How could Al Bundy afford a house when he was making minimum wage?
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Edit 1 hour later: looks like the fine folks at /r/askhistorians have answered that too: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1uv6/the_s...
This combines 2 things that tick me off: not checking data & not knowing The Simpsons
2023: Nuclear technician salary in IL: $93,210
4 bedroom house in Springfield IL: $220,000
Burns illegally put him in a job req. a nuclear phys degree so he went to college in season 5 ep. 3
source:
https://twitter.com/Austan_Goolsbee/status/16739011885284392...
It was named after the Springfield in Father Knows Best, which happened to be the one in Oregon.
But it was chosen partly because it's so hilariously common. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_(toponym)
Besides, among what we know is that it's on a coast, so it definitely can't be in Illinois. You can say the show has lots of contradictions, but Springfield being on a coast is pretty consistent.
Which isn't coastal. Nor is Springfield, OR. In fact, if coastal is required that generally rules out Oregon as a candidate state. Not too many major coastal population centers of any name...
I didn't say Portland was coastal, I said Springfield was. Clearly the universe of The Simpsons is not our universe, but in that universe Springfield is coastal, and most likely in Oregon.
> Well yeah, I stated he grew up in Portland in the comment you are replying to and asking that question...what the heck?
You did not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/n06qbb/you_did...
But Homer's incapacity to pay for it was of course dwelt upon:
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&mid=3BEE...
(Note above hack to get around youtube's new no-ad blockers policy.)
I'm not that old... but I remember watching the show!
I guess it's like a show from the 60s was to me to a Gen Z or young millenial from today!
2023: If you save up $45k maybe one day you'll afford to live in a van by the river
Hold some dry powder now and those riparian dreams may be fulfilled at firesale prices in the not-too-distant future :D
My mom was about 30 when they got married. Junior college stenography degree. Never worked for pay again after getting married. Dad was a railroad man (working class, nothing fancy) and mom a homemaker.
They followed a playbook that’d spell doom today, but rode rising real estate prices and real honest-to-god pensions to a couple million dollars invested plus social security. We did a couple weeks of driving or (sometimes) air travel vacation every year. All the usual American Dream stuff.
Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.
The price of property in Australia has increased so much but the demographics aren’t there to support continued growth. Yes immigration is a thing but most immigrants don't move to Australia with $4 million(AUD) in the bank to continue fueling the boom.
What happens when demand falls ?
Now that is even more amplified.
Most young people will become rich by inheritance in US.
Really what makes things cheap is a simple formulaic application of supply and demand to things like housing, which takes up the bulk of the American take home pay bar almost nothing else in comparison. Boomers had things cheap not because of riding off a population boom, but a home building boom, that zoning changes in the decades since have made impossible to replicate.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...
This suggests that something is deeply wrong with society in at least two places:
1. whatever is distressing the native population so badly they stopped breeding; and,
2. casual psychopathy towards people, which is inherent in such a policy analysis.
Same sentiment, closer to the actual concept of a nation state.
Or maybe, “my kids can’t have grandkids, so I’ll just adopt myself some.” The reasonable question you have to ask isn’t “how do I adopt more grandkids?” It’s “Why can’t MY kids have their own kids?”
People of my generational cohort have it easy by comparison. The unemployment rate was < 4.5% when I graduated college. SPX (a big chunk of my own retirement) is up 65% in the last four years.
Do people not have any sense of history?!
The necessities were more affordable then, as were the simplest pleasures. My mother's father was a milk man, and her mother was a gas station clerk. They had 3 kids, a house and 2 horses. But, calling the next town over was exorbitantly expensive, their siblings were drafted, their uncles and aunts had had polio, they couldn't get kiwi fruit or sushi.
My siblings can talk to anyone anywhere in the world real time for free, eat any food they can conceive of for relatively cheap, were never drafted, have an endless stream of stimulating entertainment, can read any book they like at a whim, diseases like measles are a fairy tale. But with 17 years of education and two salaries they can barely afford a house, a basket of groceries for a week costs them a day's labor, they're constantly bombarded with bad news, real or not.
Things are better for us, but the basics were easier for them. Something's not quite right, and we can all feel it, even though the measures all tell us it's better than ever. I think the real problem is that we mostly agree that things will not be better for our grandkids. Increased international tensions and drug resistant disease mean that the two main ways we are better off won't last, and on top of that, the basics are unaffordable.
You can live the 1960's middle class lifestyle today, it's just considered lower middle to lower class. I think that's great, it means our country is becoming wealthier every year!
My father-in-law didn’t do quite as well but had the same kind of easy mode experience – working as a letter carrier for years was enough to support a stay-at-home wife, kids, house, pension, etc. He upgraded towards the end by moving into being a supervisor and then the IT group - by virtue of having bought a PC in the late 80s, the regional postmaster knew him as one of the most experienced - and retired at 60.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I feel it’s constantly hard for most people of that generation to understand how much different things are now.
None of what you are saying is supportable by any data or statistics.
The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.
My parents, my grandparents, they grew up the same way everybody else did back then. They worked on a farm from the age of like 5 doing manual labor.
When you are talking about your parents, you are talking about the luckiest people in the country. Nobody got a pension back then. Maybe if you worked for IBM, but that was not the norm.
What you are saying, "every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then" is completely false. Every plausible life-path has been upgraded since then, the things you are saying just aren't true.
Yeah, I know, I’ve hand-pumped water at the well my dad used growing up. The ‘40s and ‘50s were rough for a lot of families—but their kids basically just had to not constantly fuck up for multiple decades to be on track for at least moderate success.
I think it’s why a lot of that generation (my parents included) assume anyone who’s not doing at least decent is basically not trying at all, or is astonishingly useless. For their relatives who didn’t climb out of poverty with the rest of the wave, that’s mostly true.
(YMMV for minorities over the same time span, of course—racist FHA policy and other measures meant e.g. black folks didn’t get such an easy on-ramp to the postwar-success highway, to put it mildly)
2000 │ 1990 │ 1980 │ 1970 │ 1960 │ 1950 │ 1940 │ 1930 │ 1920 │ 1910 │ 1900
66.2% │ 64.2% │ 64.4% │ 62.9% │ 61.9% │ 55.0% │ 43.6% │ 47.8% │ 45.6% │ 45.9% │ 46.5%
[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti...
Or at least: how many people live in each owned house now vs in the past?
Total ownership numbers aren't the ones that matter to people right now. If owned homes used to be populated by multigenerational and nuclear families, while elders moved in with their kids and bachelors rented apartments in the city, but are now populated by elders and high-paid professionals while families with children are generally left to rent, it's a whole different world even while your quoted figures remain the same.
People are worse off now, it just doesn't appear that way yet.
Even the trough of the decline started by the Great Recession was only down about 6 percentage points of the peak of a little over 69%.
And social media amplifying the complaints and rage postings of its younger users and the lower class?
What does the data say?
Beyond that, it’d depend on definitions…
- data shows housing, healthcare, college costs outgrowing wages and inflation
- data shows tons of other stuff costing less over time when accounting for inflation.
Basically, data shows that (American) consumers have access to more and more cheap consumable goods, but the 3 things that are the (probably for most people) biggest purchases in life are the most expensive they've ever been.
The data can say whatever you want it to say depending on which data you look at and how you interpret it and what bits you include and leave out.
"Home ownership is higher than ever" is what the data says, and this can "prove" that there is no problem. Of course, you can also point out that the average age where people buy a house is ten years later, and that house prices really have massively gone up, and that especially lower-income people are spending an ever-larger share of their income on housing.
And of course averaging out over any country (especially a huge country like the US, but also smaller ones) is a very incomplete picture in the first place, and there can be huge differences between different groups that averages don't display: if everyone stays put with old low housing costs but entering the market is very expensive then "the data says" that there is no problem.
etc. etc.
Try doing a working-class job and try to find affordable housing for you and your family. This is the data that matters.
This is what most people don't understand. Like 99% of the population. There is plenty of data that is fake as well when they want to brainwash people and there has never been more brainwashing in the US than there is today.
Looking at things like housing and cars directly can hide things because of can-kicking shenanigans. Melody Wright has a great substack that goes over what the homebuilders are doing to make it seem like sales are strong [0], going well beyond the "have the construction workers park in the driveway of unsold units" stuff.
"The homeownership rate is the proportion of households that is owner-occupied."
Which seems contrary to the story being told that more and more homes are owned by corporations. At least this is a reason being tauted when questions about single family housing inventories are low.
Also, that stat conveniently stops before 2007-2008 housing collapse. So maybe that's where the disagreement begins???
Often overlooked and makes it possible to have a steady 'homeownership' rate while the actual proportion of young adults that own homes falls off a cliff (i.e. due to the obvious trend towards adult children living with parents longer).
Really, homeownership is quite low in most in demand markets, especially ones that have been in demand for some time now.
Edit: nice formatting
There's a whole lot of anecdata over the last few years that's not accounted for by a 4% increase.
To take it to an extreme to illustrate why this may matter, if one town gets abandoned and the houses all sell for $1 to a single family, while all the former residents move to another similar-sized town that sees prices more than double… you’d be best off ignoring or down-weighting the effect of those $1 houses if you’re trying to figure out how the housing market is looking to most people.
Though it’s possible the figures used for the analysis already account for that kind of thing, in some fashion. Are they actual sale prices, or asking prices? Do they only count sales to someone who’s intending to use the dwelling as a primary residence, or all sales? There’s a lot of room for the median experienced house price for a person just trying to buy a place to live to differ from the median on-paper, depending on how it’s handled.
But I agree with your first point.
from Appendix Table 1 (Home ownership estimates) in https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... - (extracted columns = Year, Homeowners, Percent of total Households):
2005. . . . . . . . 74,318,982 66.9
2006. . . . . . . . 75,086,485 67.3
2007. . . . . . . . 75,515,104 67.2
2008. . . . . . . . 75,342,138 66.6
2009. . . . . . . . 74,843,004 65.9
2010. . . . . . . . 74,873,372 65.4
2011. . . . . . . . 74,264,435 64.6
2012. . . . . . . . 74,119,256 63.9
2013. . . . . . . . 73,843,861 63.5
2014. . . . . . . . 73,991,995 63.1
2015. . . . . . . . 74,506,512 63.0
2016. . . . . . . . 75,022,569 63.1
2017. . . . . . . . 76,684,018 63.9
2018. . . . . . . . 77,708,394 63.9
2019. . . . . . . . 78,724,862 64.1
The main cause for the increase since 1900 was the invention of the mortgage, which did not really exist until about 1950. Loans existed, but the exact mortgage structure is a modern invention. It increased home ownership rates but also housing costs due to higher demand.
In 1960 or thereabouts, a production-line worker at Ford, etc, earned about 100 bucks a week. On that wage he could afford 2-3 kids, a reasonable house, a reasonable car and could afford a stay-at-home wife. Todays' wages have not kept up with 'inflation'. More acurately, wages have not remained relatively constant in the face of declining buying-power of the US Dollar.
To maintain parity with his grandfather's lifestyle, a production-line worker in today's factories would need to be earning about 5 grand a week.
That ain't happening.
That's why today a man and his wife are both working, sometimes with more than one job, and still can't make ends meet.
reply
It’s certainly still doable but people may not be willing to make the sacrifices to do so (such as living in a house from the 1960s or earlier).
I was moderately amused to discover I paid less in real dollars for my new vehicle than my dad paid for the only new car he bought about 50 years ago. And my vehicle is a freaking Martian spaceship compared to his old one.
And honestly I don't care that the value has gone up so much since I bought it, because any house I would want to shift to if I sold it will have also gone up in value just as much - basically the only benefit is to those with multiple houses, or those inheriting houses from relatives...
Yup. All you get for the increase in value is a bigger tax bill.
The story is harmful deregulation after deregulation even though lots of smart people kept saying it was a bad idea. The ridiculous wealth inequality and the inability for anyone to get ahead without preexisting generational wealth . . . ironically unexpected.
> inability for anyone to get ahead without preexisting generational wealth
What did Bezos/Musk/Gates/Jobs/Cuban/Springsteen/Oprah/Altman/Nadella/etc. inherit?
I am guessing that in 1960 they were doing relatively well compared to other factory workers also.
If we’re going off of OP’s math, the average autoworker only has a fifth of the purchasing power that autoworkers had in the 1960’s.
>”For decades, the UAW tugged wages upward. In 1960, a UAW member made 16 percent more than the average American manufacturing worker. By 2006, the figure was 74 percent. Today, new hires in the UAW make about 20 percent less than the average.”
Said average developers then banded together and built an e-commerce website that sold shoes drop shipped direct from the sweatshop and put Al out of business.
No ma'am indeed.
Health care and tuition are the other cost disease centers. People today are better off and richer when it comes to everything except housing, health care, and tuition. I’ve heard these called “the big three.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those three things are all areas where we simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.
1. Housing. Increase supply of affordable housing. Which means upzoning existing land for denser redevelopment. Which means more public transit. (And outlaw the realtor / commission system for transactions)
2. Health care. Increase supply of GPs and allow mid-level providers more independence (within bounds) to take less complex work off their plates. (There's also the inefficiencies created by the ridiculous number of middle layers. To which, single payer)
3. Tuition. Make highly-automated online degrees the new base normal to increase scalability of the system. (And use the stick of government tuition assistance to bludgeon any university that disagrees or exceeds set administration cost caps)
Student aid and subsidized loans should require that the admin to teacher ratio not exceed a certain value. That would help a lot.
For the others you nailed it. Housing is tough though, because the existing policy is a massive success for older homeowners who bought before the prices rose and property speculators.
Hence the solution is cutting off the student loan money spigot. Everything else will automatically fall into place.
Congress can surely do pass a law removing access to taxpayer backed student plans starting whenever they want.
And one can safely assume schools are already cramming students as much as they can to maximize budget for other expenses that benefit administration.
In any case, the number of students should be declining for a very long time, so they will have to figure out how to compete for the students’ business.
My general sense was that the government was equally (or more) monetarily involved, in terms of total funding sums.
But less involved with regulating.
Then, inevitably, fraud and scandal happened, which begat additional regulation, which begat regulatory capture by industry.
And then the government stopped directly buying/doing most things, which introduced a new layer of intermediaries, which in turn required additional regulation to police.
The older I get, the more I think paying the graft tax for direct government production but getting a simpler, more manageable/agile system might be a preferable outcome.
But I just went through Springfield Armory last week... which managed to supply 1/2 a Civil War, most of 2 World Wars, and innumerable minor wars from a government enterprise (while innovating). So maybe government successes are readily at hand in my mind.
Yes. A lot less. The US government was fairly small until WW2.
> So maybe government successes are readily at hand in my mind.
You have to look at the cost before determining if it is a success. Not simply the volume of production.
It looks like we went from ~20% GDP federal budget pre-WWII to ~35% 2023. [0]
Digging in, most seems like it's from the creation of health and social security entitlements? And certainly (sadly) most YoY growth. [1] [2]
> You have to look at the cost before determining if it is a success. Not simply the volume of production.
Well, cost and capability. There are many government functions that industry doesn't really need to do.
And if you create businesses for the sole purpose of performing government functions... aren't those just outsourced government departments, albeit managed by contract instead of directly?
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spendi...
[1] "Table 3.1—Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940–2028" OMB https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/hist03...
[2] "Historical Tables" OMB https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/
But maybe the U.S. is a super-special case and whatever works for the rest of the world doesn't work for the US shrug.
Single family home ownership rates were the highest in the world.
Healthcare cost a tiny fraction of what it does now.
Life as a college student is definitely more expensive than it was, but that's mostly because of housing.
https://fortune.com/2023/10/04/college-tuition-isnt-getting-...
But that means real wages are lower.
> People today are better off and richer when it comes to everything except housing, health care, and tuition.
Interesting spin to saying people are worse off and poorer but can afford leased iphones and cars that break often.
> Reuters reports that New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley was heckled at a speech in Queens today when he suggested that the rising cost of food is offset by how cheap iPads are. (2011)
https://news.yahoo.com/news/blogs/lookout/fed-official-heckl...
"Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful"
- this is idiotic.
Just because performance of phones improved 1000x does not mean I can buy a functioning phone for $ 0.1.
Just because 5G is 100x faster than 2g, does not mean my mobile phone bill is now $0.1. And they turned off 2G.
our inflation calculation is fucked.
Lots of us were able to cut costs in housing. And many of us were able to cut costs in healthcare through preventative care. Tuition is entirely optional.
If you've got a mandatory need for a big house, have some pre-existing condition to maintain, and want to get a Harvard Divinity School degree then yeah, life's going to be much much worse.
For my part, I'm very glad I was born now and not then. Life has been so much better.
No need for a big house or any more tuition - never wanted kids so I guess I’m saving lots of money there and then when I see what family health insurance costs these days during open enrollment, I’m pretty glad about that.
It may be that the fix for me is a hip replacement which has had some advancements in the past decade or two so that is also something I suppose.
I don't really know why I'm replying. I'm sure it's no consolation to you. Just... it really hit me and I feel for you. I'm sorry.
In theory, we each have 8 great great grandfathers (though these things are not always perfect). I can name 1 of mine because I dug the grave for his youngest daughter who was buried at his feet, but he is little more than a name on a stone to me. Can you name more?
I’d say fundamentally that is what I don’t want to have to tell a child. Global warming isn’t looking too good either, and I’m happy to avoid that one as well.
Essentially, there is almost no part of this world I would wish to tell a child about, and seeing them today causes me much sadness. It used to be that I was envious of their youth because they would live to see science and tech advances that I would not, however these days I feel quite the opposite. Maybe I'm wrong; I hope I am, but it's hard to see a happy path for humanity these days.
I fully agree with this. Unfortunately ai is a bullshit generator and is controlled by bullshit people. I personally speculate that some are suffering from a mild form of schizofrenia but thats an entirely different topic.
However i do recommend a change in personal environment because things while grim are not as grim as to wish an end to procreation. Life os pretty cool in some places - the further away from corporate dictatorships the better.
This seems exceptionally vague. If you're telling me to get therapy as many have, I can tell you I've been in therapy for much of my life at this point and on one medication or another as well, but they never seem to be able to create any meaning to any of this. I do have appointments with new ones scheduled actually, but I suspect I'll still be bothered by the same issues that have plagued me for much of my life at this point; the "Death of God" as Nietzshce would call it and the continuing environmental degradation I have to live through (my hometown set a new high temperature record this year and it was oppressively hot all summer). I don't think a new medication will solve this, but I obviously am still willing to try. I can't help but wonder, what if I'm not depressed, but simply see things clearly?
I am not of the opinion that you are depressed nor am i recommending therapy. What i am recommending is a change of setting. You’d be surprised how your outlook changes once in the right environment. Also i am not saying you are wrong all i am saying is that it depends on how you look at things and what things dominate your life and the setting influences both. Issues may be more acute in certain parts of the world than others. For instance in country people living in London can only dream of owning a property, whereas outside london thats not an issue. That doesnt negate the problem of london housing. Similarly weather patterns are shifting to worse in some areas but to better somewhere else. Theres loads of nuance around us.
Surgery is tricky. I had one recently and asked the nurses to drug the shit out of me. When i saw pipes one with blood coming out of my belly and one stuck in my willy i felt i was going to pass out. I even considered asking to be put down humanely. When they pulled it out i asked for permission to curse and boy i did. A person in a bed next to mine said they had a boner when they removed theirs. To each his own i suppose.
But i did have my surgery, it’s all sorted and a thing of the past, i am recovering, all is good. It’s a thing that a decade or two form now will be just another “ah yeah i did that”. Water under the bridge. My mind is somehow erasing the memory because it now feels as if it happened in another life. Of course each experience is unique but overall i’m laughing at myself at how scared i was, and i am a full grown adult. I say that now but i’d terrified of doing it again. There were bits that did hurt but 90% was all in my head - mostly what ifs, and they suck more than pain. As everyone else i too have fears but some things just need to be done - assuming the risks are low, and other t&cs. Just like data, you “click” your head, switch in low power mode, and walk through hell. There’s light at the end.
And you're right about the surgery, though sadly it's not necessarily a one-time thing, but a part that could require future surgeries to maintain (though the hope is that current materials will mean it will last decades). Nevertheless I try and tell myself what you said, that it's a few weeks or months of life to recover and then on with it. The what ifs are indeed the worst, but both people I've talked to online and in my life have gone through with it much success. A therapist would say to focus on the good outcomes rather than the negative, and the statistics really do bare that out too.
Anyway, I truly appreciate the kind words.
I've done all 3 of these things to great degree of success. I've always lived 1-2 hrs away from jobs, exercise like a dog, and skipped college.
Contrast that with the software business, which is very free market. There is pretty much no government interference with it. And costs have trended to zero. Literally to zero!
if you weight inflation baskets by how discretionary the spending is i dont think wages are higher. theyre much lower. you cant live in an iphone but you can easily live without one.
This has been called in-deflation or disinflation and has been the dominant paradigm since the turn of the century, at least in the US and much of the developed world.
The terminal end state of the disinflationary economy is desperate people living check to check but carrying supercomputers with instant access to all knowledge and all media in their pockets.
Wages have risen a bit lately (in real terms even after inflation) but not nearly enough to undo 20 years of the above pattern.
Eye, people who are sick and uneducated are very employable, have good prospects in life
> Food, water, and clothing are cheaper than eve
yes and no, we prodyce loads of unhealthy food cheaply, you wont starve. Fresh produce costs, organic, ethicslly farmed stuff us really expensive. The latter is probavly a closer comparison to food as it was produced in good old days
Interesting claim.
Just think of the settlers that came over the Oregon Trail, not that long ago. Where was their tuition and health care?
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/housing-should-be-afford...
Not to mention real wages have stagnated for almost as long with 1%ers taking a larger and larger slice of the pie. Trying to blame the housing crisis on workers getting paid too much is misguided to say the least.
Fire every programmer in the world and at most it might make a temporary minor dent in the housing market. Those "overly paid" tradesfolks would pick up the slack in short order.
True, but that's just an abstract measurement of what happened, not that interesting when trying analyze the parts that affect it. Particularly when it comes to different geographical regions.
> Not to mention real wages have stagnated for almost as long with 1%ers taking a larger and larger slice of the pie. Trying to blame the housing crisis on workers getting paid too much is misguided to say the least, especially programmers, who are already all fired.
Blame, particularly blame aimed at specific income earners, is a different thing than saying it obviously has an affect. Dismissing a part of the system that has an impact is as silly as suggesting it's the only culprit.
But I also wasn't necessarily implying it's workers getting paid too much, that's just one of the bits that varies depending on context, but there's more than likely an inflow cash that currently and will continue severely outpacing supply, and whatever supply is created is often so expensive to build for a series of other reasons that it can only be marketed to an endless supply of buyers with an endless supply of money. Especially because of the reason you mention—decades of not building—one has to think of it as the complex system it is, with the bottlenecks and winners and losers it has. The whole thing doesn't work.