Edit: I meant less than a century ago! My bad! Just a brain fart.
In: 9783
This isn’t the total answer, but another thing to consider is that we buy a lot more than we did in the 50s and 60s. Our houses are far bigger, we eat out a lot, we have gaming systems and internet bills and access to far more consumer products than people did back then.
In my grandmother’s house in the 1950s, they had a single tv, 2 telephones, and a record player – that was basically it in terms of electronics. My house has 4 tvs, my $1200 dollar iPhone, internet, an Xbox, Alexa, etc. They ate out maybe once a month, and it was a special treat. I eat out probably multiple times a week.
Obviously that’s anecdotal, but I think fail to realize that houses today are like twice as large as they were back then and have far more amenities. Materially we have a lot more than people did in 1955 or 1940.
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.
The core of it is that after WW2 and particularly starting in the 60s-70s we welcomed the widespread participation of women in the workforce under 2nd wave feminism (1st wave was the vote, 3rd wave was politics and punk, 4th wave is woke). This added a huge amount of potential workers in the economy, which devalued individual jobs. It’s basic supply and demand: if you have more supply for workers and the same demand in terms of jobs, then each worker brings home less money.
It’s a bit more complicated, of course. Lower class women were already in the workforce since forever, so 2nd wave feminism mostly affected the middle class. Even then, not every middle class woman worked full time or at all, so it’s not as if the pool of workers doubled, exactly. But it was still a lot. Women in the workforce also relied in part on the sexual revolution and access to birth control, not just feminism (though the two are linked, and this is one reason birth control is still controversial). The prevalence of unions and worker expectations at this time also meant employers couldn’t just slash wages through the 70s-80s, so the oversupply of workers meant salaries instead stagnated for decades, failing to keep up with inflation as job salaries were worth less and less.
Further, the existence of more workers eventually led to more jobs being created through the 80s-90s, but by this point unions had been mostly broken and worker expectations had dropped to the point that wages still weren’t increasing much, particularly compounded by a relative lack of ambition and entrepreneurship through the 90s-2010s that concentrated power into corporations that were using various economic crises starting in the 00s as excuses to keep wages depressed while paying out obscene executive bonuses instead. Why didn’t more people have enough confidence to start their own business to free themselves from parasitical corporate overlords? My guess: poor parenting from the previous generation due to both parents working.
Also, women tended to gravitate towards administrative and highly-educated work, not so much factory work or construction. This meant men were still building most of the stuff that folks wanted to buy with their salaries. Automation helped pump up production a bit, but mostly the only way to get enough stuff for an economy of more wage-earners was imports. Japanese goods were huge in the 70s and 80s which is why cyberpunk starting in this era had so much Japanese imagery, but China took the role of global factory in the 90s and 00s.
Unfortunately, that meant paying shipping companies and foreign workers, not western workers, so western wages still didn’t increase much. This is why bringing bringing those jobs back, and also limiting immigration, are of interest to politicians, though without much more automation or convincing women to work hard, dirty jobs it won’t help the 2 breadwinners per household problem.
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