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Comment by vannevar | Hacker News Reader

>it will cost less as a proportion of people's incomes today.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or are you relying on intuition here? A cursory search yields a number of references similar to this one---https://reno.nyloffices.com/resources/articles/starting-a-fa..., which indicate that the cost of raising a child has gone up significantly, at least in the last 40 years. And many of these references do not include the cost of college, which has skyrocketed. I'm not sure what you mean by "bringing up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s." They certainly had housing in the 50s and 60s, and that single expense alone is probably enough to make today's kids more expensive.

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Even a cursory reading of that article is full of stat crimes. They denominate a single value for the past then a gigantic range for current times. But basic math shows no major increase for the bottom of their range in their own numbers.

I don’t have any intuition or stats either way but that’s a bad and biased citation.

Which is not surprising giving it’s selling something.

This is not complicated. Median household income in 1960 (in today's dollars) was about $58,000. Today it's about $88,000. You therefore have more inflation adjusted money available to spend on everything, including children.

The inflation adjustment includes everything: housing, education, and their proportion in the average US family's bucket, so calling out a specific item like education or housing doesn't change that data.

It doesn't include the non market services provided. And those are non trivial part of rising children. So both things can be true - median monetary income is higher and rising a child is more expensive.

That figure was created in 1963 by a lady who assumed that 3x starvation was thriving. Now may years later we claim ~34% of our population is now making up to $160k a year! we ended poverty, but they costs for an actual family of 4 starts at about $160k/yr. The figure shows that a huge amount of our population is still actually in poverty. You all just assume because the TV says so, it must be so.

Maybe you're confusing the terms "income" and "disposable income"? The latter would presumably include the items you mention, but the former does not. The (unreferenced) numbers you cite are almost certainly income, not disposable income. Or perhaps you're assuming that all costs have increased only by inflation, which is not true.

Median housing cost in 1960 was $11,900, which was about twice the median income at the time. Today it is nearly $400K, which is over 4 times as much as the median income. Medical and education costs have similarly risen faster than inflation (and faster than wage growth). You're right that it's not that complicated, though.

I meant income. I think you may be confusing what "real" income means. It adjusts for the typical bucket of goods and services Americans consume, and the deflator used to correct incomes over the years includes housing and education. After adjusting for the increases in these, the resultant real median household income today is $88,000 vs. $58,000 in 1960.

I know it doesn't feel that way, but that's because of the hedonic treadmill.

>I think you may be confusing what "real" income means.

Median income is exactly what it sounds like, the median income.

>The deflator used to correct incomes over the years includes housing and education.

That may be the intent, but it is clearly not working, because housing, medical, and education costs have in fact risen as a percentage of income.

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