or 2 young kids, for $17,000. Blockbuster Friday comes out to 4 movies a month for $16. Compared to $16 for a streaming service that you can watch every single night. And everyone knows the experience of going to a video rental store and walking the aisles for what felt like hours trying to find something to watch, just a different kind of scrolling. In 30 years of working in IT, cubicles have been the norm. 30m from where I'm sitting right now there is a ping pong table. The break room is huge and has plenty of large, cushioned seating that you can lie down on and take a nap if you need to. As well as small private meeting spaces if you just have to get away from everyone. This is not a tech startup or FAANG. The summer job is still true for most state universities. Utah State University 2026 tuition and fees is $4500 per semester.

If you don't want to pay subscriptions, don't subscribe to those services. You can trivially buy Bluray, DVD, and CDs. Or you can get DRM free music from multiple sources. You can stream spotify and youtube for free. OTA TV is still a thing.

Apparently, I'm in a contrarian and argumentative mood today.

Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable

#62

Post by megaman821 »

ihumanable wrote: post #57
megaman821 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

I find this graphic a good one https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-pric... Obviously it's partial (or else there would be a billion lines) but it gives a good broad view of what things have gotten more or less expensive. - TVs, toys, software, and cellphone services are cheaper. - Clothing, funishings, and cars roughly flat. - Healthcare, education, childcare, food, and housing are all more expens…

Almost nothing can make labor-dominated services drop though. I guess you could have guest worker visas that pay half the going wage, and there would be a lot of people that take that deal, but most Americans would hate that.

Grocery inflation is not nearly as bad as the food inflation overall, which is driven by food-away-from-home just absolutely skyrocketing.

Billions of words have been spilled about housing, so I will boil it down simply. It is a mixture of policy and preference. It doesn't have to be the way it is, we just need to collective will to change things.

Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable

#63

Post by wang_li »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #50
megaman821 wrote: post #19

Even 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 importan…

>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?

A brand new Nissan Versa for $17,300.

Work for an entire year after high school while living with your parents and saving money so you can attend a state school for https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/versa-sedan.html

Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable

#64

Post by maldusiecle »

psadauskas wrote: post #47
MarkusQ wrote: post #3

Not 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 ever…

In 1979, 13% of US hourly workers were making the federal minimum wage. By 2025, that number had dropped to 1%.

Inflation-adjusted wages have been at worst stagnant. Inflation-adjusting prices is necessary for these comparisons to be meaningful at all.

This is a website for engineers, you should be embarrassed to be posting these completely innumerate comments.

Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable

#65

Post by ozlikethewizard »

neaden wrote: post #54
syel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I 100% disagree with this and don't think it is particularly close? Sure there are some specific locations that are much more expensive, and there are some locations that are much cheaper. Overall if you want the same things it is way more affordable today than the 80s and 90s. But our standards have risen a lot and things that used to be considered middle class are now considered poor.

Anything that could be considered in the base layers of Maslov's heirarchy is certainly less affordable. Food, shelter, health, education. Sure lots of consumer goods have got cheaper, but if you've got a big TV and no house to put it in are you actually any richer?

Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable

#66

Post by SirMaster »

8% savings accounts? It says today 0.01% below that, but there are definitely high yield saving accounts in the 4-5% range today...

So sure it's half as good, if 8% really was common back then... but weren't loan interest rates even higher back then than today too?

Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable

#68

Post by [deleted] »

wang_li wrote: post #61

Lots of problems with this. The noted lack of inflation adjustment. The savings interest item ignores the fact that loan interest rates were 10%+ when you could get a good rate on your savings account. The student loan one is just wrong, the average student loan debt in 2026 is $43k. You ignore the point of the avocado toast (what used to be called the latte factor) simply so you can make some pithy comment. If you d…

[deleted]

Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable

#69

Post by SirMaster »

Subsidized smartphone is definitely still here.

I got my 17 Pro ($1100) from ATT for free which is almost twice the cost of the phones back then. And my monthly cost is only $35/mo as well for the 3 year term, for unlimited data too, which is cheaper than the data plans back then.

Re: I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable

#70

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

tim-tday wrote: post #7

Inflation adjusted?

Looking at an inflation calculator, the average rate since 1980 has been 3.06% over 46 years. Compounded, 1.0306^46 = 4.0.

So, adjusting for inflation, a single income family in 1980 would be equivalent to a four-income family today. Since millennials currently get by with just two incomes, they actually come out way ahead when adjusted for inflation.

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