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Comment by throw8383833jj | Hacker News Reader

the US economy has been on a continual decline for the last few decades, it's jsut been cleverely masked.

that sounds quite reasonable to me, considering the vast decrease in material living standard in the US for the last several decades. there was an interview with someone who lived through the 70s that was saying a painter back then could afford to buy his own home, have a wife that didn't work and six kids! today, a single painter can barely afford to rent a single bedroom, let alone support a whole family and have a house.

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Houses today are much larger and more expensively built than in the 70s.

I don't know when this practice died out, but it used to be routine for homeowners to take in boarders.

Not just that, but our lifestyles have changed entirely. How many outfits did people own? How many cars? How often did they eat out? What kind of entertainment did they enjoy, and how often?

People could generally meet their basic needs because those were the only things they spent money on. Life was exceedingly bare-bones. Houses were small. Your life revolved around your job. You cooked all your own meals. You entertained yourself. The list goes on.

All of that said, house prices are alone just bad example. If you went somewhere with cheap land and no red tape, you could get a 70's house at 70's prices (adjusted for inflation) still.

I watched "Apollo 10 1/2" recently. It's about what life in America was like in the late 1960s.

One thing is that mom cooked all the meals. People rarely ate out. I know that was true in my family at the time. Eating out was a major, major treat. Entertainment was going out the door and joining up with the neighborhood kids. The house was tiny.

It all was perfectly normal.

Yeah, I rode in the back of a pickup with my friends on the freeway, too. No seats, no seatbelts. Nobody thought anything of it. It was fun, too.

People rarely ate out because most people were single income families and there was one adult that had time for food preparation. Today prepared foods and eating out are a necessity rather then a convenience for most couples.

Food has also gotten much cheaper relative to what it was in the 1970’s. Some would argue that it has also reduced in quality.

People in the 1970’s bought different things than people do today. In the 1970’s people bought more formal clothing (e.g. suits) and formal dinnerware than people today. They bought more wrist watch’s and slide rules.

But if you add up all the plusses and minuses the two income family today has less disposable income then the single income family in the 1970’s when you exclude the cost of transportation, healthcare, childcare and housing.

It turns out one of the biggest drivers of home prices is school quality and income potential. So two cars for two jobs in a place you can find them and housing and childcare to ensure that children are safe.

only the newer ones are much larger. the ones built in the 60s are still the same size they've always been. the point is # of hours worked to afford a house of a given set size is higher today than it was in the 70s. same is true for cars too and they haven't improved much: i know i'm cherry picking here but look at a corrola from today, the mpg is 35mpg, the same as it was 40 to 50 years ago. the new one is heavier than ever, loaded with safety features rarely used, nullifying most of the mpg tech increases.

There's a neighborhood near mine, where all the houses were built by the same outfit with 3 distinct floor plans. I'd guess it was built in the 1960s.

Most of the houses have had additions built in by now, and extensive revisions and upgrades.

Houses are larger but most of the housing stock is much older than in the 1970’s. Most of the 1970’s housing stock is still around, it isn’t like we tore it all down in the last 10 years and built new, larger housing.

The starter homes of the US Boomer generation are out of reach of the Millennials even though they are the same houses but now 50 years old.

You're not comparing the same houses.

There are plenty of homes in the US that can be afforded on a single salary of a blue collar laborer.

Are these in the highly desirable coastal cities? Of course not.

People used to move to LA post-WW2 because it had cheap and plentiful land. It no longer does.

Having your spouse not work is a sign of poverty. It means that if they worked, they wouldn't be able to bring in enough income to pay for childcare.

It is possible that you're just so rich their income wouldn't contribute to the family, but income is always useful - otherwise neither of you would be working.

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