Time for the other American political party to pick up the "nah it's just negative media, people still have money and food" drum!
Sure, many people (in an absolute-number sense) are in no immediate risk of crisis. But many are.
Economic policy for 40+ years has been shifting both income and wealth largely to the already-haves with massive knock-on effects on the general affordability and comfort for everybody else. The flow of money into small sets of assets and investments distorts the "inflation" measurements and we find ways to ignore it. Buy groceries instead of eating out! Just let the median household's kids work more too, in some red states! That part of the story has been going on for a long time, and the actual-Covid-inflation just drew more attention to the trend.
People were talking about it long before Covid, but the Covid bullwhip and the complete lack of foresight or management[0] of the situation pushed it into a new, noticably-worse-normal overnight. While before we were just boiling the frog and blaming avocado toast for millenials not buying houses or having kids yet. Some good math in the post about the concrete part of this vs just "vibe" parts, especially re: the behavior of the lower-income end of the economy.
But you can't have a viable consumer economy when everyone with power is squeezing the consumer tighter and tighter. We've been papering over this problem by making stuff free-with-ads but eventually there won't be enough buying power left in a large enough non-broke cohort to keep the system working for anybody.
[0] "you think maybe people will want more of the stuff they bought before, and less Pelotons, in a two years?? No way! Buy Zoom stock!"
I saw a thing in Wall Street Journal today about how millennials are "splurging on rotisserie chicken."
> “Gen Zers and millennials are swimming in student debt and may never own homes, but they’re splurging on gut-healthy juices and rotisserie chickens.”
Yeah, that's been the typical attitude for well over a decade now from the older generations who didn't have the same struggles and don't imagine that things have actually changed.
Even if we read that as generously as possible - "wow, look at how many millennials buy $20 Erewhon smoothies" - it's a wildly stupid play to couple that to how many millennials are in debt and can't afford homes.
Nobody said no millennials can afford homes. Nobody said they are all broke. Plenty of businesses out there are still capitalizing off the higher end of the range.
But at almost every percentile they're worse off than their parents were, economically. And probably working more hours to get there.
But the Supreme Court declared the president was essentially a king and that it was illegal for the United States to help graduates with their student loans, so it must be a fine situation.
It's a good way for a grocer to minimize waste. When raw chicken gets close to sell by date, turn it into rotisserie chicken, when it doesn't sell - turn it into sandwiches and other products.
My kids just remarked to me that a Costco rotisserie chicken was $4. I didn't believe them but I do now. I wonder how freezing that will thaw. That's a cheap food option.
It's weird I was having a conversation with a contractor the other day, and he mentioned how in 1970, contractors earned ~9k/year and a truck cost ~2k. He was making the comparison about how he made 50K this year and the truck he financed was also around 50K..
I don't think it's a coincidence a lot of problems are happening at the same time in the US.
Part of the economic distortion, and difficulty in making these comparisons, is that a 1970 Ford F-100 and 2025 Ford F-150 are pretty radically different. Both by design, government mandate, and customer demands.
2 door single row -> 4 door two rows
drum brakes -> anti-lock disc brakes
lap belts only -> shoulder belts with airbags,
normally aspirated V-8, no catalytic converter -> twin turbo v6 and dual catalytic converter
manual transmission -> 10 speed automatic
If you wanted to make a Ford F-100 today, without the modern safety, emissions, fuel efficiency, and comforts, you could probably do it for less than $17,000, which is what $2,000 adjusted for inflation is.
And a computer in 1970 would've been way more expensive and far crappier than a hundred dollar Android tablet today. It's not exactly in dispute that there has been technological development between 1970 and 2025. But it's also not the central issue.
In America the personal vehicle is a necessity in the vast majority of the country, and it's relatively more expensive today. As are many other necessities.
(If you want we can quibble further and say a 17k used Rav 4 or Tacoma would be more reliable than a 1970 F-100 anyway blah blah blah blah the increased lifespan and availability of used cars causes new cars to have to go more upmarket blah blah blah... but the hedonic treadmill is also real and if you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute in the 70s, but today have a 10 year old car and an apartment with a 70min commute, you're not gonna feel good.)
Yes I agree they are MUCH more expensive relatively. But they are more expensive entirely by choice, not because of inflation or stagnant wages. People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute
And you be killed or paralyzed after a fender bender. Death rate per 100,000,000 miles dropped from 5 in 1970 to 1.4 in 2023.
> People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
Hell, we did it with computers. Let's figure out how to do it in more places.
Isn't that supposed to be the main job of the economy? Increase productivity? So that we all get more for less? Make the pie bigger, don't just make your own slice bigger?
If there's "no world" where all that can happen, most of the "taxes will hurt innovation, actually" arguments fall EXTREMELY hollow. Let's connect a few dots:
- Streets are in disrepair
- You can't afford the lifestyle you used to (by "choice")
- It's far harder for people, especially the young, to find a job (many end up hiding on disability and such that didn't exist much several decades ago in the first place)
- The wealthy have more money, and proportionally more money, than any time in the last century
Maybe instead of choosing the more expensive car we should start choosing to put some of that money to use repairing our basic infrastructure and trying to increase whole-society productive output instead of bottom-line ROI.
There are more vehicles in the US than the F150 right? in Australia this would be seen as an absurdly over the top vehicle for almost all contractors and construction workers.
Some amount of this issue must be marketing and propaganda making people buy massively over spec vehicles than their actual needs require. Most of these workers could get by with basically any car but get marketed and peer pressured in to spending $50,000 on the biggest one.
Yes, but there are no ~17k pickups in the US, which would be the inflation adjusted price of the F-100. The cheapest truck is the Maverick which starts at 28k.
Not entirely, the problems are also that wages haven't kept up with inflation; $9,000 salary in 1970 would be $75,000 today, and the automakers realized they make more profit in financing than on the vehicle itself, optimizing the maximum they can squeeze someone who needs a vehicle, hence 96 months for an auto loan.
But back in 1970, racial barriers for hiring were still the norm and if you weren't a specific type of white you were shit out of luck.
If you were of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish (not Latin American), Greek, Maltese, etc heritages you weren't viewed as "white" in much of America until the 2000s. And "white" Irish Americans were still treated as the "other" back then in much of the US. And Jewish Americans were viewed as a separate race.
Having studied in Boston/Cambridge right when Slummerville's transformation took off this was a major subcurrent in ethnic relations between Italian, Irish, Domininicans, Brazilians, Ivie kiddos (mostly WASPs and some Asian Americans), and Somalis.
And that ignores African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans who were othered and were still excluded from most opportunities.
In 1970, I wouldn't have been able to work as a contractor in $9k a year in much of America and would have been forced into a redlined neighborhood where my attempt at building intergenerational wealth would have been stymied.
Edit: Cannot Reply
> Is this supposed to convince a white person
For the 42% of Americans who are non-Hispanic White [0], the reality is our life today is objectively better than it would have been in 1970.
And a large portion of non-Hispanic whites in America today would also not be counted as white in 1970 and would agree with that statement.
> The wage gap between black and white Americans is nearly the same today as in 1970
Yep. And that's why I called out redlining - that was the original sin that has prevented a large segment of Americans from developing intergenerational wealth.
Yet we do not pay poll taxes today. We are not getting lynched [1]. We are not being directly racially discriminated from employment.
With such a base, it's hard not to recognize that a large portion of Americans don't look back at the 1970s or 1950s with nostalgia.
If you're going to reply to people can you actually reply to then instead of editing your comment? You probably shouldn't reply to people who tell you to kill yourself anyway but the fact that comment is (presumably) deleted illustrates the kind of confusion this causes.
The 80s-and-on story of America is not a story of women and minorities getting on more solid economic footing at the cost of some additional costs for white male Americans. Almost everybody is worse off - higher debt, less property ownership among the youth, etc.
I wouldn't agree with a position of "white people aren't going to stop being racist, just separate everyone and let them be" (we could call this the Clarence Thomas position, as Corey Robin has written about[0]). But it's wildly misleading to say that the slippage of the American economy is because of less overt discrimination. It's universal. The economy itself is broken compared to how it used to be. (Personally, I'd point at the oligarch-fighting "soak the rich" taxes passed in the early 20th century as a key point here.)
So your thesis is that the segregationists were right and there’s a causal link between the decline in conditions for white American workers and the success of the civil rights movement?
Why must anyone be content to be poor and equal to only the poor?
I think it would be beneficial to conduct such analysis at a subnational level, becuase the reality is the market dynamics in (eg.) the Bay are distinct from those in Chicagoland.
A similar macro-level analysis by the FT highlighted how certain states are in the midst of a positive economic expansion and others have fallen into a deep recessionary cycle [0].
I've also noticed HN cycles of pessimism and optimism shift significantly based on time zone - which could be attributed to this subnational malaise.
Not really. Different demographics and different subeconomies are feeling better or worse than others. CPI is also calculated at a subnational level as well.
Insurance, Rent, Food, and other fundamentals are all differently priced in different regions and subregions of the US.
Edit: cannot reply
> The racial diversion ...
This comment was not about race - both Oregon and West Virgina are majority white, but have entirely different demographics (urban heavy Oregon with the population centered around Portland versus rural primary WV with microagglomerations on the border of DMV and Huntington-Ashland).
And more critically, the fact that you assumed it as such betrays a lot about you.
> But the first step is to believe that what people have been screaming about their lives for the past several years actually exists. Even a representative agent, forward-looking and fully aware of all the parameters surrounding them, can feel the vibecession.
Gee. Who would have fucking thought.
When people, en masse, are saying they're in pain, *believe them*. They have very real fears or stressors, even if "you" can't understand them.
Exactly. People all over America are saying that illegals are taking their jobs and a bunch of coastal liberals are trying to convince them it’s not real? Maybe believe them to start with. Talk to them. Don’t just start ivory tower intellectualizing like you’re Matt Yglesias talking about how Biden is in terrific shape.
Well, okay, so just like this article talks about, people often find it easier to declare a source of a problem, rather than describing a symptom they're having.
Illegals aren't taking their jobs - there's plenty of studies evidencing that that's not true. *BUT*, people are feeling:
1. under-employed
2. under-paid
3. in some level of pain, economically
4. feeling insecure, financially
And they're saying "it's those damn illegals takin' my job" to reflect that pain.
Sure, propaganda plays a part of the experienced pain people have; but it's often not all of it. Propaganda is less effective when people are comfortable.
They're saying a cocktail shouldn't cost double digits.
They're saying they can't afford doctors or health insurance.
The complaints are specific about specific changes in affordability, not 80's AM radio talking points. They mostly aren't suddenly saying illegal immigrants are taking their jobs.
(Certainly some people are, but it's not really a bigger contingent than any other time in the last... 30? 40? years...)
It's not an economic effect. The news is all awful. If you're in the US and on the left, or outside the US, the world is descending into autocratic chaos and police state violence. If you're in the US and on the right, the country is descending into chaos at the hands of the anarchist left and the invasion of a horde of immigrants who need to be suppressed by autocratic chaos and police state violence.
Yeah yeah, there's food on the shelves and money in your pocket. But it's scary out there for everyone, and that trumps (heh) rationality.
The solution is to get Washington and partisan media to, ahem, shut the fuck up and just let people be happy. But that doesn't put bribes in their pockets or advertisers on their screens, so on with the autocratic chaos.
Sure, many people (in an absolute-number sense) are in no immediate risk of crisis. But many are.
Economic policy for 40+ years has been shifting both income and wealth largely to the already-haves with massive knock-on effects on the general affordability and comfort for everybody else. The flow of money into small sets of assets and investments distorts the "inflation" measurements and we find ways to ignore it. Buy groceries instead of eating out! Just let the median household's kids work more too, in some red states! That part of the story has been going on for a long time, and the actual-Covid-inflation just drew more attention to the trend.
People were talking about it long before Covid, but the Covid bullwhip and the complete lack of foresight or management[0] of the situation pushed it into a new, noticably-worse-normal overnight. While before we were just boiling the frog and blaming avocado toast for millenials not buying houses or having kids yet. Some good math in the post about the concrete part of this vs just "vibe" parts, especially re: the behavior of the lower-income end of the economy.
But you can't have a viable consumer economy when everyone with power is squeezing the consumer tighter and tighter. We've been papering over this problem by making stuff free-with-ads but eventually there won't be enough buying power left in a large enough non-broke cohort to keep the system working for anybody.
[0] "you think maybe people will want more of the stuff they bought before, and less Pelotons, in a two years?? No way! Buy Zoom stock!"
> “Gen Zers and millennials are swimming in student debt and may never own homes, but they’re splurging on gut-healthy juices and rotisserie chickens.”
https://offthefrontpage.com/the-wall-street-journal-gets-com...
Is the largest produced (by volume) source of animal protein in the US considered a luxury item?
Even if we read that as generously as possible - "wow, look at how many millennials buy $20 Erewhon smoothies" - it's a wildly stupid play to couple that to how many millennials are in debt and can't afford homes.
Nobody said no millennials can afford homes. Nobody said they are all broke. Plenty of businesses out there are still capitalizing off the higher end of the range.
But at almost every percentile they're worse off than their parents were, economically. And probably working more hours to get there.
Other places have them priced high enough that I think they make money on them.
(The trick is they take the unsold ones and strip the meat off and sell it in the deli/sandwiches.)
I don't think it's a coincidence a lot of problems are happening at the same time in the US.
2 door single row -> 4 door two rows
drum brakes -> anti-lock disc brakes
lap belts only -> shoulder belts with airbags,
normally aspirated V-8, no catalytic converter -> twin turbo v6 and dual catalytic converter
manual transmission -> 10 speed automatic
If you wanted to make a Ford F-100 today, without the modern safety, emissions, fuel efficiency, and comforts, you could probably do it for less than $17,000, which is what $2,000 adjusted for inflation is.
In America the personal vehicle is a necessity in the vast majority of the country, and it's relatively more expensive today. As are many other necessities.
(If you want we can quibble further and say a 17k used Rav 4 or Tacoma would be more reliable than a 1970 F-100 anyway blah blah blah blah the increased lifespan and availability of used cars causes new cars to have to go more upmarket blah blah blah... but the hedonic treadmill is also real and if you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute in the 70s, but today have a 10 year old car and an apartment with a 70min commute, you're not gonna feel good.)
you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute
And you be killed or paralyzed after a fender bender. Death rate per 100,000,000 miles dropped from 5 in 1970 to 1.4 in 2023.
Hell, we did it with computers. Let's figure out how to do it in more places.
Isn't that supposed to be the main job of the economy? Increase productivity? So that we all get more for less? Make the pie bigger, don't just make your own slice bigger?
If there's "no world" where all that can happen, most of the "taxes will hurt innovation, actually" arguments fall EXTREMELY hollow. Let's connect a few dots:
- Streets are in disrepair
- You can't afford the lifestyle you used to (by "choice")
- It's far harder for people, especially the young, to find a job (many end up hiding on disability and such that didn't exist much several decades ago in the first place)
- The wealthy have more money, and proportionally more money, than any time in the last century
Maybe instead of choosing the more expensive car we should start choosing to put some of that money to use repairing our basic infrastructure and trying to increase whole-society productive output instead of bottom-line ROI.
Some amount of this issue must be marketing and propaganda making people buy massively over spec vehicles than their actual needs require. Most of these workers could get by with basically any car but get marketed and peer pressured in to spending $50,000 on the biggest one.
You can easily run into trucks in the $120,000-$150,000 range in the car lots now.
That's actually in the range of what contractors make today.
Some sources:
GLassdoor: 67k https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/contractor-salary-SRCH_KO...
Finturf: 75k https://finturf.com/blog/how-much-do-contractors-make/
BLS: 91k https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/construction-managers.htm...
But back in 1970, racial barriers for hiring were still the norm and if you weren't a specific type of white you were shit out of luck.
If you were of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish (not Latin American), Greek, Maltese, etc heritages you weren't viewed as "white" in much of America until the 2000s. And "white" Irish Americans were still treated as the "other" back then in much of the US. And Jewish Americans were viewed as a separate race.
Having studied in Boston/Cambridge right when Slummerville's transformation took off this was a major subcurrent in ethnic relations between Italian, Irish, Domininicans, Brazilians, Ivie kiddos (mostly WASPs and some Asian Americans), and Somalis.
And that ignores African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans who were othered and were still excluded from most opportunities.
In 1970, I wouldn't have been able to work as a contractor in $9k a year in much of America and would have been forced into a redlined neighborhood where my attempt at building intergenerational wealth would have been stymied.
Edit: Cannot Reply
> Is this supposed to convince a white person
For the 42% of Americans who are non-Hispanic White [0], the reality is our life today is objectively better than it would have been in 1970.
And a large portion of non-Hispanic whites in America today would also not be counted as white in 1970 and would agree with that statement.
> The wage gap between black and white Americans is nearly the same today as in 1970
Yep. And that's why I called out redlining - that was the original sin that has prevented a large segment of Americans from developing intergenerational wealth.
Yet we do not pay poll taxes today. We are not getting lynched [1]. We are not being directly racially discriminated from employment.
With such a base, it's hard not to recognize that a large portion of Americans don't look back at the 1970s or 1950s with nostalgia.
> kill yourself
Stay classy HN.
[0] - https://usafacts.org/articles/is-the-us-becoming-more-divers...
[1] - https://www.newspapers.com/article/san-antonio-express-news-...
I wouldn't agree with a position of "white people aren't going to stop being racist, just separate everyone and let them be" (we could call this the Clarence Thomas position, as Corey Robin has written about[0]). But it's wildly misleading to say that the slippage of the American economy is because of less overt discrimination. It's universal. The economy itself is broken compared to how it used to be. (Personally, I'd point at the oligarch-fighting "soak the rich" taxes passed in the early 20th century as a key point here.)
[0] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627793834/theenigmaofclar...
Why must anyone be content to be poor and equal to only the poor?
No thanks to the present government, who post about deporting slightly less than 1/3 the US population.
A similar macro-level analysis by the FT highlighted how certain states are in the midst of a positive economic expansion and others have fallen into a deep recessionary cycle [0].
I've also noticed HN cycles of pessimism and optimism shift significantly based on time zone - which could be attributed to this subnational malaise.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/e9be3e3f-2efe-42f7-b2d2-8ab3efea2...
Insurance, Rent, Food, and other fundamentals are all differently priced in different regions and subregions of the US.
Edit: cannot reply
> The racial diversion ...
This comment was not about race - both Oregon and West Virgina are majority white, but have entirely different demographics (urban heavy Oregon with the population centered around Portland versus rural primary WV with microagglomerations on the border of DMV and Huntington-Ashland).
And more critically, the fact that you assumed it as such betrays a lot about you.
“When metrics and anecdotes differ, believe the anecdotes.”
Gee. Who would have fucking thought.
When people, en masse, are saying they're in pain, *believe them*. They have very real fears or stressors, even if "you" can't understand them.
Illegals aren't taking their jobs - there's plenty of studies evidencing that that's not true. *BUT*, people are feeling:
And they're saying "it's those damn illegals takin' my job" to reflect that pain.Sure, propaganda plays a part of the experienced pain people have; but it's often not all of it. Propaganda is less effective when people are comfortable.
They're saying rent is too high.
They're saying houses cost too much.
They're saying a cocktail shouldn't cost double digits.
They're saying they can't afford doctors or health insurance.
The complaints are specific about specific changes in affordability, not 80's AM radio talking points. They mostly aren't suddenly saying illegal immigrants are taking their jobs.
(Certainly some people are, but it's not really a bigger contingent than any other time in the last... 30? 40? years...)
Yeah yeah, there's food on the shelves and money in your pocket. But it's scary out there for everyone, and that trumps (heh) rationality.
The solution is to get Washington and partisan media to, ahem, shut the fuck up and just let people be happy. But that doesn't put bribes in their pockets or advertisers on their screens, so on with the autocratic chaos.