Edit: I meant less than a century ago! My bad! Just a brain fart.
In: 9783
Not seeing it called out, but an important factor is that how we perceive wages and inflation is skewed.
Consumer goods have gotten *cheaper* to a significant degree, relative to people’s average buying power. Think about how cheap you can get a big screen TV or a personal computing device compared to the 90s. Cheap goods, like consumer electronics, cost a fraction of what they used to. This in turn holds down inflation, and wages…but *essentials* that you need to survive and thrive like healthcare, education, housing, and so on have vastly ballooned in real dollar costs.
If you look at house prices compared to average wages in any given area, they’ve gone from 3-4x the average annual wage to 5-10x or more.
These essential things have a relatively inelastic demand: people can’t live a healthy life without them, so it simply costs more to “live” than it used to, even if you can buy a new laptop for $300.
Add in that the folks who are in power, older, established, don’t see these costs. Their healthcare (medicare) covers them in retirement, NIMBY voting to restrict the supply of housing increases the value of their paid off homes, their college degrees paid for by public spending in the 60s/70s didn’t cost them like the six figure student loans young people today have to take out on education.
TL;DR – The things that you need to live a healthy and happy life cost far more now in real dollars relative to earning power than they used to.
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