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Comment by chanakya | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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