A single mother working as a waitress at Denny's in the 1980's had more spending power than a college educated cubicle drone in 2019
Do you have any source to support this? Because real median personal[1] income went up almost 50% since then[2].
[1] — don't confuse it with real median household income, which didn't grow nearly as much, because of a significant rise in single-person households which pushes the median down a lot.
I'm not the OP, and they may be overstating statistics (happy to be shown otherwise). At the same time, wage stagnation is no myth:
"From 1973 to 2013, hourly compensation of a typical (production/nonsupervisory) worker rose just 9 percent while productivity increased 74 percent. This breakdown of pay growth has been especially evident in the last decade, affecting both college- and non-college-educated workers as well as blue- and white-collar workers. This means that workers have been producing far more than they receive in their paychecks and benefit packages from their employers."[0]
"The minimum wage peaked in inflation-adjusted value in 1968, when it was equal to $10.15 in 2018 dollars. [...] As of 2018, the federal minimum wage was worth 28.6 percent less than in 1968" [1]
"While the cost of a four-year degree exploded to $104,480 [from $52,892 adjusted for inflation], real median wages only went from $54,042 to $59,039 between 1989 and 2016." [2]
Heavy childcare costs [3]
"In U.S., wage growth is being wiped out entirely by inflation" [4]
The really weird thing about wage stagnation is that there are millions of jobs going unfilled, companies are so desperate for people that they can't find anyone and are just dumping cash into stock buybacks instead of raising wages.
Something is fundamentally broken in the labor market, it is not responding to supply & demand forces as it has in the past. I am not sure what terminology to use to describe what's going on now, but it's not a free labor market any more, it has been destroyed or transformed into some other construct.
They don't need people. They always complain about needing people because it's always in their interest to do so, but the fact that they don't just raise wages strongly suggests that they don't know how to profitably employ additional people and that "we need people" is just a bunch of hot air.
This dilemma, and many like it, vanish entirely if you stop paying attention to what people say and start paying attention to what they do.
Yes, if you need people, raise prices until you can afford the people that are available. The actual industries that do need people (like tech) have done that.
Right, in theory that's what we've always been told about how it works, but that is not what is actually happening. There has been almost zero correlation between unemployment and wage pressure for 20+ years now. In all industries, yes even tech.
It's just not working. Unless you're a director or exec, then your wages are skyrocketing. Everyone else is flat or declining.
Personally I think the issue is that there is still a lot of unemployment (see U6) that prevents classical wage inflation from happening. That, and people outside of highly skilled industries have basically no bargaining power these days + intense global competition in almost all industries
Actually I would argue companies just don't want to pay the wages that Americans would expect for the labor. Raise the pay, you'll see those positions get more qualified candidates and then they will be filled.
Anecdote...I had a random chat with a hiring manager and he commented he can't hire the right developers. Developers think too highly of themselves and ask for too much money...I had no sympathy for him.
I suspect the federal reserve plays a part in this too. They started targeting 2% inflation about the same time wages started to stagnate.
When the labor market starts to tighten, they consider it full employment.. and if it starts to increase wages, it counts against their inflation target... and to counter both points, they start taking actions to cool the market.
And the "full employment" isn't even really full employment.. since it doesn't include people who have excluded themselves from the labor market. A lot of those people have difficulty for one reason or another entering the market, but they will if employers are willing to train, pay more, etc... and employers will only do that in a tight labor market.
So it seems like when the labor market enters a period where it may address some real problems (wage stagnation, structural issues in the labor market, etc)... the fed jumps in to cool the market off.
To be clear, I think the inflation target is a good thing... but I think it's perhaps too broad of an indicator.. and maybe we need a more nuanced target.
Well, that could be because they're giving even the sandwich-making staff at fast-food joints noncompete agreements that stop them from switching to a better-paying employer, and union busting remains at historic levels.
Could be a signal of a strong disconnect between the people who are making the spending decisions and the people doing the hiring and managing. Departments are given a fixed budget or headcount based on historical precedent rather than current need.
It also could be perverse incentives. The people with their hands on the cash tap have more to gain from stock buybacks than they do by wage increases.
Let's say you have a company that makes smashed widgets. So you need to hire widget smashers, but all the good ones want to be paid $20 per widget that they smash. But consumers won't pay more than $5 per smashed widget, so there is no way you can charge enough to pay for that labor.
So yes, you can get the labor you need if you pay enough. But then you won't have a business, because business need to turn a profit (or at least break even).
Now I wonder if the current labor shortage actually resembles this scenario, or if the complaining that corporate execs do is more of an act in order to get cheaper labor when they can still turn a profit with more expensive labor?
>But consumers won't pay more than $5 per smashed widget, so there is no way you can charge enough to pay for that labor.
Yeah except the worker already gets paid $18 at his current company. Producing $5 worth of goods with $20 worth of labor is economically impossible. Someone has to eat that loss. Either it's the company, the customer or the worker and as far as we know the customer always picks the cheapest stuff regardless of how sustainable it is and the company will always yield to the customer. The worker will always receive the short end of the stick.
Ok lets assume the worker accepts the $5 job. Previously he could afford buying lunch for $18 but now he desperately needs super cheap $5 lunch because his job doesn't pay as well anymore. The restaurant cook can't be paid $18 per lunch anymore because the worker switched to fast food. The cook now has to work at a fast food place and only gets $5 too.
This scenario is called deflation. Prices go down and with them worker compensation starts shrinking and through lower compensation prices must go down too. It's a vicious cycle with awful consequences for workers. Meanwhile investors benefit because their investments appreciate without doing anything at all.
What if the opposite scenario happens? What if the worker wins and get his pay increase? Well exactly the opposite happens. The worker will spend the extra $2 per widget on better lunch. The cook will now receive $20 for his lunch and use it to buy more expensive widgets.
Obviously this is inflation. Some inflation is good. Excessive inflation is just as harmful as deflation.
So what we need is a healthy balance between inflation and deflation.
When you're in the stock market for the capital gains then you only need to hope for a quantitative easing windfall. The idea behind QE is to drive yields of the most popular investments down and therefore make other investments like small businesses more profitable which didn't really work out and is actually backfiring.
The productivity and wage decoupling is very hot debate topic in the economic circles. It's not very easy to sum it up, as there are many factors going in. For example, productivity is calculated based on real GDP, which uses GDP deflator, while deflator for real wages that is typically used is CPI. Just the fact that you're using two different deflators already makes a meaningful comparison harder.
Looking at minimum wage is not really relevant, as only around 2% of workers earn minimum wage.
The degree cost explosion is very unfortunate, not only because it is more expensive now, but also because much fewer people had (or even attempted to obtain) degrees, so not only it was much cheaper for them, but also they simply didn't need to get them as much as people need them now. The push for universal tertiary education has been very detrimental to our society, as people need to spend more, and the only result is degree inflation.
Only about 2% of workers may earn minimum wage, but the minimum wage serves as a kind of anchor that other very-low pay jobs base their pay on. Many major national fast food chains (for example) pay like $8/hr which isn't technically minimum wage but is essentially the same, because if the minimum wage were $5/hr these jobs would probably similarly pay $6/hr or therabouts
Scott Alexander has a good entry level write-up[1]. He is not an economists, he tries to understand the debate as a lay-person, so it doesn't cover it all, but should give you some taste of the complexity involved. For an actual economist, see e.g. Scott Sumner[2].
They claim "median personal income for ALL AGES us up 394.4% since 1977". However a quick check on FRED [0] tells me this figure is way off:
1977: $23,202
2016: $31,099 (2017 not available in the data)
~34% increase
They said they had sources but I only see sources for the price of bread claim. Maybe they aren't looking at real wages? In which case the claim is very misleading.
I also agree twitter's thread layout is hard to follow.
Yes, they aren't looking at real wages, that's the whole point of the comment: they are comparing the inflation of bread price with the nominal growth of median personal income.
For some simple examples, inflation-adjusted home prices have gone up by a factor of 6 and inflation-adjusted education prices have gone up by a factor of 3 over the past few generations [1], while inflation-adjusted average wages have only gone up by $2/hour [2]. That single mom would have had a dramatically easier time providing housing and education for kids even with lower purchasing power for most consumer goods.
Isn't it partly expected though? I never looked at the stats for single income vs dual income families over time, but my instinct tells me that single income was much more common in the 80s, and dual income is much more common today than it was back then. So even if single income had drastically gone up, they'd be "competing" with dual income families on a global level.
And sure enough, when you look at house prices in an area, they very much seem priced for dual incomes.
All anecdotal and unverified guesses, mind you. But even a highly paid software engineer in SF will have no hope of competing with a DINK family of equally paid software engineers, for example. And there's more and more of those. I assume the market's following.
Another thing to note: Real GDP per capita has basically doubled since 1980, but that increase in wealth isn't being seen by the average person, as your data shows.
You're not accounting for the higher interest rates of the 1980s.
Which home would you prefer to buy:
$150,000 at 15% over 30 years.
$350,000 at 4% over 30 years.
Hint: they both have approximately the same total loan cost and payment.
You can do this calculation with your parents. My home cost $350k at 3.8%. My parents bought my childhood home for $88k at 8%. Adjust my parents' home price for inflation and run the result through a mortgage payment calculator. You find that I paid slightly more for my home but my home is much nicer (central heat and air, closer to town, larger, better schools, etc).
My parents' home happens to be for sale currently (not by them). If I paid full asking I would pay MORE in raw dollars but LESS in inflation-adjusted-total-loan-cost (which is what actually matters).
The hitch in this whole thing is that down payments have gotten ridiculous, it's gotten harder to save in desirable areas because rents and many expenses have grown out of pace with income for normal folks. Even as the percentage necessary for down payments has dropped, house prices have gone into orbit so much that it hasn't kept parity.
My girlfriend and I had to buy a house for $520k, at 5% down, just for the privilege of dumping $100K into it to make it livable. And we are the fortunate ones who can do that; we're both 31 and I'd say maybe a quarter of my friends are in the same boat.
Where do you live, the Bay area? At what point do you say that enough is enough, and you move to a location that even though you'll earn less, the COL adjustment will more than make up for it?
I can't foresee ever leaving because of cost-of-living expenses. I'm not an import; I've lived in New England my entire life and the Greater Boston area--let's define it as "the Red and Orange Lines, and I guess the Green Line if I was desperate"--is effectively the only place I can be short of blowing off my family and my support network of friends and colleagues. The area is congruent with my politics--I mean that not just in the "who you vote for" sense of the word, but in the "how a society should operate" sense of it. And while I own one for errands I really profoundly don't like commuting and don't like driving a car much even outside of that, which rules out much of the surrounding area like New Hampshire or Maine, where I'm originally from. My parents live in northern Vermont. It's nice to visit, when I'm not white-knuckling across ice-floe roads in February. I couldn't live there.
We're thankful that we bought what will eventually, after a big up-front whack, be a really nice house. And we did it somewhere where it's still kinda doable, rather than when it's not doable at all.
I mean, that's fine and all, but you should probably just admit that you value the luxury of living in an extremely expensive area with lots of urban amenities. There's nothing wrong with it, but phrasing it like you simply can't live anywhere except these two particular metro lines comes off as really out of touch.
Urban liberals' lifestyle is a luxury consumption choice the same way that a Rolex or a Masarti is.
I mean, sure, I like those luxuries. I also get panic attacks when driving in stressful situations and more than moderate traffic. Not wanting to cause a crack-up rules out a commute into an urban area from an only marginally cheaper suburban area. (I've tried it before.) And fully-remote work is uncomfortable, socially isolating, and completely impossible for my girlfriend due to the urban-localized nature of her career, which makes living further out impractical.
I've tried living elsewhere; this wasn't my first choice and I'm very lucky to be able to afford it. Perhaps all this makes this urban liberal some kind of snowflake, but that's all right with me.
Somerville is already one of the most densely-populated places in the United States (16th most densely populated city in the nation as per the 2010 census--6th most that isn't part of the NYC metro area) and I'm enthusiastically in favor of that increasing with additional building. Keeping in mind that new construction necessarily overwhelmingly favors high-end construction I'm also in favor of increased proportions of affordable housing, as well as rent control ordinances to help keep people in their homes. And I say that as a soon-to-be rental property manager and owner, too; these are things that would be skin off my nose in the near future.
So that's a pretty weak strawman--and, tbh, I've seen your posts before, I thought about ignoring you because I get a troll whiff out of them. But I will also push on the real question behind it, because there is the germ of something useful there. I believe that a society should openly welcome people who are not members of the majority, should emphasize that its public administration be mindful that it operates for its constituents, and where, when citizens need help, they can get help. The place where I live is not perfect, but there is a drive to adhere to such principles.
It is not impossible to find that elsewhere. It is unlikely to be found elsewhere that also doesn't involve disconnecting from my personal social networks and also doesn't require a car to commute.
I'm not trying to argue, just trying to understand what you said.
> I believe that a society should openly welcome people who are not members of the majority, should emphasize that its public administration be mindful that it operates for its constituents, and where, when citizens need help, they can get help.
You honestly believe that other parts of the country do not believe that? I feel some travel would get rid of such notions, but oh well.
> --and, tbh, I've seen your posts before, I thought about ignoring you because I get a troll whiff out of them
Probably a good idea not to engage if you're uninterested in engagement.
> I'm not trying to argue, just trying to understand what you said.
Cool (and I say that without snark). For future reference, I might suggest "can you explain what you mean by this?". It sets a better tone than what you wrote, which reads as points-scoring caricature.
> You honestly believe that other parts of the country do not believe that? I feel some travel would get rid of such notions, but oh well.
Of course there are, and I travel extensively--travel and consulting used to be my job. There are not, however, ones that fit my idea of how people should live (which rules out otherwise lovely places like Richmond, VA), don't decouple me from my personal social connections (i.e., are in New England; as an example I really like Columbus, OH) and have sufficient mass transit to not park my rear end in a car every day (i.e., not the Amherst area of western Massachusetts or somewhere like Unity or Orono, Maine--both places that I love, but the car dependence sucks).
So if I had just asked 'can you explain what you mean' you would have given me an explanation about how you appreciate the way of life in Boston, etc. I was more interested in the fact that -- across the country -- places similar to Boston (i.e., large, rich cities) seem to all be having the very problem you are calling out (high home prices). I was interested in an explanation of how you thus justify liking the politics (which in my mind are intrinsically linked to the high home prices) while simultaneously decrying its effects. Without asking my direct question, I don't see how I could have mandated this level of introspection.
Your response now seems to indicate that the main reason you want to stay in Boston is your family, which I get wholeheartedly. But your claim was that you appreciated the politics, which doesn't make any sense to me still, because in my mind, the way of life you idealize (and I'll admit I like it too) sounds like it leads to expensive home prices.
I'll mention since I am in the same boat in a sense. The cost of a house even 40-70 miles out from Boston on effective commute routes is still hovering in 350k to 500k. A house without a likely 100k in repairs is 450k It feels like for the Boston area they are just toeing the FHA limit or blowing completely past it instead of some other pricing dynamic. I haven't checked the Bay Area's FHA limits but since the max is 750k for 2019 and I keep reading about million plus properties I think they are just in a different category of appreciated values.
Do you mean you spent $520k for a 5% down payment? Why should anybody feel sorry for someone who is buying a $10m house? Even for bay area standards that's on the very high end and not at all representative of any meaningful fraction of people in the US
If you bought a house for $150,000 at 15% in early 80's, you likely refinanced as the interest rate continuously dropped from there. In 90's interest rate was below 10%, and around 7% in early 00's. Nobody would keep the 15% over 30 years.
Yes but refinancing is not a silver bullet. After 10 years you would have only paid off $7k in principal. So you'd re-fi at 10% at $143k and refi at 7% at $130k. Twenty years worth of payments for only $20k in principal.
Your payments would total $375k over that period. $350k at 4% would total the same amount but with $200k in principal paid down.
I'd much rather be in a situation with $200k in equity versus $20k in equity. And remember, both people have the same monthly payment amount!
I once did the math. Refinancing from high interest to low interest or refinancing low interest to high interest will cost you the same amount in interest over 30 years assuming identical house prices. However during times of low interest house prices are higher than during times of high interest and this means if you get a mortgage with high interest you end up paying less overall for the house but a bigger portion of your payments are used to service interest.
Therefore the 15% house is the best deal.
>closer to town, larger, better schools,
You're shifting goal posts now. Buying a more expensive house doesn't get you any of that. Only buying more expensive land does.
The $150k loan at 15% is generally healthier, as you have increased ability to pay off the principle early by making more than the minimum payments during good times.
The larger principle is only a benefit if you will actually see that money by selling the home. Given that everybody needs a place to live, this will only occur if you sell and retire to a low resource area. Everybody else can only look at the illiquid funny money and pretend.
Never mind that the larger valuation provides a juicier target for eg real estate taxes.
a more accurate measure of housing costs is not "home prices" but "rent prices", and rents have gone up compared with inflation, causing housing to be absolutely more expensive. The generational warfare double whammy here is that the boomers are scooping up an insane unearned amount of value in both real estate appreciation and imputed rents.
I just posted similarly about down payments, but 20% seems to not generally be the case anymore. FHA loans are as low as 3.5%. I paid 5% down for a non-FHA loan.
PMI is then a thing, of course, but you can get in the door.
(This is not to say that down payments, as well as initial habilitability outlay, might not crushing. Our small, train-accessible single-family in the Boston area cost half a million dollars and we had to immediately gut the place for remodeling and for asbestos remediation, to the tune of $100K.)
Not many first time home buyers do a standard mortgage now. Typically 3-5% is all that is needed.
That and the lowest home mortgages rates anyone alive has seen have contributed to the home price increase. It's not the total value of the house but the amount of the monthly payment that is the driver, and 3% (today) vs 13% (early 80s) mortgage rates provide a huge swing.
If the number of people that can afford to put down 20% has shrank significantly over time, won't the pool that can put 3-5% inevitably shrink as well? Will we return to 0-down homes? Where are down payments terminally headed?
Down payments are the monkey wrench here. The requirement to have a down payment means high prices basically lock people out of homeownership, period. That in turn limits ability to build wealth at all, even at a crappy interest rate.
The main way that owning a home allows someone to build wealth is that it forces them to put money towards something productive rather than blowing it on stupid things.
My experience from buying a house two years ago is that though I suspected it, I never truly realized how many amenities were covered by my rent. I went from paying $30/month in utilities, etc. to ~$400 /month. I also now live 10 miles further away from where I work / hang out.
Granted, we live in a house that is ~2x as big as our apartment, plus two car garage. But if you factored out strictly the various recurring expenses I now pay from my previous rent, it is extremely close to breaking even. And that isn't including the increased cost of owning / operating two cars that now drive ~60 more miles a day between the two of them.
Our net worth increased much faster while we were renting than now that we have a house.
If a cubicle drone is making twice as much money in adjusted terms but has to pay three or four times as much for housing, they could well be coming out behind in the equation.
One thing that I find amazing about Americans is that most of them don't understand inflation at all. It's uncommon to see any mainstream source talk about inflation-adjusted values when referring to past numbers. This becomes clear when for instance box office numbers become a conversation topic -- nobody really stops to consider how comparing films from 20 years ago with films of today is just really a measure of how money loses its value and therefore movies make more money than before
price per sq ft is probably going down as home sizes go up, largely due to location. Most new homes are built where land is available, further out from city centers, and therefore have a lower price per square foot despite being larger.
Yes, but it's always been true. The houses in 1930s, 1950s, and 1990s were also built where land was available, further out from city centers, so this hasn't changed, and doesn't explain why price/sq ft is going down.
Yeah, this is what I'm not getting. It seems like the houses that are like the houses we grew up in, or our parents grew up in cost the same. However, people want more.
The reality is that people simply can (or think that they can) afford more these days on the one hand, and the actual building costs are lower on the other due to cheaper material and more effective techniques.
High-demand areas aren't (generally) high demand because of intrinsic qualities. They are in demand because of the people and social structures that are already there. It is not inherently the case that there is a fixed amount of high-demand areas, that is just how we are set up politically at this point in time.
Best I could find... apologies for any mistakes below.
Purchasing power in the U.S. has stayed roughly the same since 1964. [0]
The median annual income for single women with children in the U.S. in 1985 was $16,431 [1]. Couldn't find information on just waiters/waitresses. I believe these are 1985 dollars? If so, that income is nearly $40,000 in 2018 dollars.
The median annual income for waiters/waitresses in the U.S. in 2018 was $21,780. [2]
I recommend using FRED data, they aggregate many data sources nicely. For example, you can see that median usual weekly earnings of women went up about 50% since 1980s[1].
My understanding is that real median income is influenced by the sheer total number of hours worked. Real median income can increase by virtue of more people working more often while their wages stay the same.
Do you have any source to support this? Because real median personal[1] income went up almost 50% since then[2].
[1] — don't confuse it with real median household income, which didn't grow nearly as much, because of a significant rise in single-person households which pushes the median down a lot.
[2] – https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N