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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure things aren't better now than 40 years ago? Everything is certainly more affordable for the average American and the standard of living is higher than ever. Sure, there was a run on toilet paper when the pandemic started and wood prices at Home Depot right now are through the roof (heh), but my gut feeling is the trade off is worth it.

To continue your analogy it's like the world's supply chains stopped colocating their own servers, shedding unused capacity, in favor of AWS. Sure, there will be a hiccup under unexpected load, but new instances will spin up soon enough and meanwhile you've saved a ton of money, resources, and energy when demand was low.

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Everything but housing and education you mean. Standard of living is probably on the whole worse. My dad had a high school education and a ridiculously good pension, full health vision dental, profit sharing, working in the maintenance department in the 80s.

>Everything but housing and education you mean.

Do you think it's due to changes in technology? political beliefs? or overpopulation?

The best reason for housing prices increasing faster than inflation is that the western world has made it policy that middle-class wealth is based on housing prices rising faster than inflation so many economic actors will personally benefit from higher and higher housing prices.

Its really just because of supply and demand. We made it illegal to add more supply. Los Angeles up until the 1960s was zoned for 10 million people with a population under 3 million, you were allowed to develop your single family home into a 25 foot wide 5 story brick apartment building and many of these went up in neighborhoods like hollywood and koreatown.

Today homes are out of reach for middle class because we have a population of 3.9 million in los angeles, but have a zoning capacity of only 4.2 million. It's not exactly rocket science how to fix this mess. Legalize building housing and housing will appear to satiate demand.

https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-with...

> Everything is certainly more affordable for the average American

I am not sure that the average is the appropriate measure to use when looking at societies and well-being.

Can the poorest live respectably and participate meaningfully in their local communities? How are we doing on that?

Things are better now than 40 years ago and yet are worse than 7 years ago.

>Things are better now than 40 years ago and yet are worse than 7 years ago.

Cars are safer and last longer (and cost 2x as much). Some forms of medical care are better (surgery). TVs have more resolution and increasing sources of media leads to more mouth agape consumption at home.

Other than that, I can't see any advantage to now over then.

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