Even with these cherry-picked examples, plug in how things actually were. That $8,200 station wagon with at 48 month loan and the terrible 80's loan rates of 10-12% would be like $750/month now. Most of those cars wouldn't make it to 50k miles without a major repair. There were almost no safety features, seat belts weren't required to be worn and you could drink and drive. This weird fetishization of the past is a mental illness.
Agree, but if we take a wholistic approach, most things were more affordable. This is a satirical take not a literal financial comparison and I designed it to be that, but I think no can disagree that life in 80s and 90s was way more affordable.
Some things yes and some things no. It is not and cut-and-dry as you think.
Look up the inflation adjust prices for a computer or a "big-screen" TV and realize almost no one pays anything near those prices for any consumer good. On the other hand there are a lot more people in the US and it is not like land is sprouting up from nowhere, so the price of land is a lot more.
Most things though fall into what people's personal preferences are. Cars have more luxury, house are bigger and have better finishes, movies are huge spectacles, one person can't watch 8 infants, you get more than an aspirin from formerly untreatable diseases; roll all this back and prices will drop.
Obviously it's partial (or else there would be a billion lines) but it gives a good broad view of what things have gotten more or less expensive.
- TVs, toys, software, and cellphone services are cheaper.
- Clothing, funishings, and cars roughly flat.
- Healthcare, education, childcare, food, and housing are all more expensive by more than 50%.
So this is the moment we are in, we can certainly find things that were cheaper but your average consumer buys a TV once every few years, they buy food and pay for housing every day.
I don't think people are ignorant of the upsides of this deal, they are just capable of also recognizing the downsides.
Almost nothing can make labor-dominated services drop though. I guess you could have guest worker visas that pay half the going wage, and there would be a lot of people that take that deal, but most Americans would hate that.
Grocery inflation is not nearly as bad as the food inflation overall, which is driven by food-away-from-home just absolutely skyrocketing.
Billions of words have been spilled about housing, so I will boil it down simply. It is a mixture of policy and preference. It doesn't have to be the way it is, we just need to collective will to change things.
Two of these items, health care and education, have been inflated in America specifically by poor policy choice (some of which was perhaps enacted for good reasons, but had unfortunate effects). So they might be more controllable if there is a will to modify the system (even if, in the former case, it will be difficult and require stepping on many toes that currently benefit from the mess).
The less said about the mess that is American health care, the better. It is the one area where monopoly effects plague almost every part of the system. Whether it is pharmaceutical companies charging monopoly prices for new drugs (knowing that consumers don't directly chose, or directly pay for, what is prescribed)... or often monopolistic hospitals conjuring up obscenely high prices, billed often deliberately confusing and obtusely, designed for insurers to negotiate down... or insurers (a quasi monopoly, since it's what your employer choses, and your employer has limited choice) themselves coming up with confusing plans with a myriad of exceptions, where even a fully insured person can end up bankrupt after a major heath scare.
In practice, the "Bennett hypothesis" (the idea that increased generosity of financial aid leads to higher tuition) is the most likely explanation that I see for high education inflation. Perhaps a symptom of just how loose things were could be seen with the "ITT Technical Institute" type institution that spent far more time recruiting students via slick advertisements and taking their student loan money, versus working with businesses and developing a solid education program that created employable students. A working system would've never let ITT Technical Institute last for as long as it did. I think the expanded loans were made with good intentions, but they unfortunately were not clamped down stringently enough.
It would be interesting to see this chart repeated for other countries. Many of them probably don't have the issue with higher education and health care that the US does, but perhaps one could find other interesting issues. Some of which is not controllable... and perhaps some of which is.
I 100% disagree with this and don't think it is particularly close? Sure there are some specific locations that are much more expensive, and there are some locations that are much cheaper. Overall if you want the same things it is way more affordable today than the 80s and 90s. But our standards have risen a lot and things that used to be considered middle class are now considered poor.
Anything that could be considered in the base layers of Maslov's heirarchy is certainly less affordable. Food, shelter, health, education. Sure lots of consumer goods have got cheaper, but if you've got a big TV and no house to put it in are you actually any richer?
1. Households in 1980 spent a large share of their income on food then today, and CPI tracks food expenditure and it's below wage increases. So this one is a victory for today vs the past.
2. Shelter is difficult because we expect much more today than the past, houses have gotten much much larger. One big issue is interest rates, which were about twice as high in the 80s than in recent times. If you want to buy a small house without air conditioning and other amenities that are now standard you can do it cheaper than what you would have paid back then. So another victory for today.
3. Health is once again hard, because a lot of the increased cost is for things that weren't around back then. We can just call this one a draw
4. Education. This is the one that is most clearly an increase above inflation. Some of this is due to decreased funding by governments, some due to admin bloat, but mostly it's just that labor is getting more expensive and education is a very labor focused sector. So victory for the past.
So overall I have to say you are incorrect, the past was more expensive than now and less affordable for a middle class person. I also have to say I find this whole thing kind of odd, I was born in the 80s and remember what it was like, I would not want to switch places with my parents economically.
If you want to buy a small house, you often can't. The rate of new construction has been low for a couple of decades, typically at or below 1% of the housing stock. Because people's preferences change over time, older homes are more likely in places that are not in demand anymore. New construction is mostly large homes and rental complexes due to political constraints. Condos and starter homes people could reasonably buy in their 20s are not getting built in sufficient numbers.
As for air conditioning and other modern amenities, they are not particularly expensive. Installing them can be, if you live in an area with a shortage of skilled labor.
I mean sure, in some places it might be hard to find a starter home. Do you think that wasn't true in the 80s and 90s as well? I can't find the data going back to the 80s with a quick search, but here is one that shows it's been going down since 2000 https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/08/who-is....
The narrative that millennials (of which I am one) are worse off economically than our parents is an attractive one to many people, but the fact is that it's not true, at least in the USA as a whole.
I think there is enough evidence that millennials had a slower start than their parents. They were worse off by many important metrics (home ownership in particular) in their 20s, but they've largely caught up by 40. Younger generation X was impacted in the same way, which is why you don't see much change since the 2000s.
The number of homes built by decade was relatively flat from the 1950s to the 2000s. When you adjust for population, it becomes clear that housing construction has slowed down over time. When the supply of new housing becomes scarce, it tends to favor the highest bidders: large single-family homes and financialized schemes such as market-rate rental complexes.
I'm really curious how old you are. The great grand-dad part makes you think you're my age or a bit younger, but then I grew up very middle class and I don't know if I've ever even seen a black-and-white TV.
From googling just now, color sales exceeded black and white by the 70s. However, new black and white models were still being introduced even into the 90s in the U.S., particularly in the budget or portable segments, and were still being sold new into the 2000s.
You are right, I think I mention that most experiences on the site are satirical but I don't mention it on the landing page to this experience, will add this today, will also add "not inflation adjusted' until I change the numbers to adjust for inflation.
> if we take a wholistic approach, most things were more affordable.
I don't know exactly what "wholistic" means, but in actual numbers, corrected for inflation and median wage growth, this is 100% the opposite of true.
A few things are more expensive in CPI terms, housing among them. Almost nothing is actually significantly more expensive as a fraction of median income.
And it's really distressingly weird that people can't see this. I mean, if cars were so cheap in the 70's or whatever why did we inexplicably have so few of them?
Focusing though on the cost (you know, no one is going to prevent you from wearing a seatbelt) where is the equivalent today? A used Ford Focus off of Craigslist? A double-wide in a trailer park?
As another pointed out, I think we're "fetishizing" the affordability of the previous decades, not the cigarette smoke in the restaurants.
As per cherry picking: housing, transportation, education… These are kind of important. If it had only been, say, giant TVs I would agree it is cherry-picked.
Perhaps you think the examples themselves (Ford F-150, etc.) are what are cherry-picked?
Americans just won't buy these "cheap" cars. Almost every American car-maker, and most foreign car importers too, have dropped passengers cars from their lineup year-after-year leaving only SUVs and trucks. Look at what Ford and GM offer in Latin America; small, affordable cars. Every now-and-then they try to bring something similar to the US and it's sales numbers are always dismal. The US is mostly rich (by world standards) and has premium preferences. The huge gulf is between what people say they want and what they actually end up buying.
There was something on here a year or two ago about how increasing emissions standards made it infeasible to continue manufacturing small cars. Big cars had more lenient standards. Also I think Honda quit making the Fit during the pandemic, since parts were limited and the larger cars were more profitable. So I think it's more complicated than just that people don't buy smaller cars.
>Focusing though on the cost (you know, no one is going to prevent you from wearing a seatbelt) where is the equivalent today? A used Ford Focus off of Craigslist? A double-wide in a trailer park?
A brand new Nissan Versa for $17,300.
Work for an entire year after high school while living with your parents and saving money so you can attend a state school for <$10,000/year. Don't take out student loans so you can buy a premium laptop, luxury clothes, and travel. Don't get a new phone every one or two years. Don't sign up for 5+ streaming services. Don't buy coffee and toast from cafes.
It was common (at least here in europe) to simply buy your car, with the proliferation of finance and lease it is now the norm to essentially rent your own car for two to four years before inevitably having to trade it in for another, perpetually on the strap.
This has driven the actual price of vehicles both used and new to astronomical levels under the assumption that you will have it on-plan rather than own it outright.
Major things aside, it's the every day minor erosions in qol that depress me...for example cereal boxes used to be stiffer, chocolate had more cocoa solids, products were on average better quality, to get that same quality requires you to know and spend a lot more, we aren't imagining it, there was a sweet spot somewhere between 2003 and 2016.
And that major repair? Water pump that dad changed in like 30 minutes. Or engine rebuild he did with friends and some beers or did for the lady down the street for the cost of parts. Do people even help eachother fix eachother's cars anymore? We used to be a society helping. Now it's go to a mechanics shop that normally starts with the process of them seeing if they can scam you.
The fetishization of basic progress is wild. We EXTPECT our society to progress. People went from horses (where they literally had to shovel shit) to cars. 2026 'now we have seatbelts' is some bullshit progress metric for an entire ass society and isn't the 2026 hyped/sold/expected. That you have to reach to pulling up that example (versus my 'shoveling horse shit to having jet airplane looking 1950s/60s cars) shows things kinda suck. In exchange you can't fix the car and have to take it in. You can't just help out the single mom down the street and check out her problem for her. Tires are so expensive they have to go on the credit card and be a planned expense (my parents with hardly any money didn't have to live off credits cards to cover incidentals).
'Guys, things can't be bad, we have these amazing things called seatbelts now (invented in 1959)'.
Well anything can sound dumb, when you simplify it to something dumb. We have multiple airbags, anti-lock braking, seatbelt pretensioner, collision avoidance, crumple zones, fuel pump automatic shut off, backup cameras, rollover testing, ... Vehicles do an amazing amount of things to keep their occupants alive in a crash.
meh. Yes cars are safer now. But this is about affordability. And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain. You could get second hand cars that would still run for years, and you or a friend could fix them yourself. Drinking and driving has nothing to do with affordability so I don’t know what you’re going on about.
> And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain.
I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.
My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.
Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.
I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.
I grew up in that era too (born late 60s). My dad repaired the cars we had, and they definitely lasted a long time. Granted, I grew up in Europe (we had Peugeot, VW, etc.) so maybe the build quality of the US cars was worse--I can't say.
Yeah, they used way more oil than today, and they were more polluting, and they were less safe, and there were less rules (I can remember six of us kids piling into a VW Bug with my dad). But we're discussing affordability.
The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often? Meaning people could afford to replace them with new ones more often?
(the downside of 20th century work on increasing life expectancy is that most of it happens in retirement, making pensions much more expensive)
edit: I have not done the maths, but I would not be surprised to discover that the total average pension paid to someone retiring at age 65 in 2026 was much more than the total average pension paid to someone retiring at age 65 in 1986, while at the same time the weekly amount of the earlier one would be higher. Because the more recent one has to spread the money over more years.
I think it depends on your financial literacy, I know a lot of people who have no idea how to invest their money, you would be surprised how many people would be more comfortable with someone else managing their life savings for them
Someone choosing to be illiterate and getting scammed out of their money still does not make sense. Life doesn’t get much easier than picking the target date fund with the year you expect to stop working.
Some of these felt very cherry picked. E.g. 8% interest rate in banks? That probably means mortgage rates were 10-15%, where as they are now 5-6%
$0 pensions? Thats just a lie? The pension comes out of your paycheck. Its literally a line item on your pay stub.
Also this site would be better if you overlay inflation or something to highlight when/where costs rose. E.g. using the CPI inflation calculator the $7400 for a new car would be $28k today. $28k wont buy you a F150 today (starts at ~40k) but its a good chunk of the way, and there are other cars you can buy for $28k easy.
I think this is misleading unless you at least include the price after inflation. "OMG, transportation is out of control. The original Model T only cost $850!!" Well, $850 in 1908 was about $28,000 in 2025 [1], which not unreasonable, seeing as how the starting price (list) of a Honda Civic is about $24,000.
I'm pretty sure I did not get to keep my shoes on through TSA in 2004. It may not have been mandatory nation-wide until ~2006, but the origin is a 2001 incident.
Yes I think the author is mixing it up with the liquids ban. And in my limited experience, at major airports with new scanners, people care much less about both of these now.
At the expense that you have to do human observed naked scans. Pre 2001 US would freak the fuck out about that. It's 2026 normal, but like most things it is pre 2001 very very not normal.
On the car comparative. I have a 2010 RAV4, and my wife drives a 2023 RAV4. I love mine, but even if it was perfectly kept. It is smaller, lighter, it has less equipment, I have seen older RAV4s and they look even smaller than mine. What is is the opposite of shrinkflation ? I don't know if it is social pressures or what is is causing us to expect things that are bigger and more expensive.
Appreciate the feedback, will definitely be making some updates based on the comments I got here. There is social pressure definitely when it comes to buying decisions, I think over the past 15 years, the world has gone crazy in terms of car sizes where most people wanna drive only SUVs
I'm annoyed that in the UK the prevalence of "SUV crossovers" has suddenly jacked all cars up by 10-20cm, especially at the bonnet line. Selection pressure (bollards are the natural predator) is at least keeping the width slightly under control.
I got my 17 Pro ($1100) from ATT for free which is almost twice the cost of the phones back then. And my monthly cost is only $35/mo as well for the 3 year term, for unlimited data too, which is cheaper than the data plans back then.
I spent the last 2 months building ideagames.fun : satirical browser experiences about work, money, and modern life.
The Middle Class Museum is a guided tour of things that used to be affordable. Starter homes. Pensions. Blockbuster Friday. Each exhibit has a "Today:" line.
"Today: $450,000. You are renting Gary's basement." Built in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS — no frameworks, no backend, no database. Runs entirely in the browser.
Would love any feedback on what works and what doesn't.
This is straight up AI generated economic disinformation. Are you seriously claiming that computers cost more in real terms today than 20 years ago?? Some of these goods (housing) do cost more, but a lot of these examples don't make any sense.
No, as it's mainly supposed to be a humorous/satirical take similar to other experiences on the site. I didn't intend for it to be a finance piece originally but I know if inflation adjusted, whole experience will change.
Looking at an inflation calculator, the average rate since 1980 has been 3.06% over 46 years. Compounded, 1.0306^46 = 4.0.
So, adjusting for inflation, a single income family in 1980 would be equivalent to a four-income family today. Since millennials currently get by with just two incomes, they actually come out way ahead when adjusted for inflation.
Not adjusting for inflation and quality really damages the integrity of the comparisons, as does cherry picking your base examples.
Taking your first, the $47K 3 bedroom starter home with a yard. In 2026 that would be $200K (cumulative inflation is a little over 4x[1]); picking a random US city[2] and looking on Zillow[3] I find that...yeah, you can get a comparable home today.
There are certainly arguments to be made about tradeoffs, quality issues (though those aren't as obvious as you might initially suppose[4]) and so on. But just listing unadjusted price comparisons like this is disingenuous.
Just "adjusting for inflation" isn't good enough. Minimum wage was $4/hr. Now its $8. An elementary school custodian could afford a mortgage, a car, support a family of 4 and go on vacation on just that single income. They had healthcare and a pension. You could work over the summer and pay for a year of college at a state school.
Yes, the house now is more energy efficient. The car is safer. But if the price of everything went up 4x-10x, and the median income only went up 2x, AND you have to pay for more things that used to be included, then everything is more unaffordable, inflation be damned.
"An elementary school custodian could afford a mortgage, a car, support a family of 4 and go on vacation on just that single income. " Can I ask what you are basing this off of? I'm fairly skeptical of this claim.
The head custodian at my elementary school (in the 80s) was a friendly guy that loved talking with the kids. He'd talk about his life, ask us if we did anything fun over the summer, and tell us where he went with his wife and kids. The school was in a small town in the rural midwest, not particularly affluent, but not poor either.
The elementary school where my kids went (in a much more wealthy district) doesn't even have a custodian that I'm aware of, just a 3rd-party cleaning service that hires immigrants for as cheap as possible, and I'm sure doesn't offer healthcare or even full-time work. They have too many highly-paid administrators to afford a custodian.
Ok so you're moving the goalposts here. What you said was a custodian (who I'm assuming did a lot more than just clean) and now you've switched to a head custodian and are comparing him to contract workers. So you're comparing two different jobs in two different school districts. Now is it possible that they've eliminated or reduced those positions? Sure, but you haven't actually shown that at all. Like I could easily counter with the fact that the school my wife teaches at still has a head custodian but I don't know what his family situation is and we'd just be trading anecdotes. So do you have any actual evidence for your initial claim? Because the overall stats with wages and prices are the opposite from what you claim.
>
Not adjusting for inflation and quality really damages the integrity of the comparisons, as does cherry picking your base examples.
But then they also need to make sure to also match salaries to inflation too.. Because wages have not kept up with inflation, which is the reason for most of this..
Thanks for the feedback. The whole experience/site is mainly satirical/humorous. It's not inflation adjusted cause I didn't want it turn into a finance piece tbh, but you're definitely right, if inflation adjusted most cards need to be re-built to account for inflation and better judge what we're getting today vs what we used to get
Not adjusting for inflation makes it look completely stupid.
There's one good effort - comparing a car to the salary of a car-worker. But it only has half the comparison (what are today's car workers earning?). That's the comparison that Marx would recognize: how long do the people making something have to work to buy the thing they made?
The reference to Marx and (implicitly) the labor theory of value renders the GP unserious. Just looking at the people doing the assembly (and not all the people in the supply chain), ignoring the time aspect (I doubt there's any product that costs more than one of the people assembling it would expect to make over the time it would take them to single-handedly create the product from scratch), and so on.
It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.
> It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.
It may be so, but those feelings are part of the disconnect and they themselves cause all sorts of problems - or benefits, if directed appropriately, e.g. the IKEA effect is part of the same thing: we put in effort so we think the result is worth that effort.
Marx being wrong doesn't mean trade unions didn't rise for much of the 20th century on the basis of similar feelings, being in error didn't stop the USSR being one of the world's two superpowers for about half a century.
If the employees are satisfied their labours will bear fruits then they historically have not minded much that billionaires skim the cream; but when they are not satisfied, revolutions come. Those are messy and unpleasant, but they come anyway.
Sure. Lying to people and telling them they're somehow oppressed just because other people are more successful than they are can be used to stir up a revolution and get a lot of the useful idiots killed.
That's why it's important to call the nonsense out.
When someone's making billions and the goods and services they get you to pay are functionally mandatory even if theoretically avoidable, with costs going up because someone somewhere has apparently cornered the market, is it even a lie?
People asking "Why can't I afford a car from 9 months salary when my dad could? Why is a house 10x my salary not 3x like my dad's? Why can't my partner and I afford kids even on two incomes when our parents managed it on one?" don't want a series of ten hour-long degree-level lectures on economic theory to be able to understand the real answer, especially not when there's clearly a bunch of very rich people who keep loudly telling them that they ought to be happy because some stock index has gone up (when they don't own stocks) or that they've moved up the value chain (which if true doesn't answer why cars and houses are less affordable).
Give them an answer about Baumol's cost disease (easy to understand without much economics study), and suddenly you're back to Marxism but with different language, where Marx's "means of production" happen to be inalienable to the human form (or at least have been so far, plumbers are not yet quaking in terror at the videos of androids falling over while attempting to open a dishwasher).
Obligatory HN web design complaint: this uses horizontal instead of vertical scrolling, which is fine-ish, but does not work when using the scrollwheel.
Lots of problems with this. The noted lack of inflation adjustment. The savings interest item ignores the fact that loan interest rates were 10%+ when you could get a good rate on your savings account. The student loan one is just wrong, the average student loan debt in 2026 is $43k. You ignore the point of the avocado toast (what used to be called the latte factor) simply so you can make some pithy comment. If you don't buy $14 toast 5 days a week, you can save $3500 per year. If you do that for 5 years you have a great addition to your downpayment for a home. Or you can use the money saved to buy a brand-new Nissan Versa, a perfectly fine starter car for a young couple with 1 or 2 young kids, for $17,000. Blockbuster Friday comes out to 4 movies a month for $16. Compared to $16 for a streaming service that you can watch every single night. And everyone knows the experience of going to a video rental store and walking the aisles for what felt like hours trying to find something to watch, just a different kind of scrolling. In 30 years of working in IT, cubicles have been the norm. 30m from where I'm sitting right now there is a ping pong table. The break room is huge and has plenty of large, cushioned seating that you can lie down on and take a nap if you need to. As well as small private meeting spaces if you just have to get away from everyone. This is not a tech startup or FAANG. The summer job is still true for most state universities. Utah State University 2026 tuition and fees is $4500 per semester.
If you don't want to pay subscriptions, don't subscribe to those services. You can trivially buy Bluray, DVD, and CDs. Or you can get DRM free music from multiple sources. You can stream spotify and youtube for free. OTA TV is still a thing.
Apparently, I'm in a contrarian and argumentative mood today.
This is US centric, but you can show this to anyone in any major city in the western world and they will nod.
The problem is global. Any time you are told the problem is immigrants in your country or that your local politicians didn’t build enough housing - that’s not the root cause.
The root cause is the inevitable centralization of all wealth in corporations who can dodge taxes. This affords them the ability to accrue assets endlessly, buy politicians, achieve monopolies and bump up the prices.
There are 3 things that need to happen to restore the first frames:
1) some things like housing and healthcare must not be asset classes. It is unsustainable to demand profit growth year over year from either.
2) the wealth needs to be redistributed. It is a systemic risk for corporations and individuals to have accrued as much wealth and power as nations (and it doesn’t seem to be good for the mental health of those at the top)
3) we all need unions so workers can advocate for themselves and even the playing field. Including tech.
I’m not a communist, I think capitalism broadly works, but it requires regulation. We deregulated and it’s made a mess, we need to wind that back and patch the bad logic.
Yeah, I actually live in Toronto, and this was one the design decisions I was thinking about before building this, it's just that more people relate to the US. And I agree with the reasons you listed, immigration imo can be controlled, like what I see here in Canada, they seem to control the flow based on economic state and demand year to year.
None of the prices are inflation-adjusted. That gives more sticker shock than reality.
> The Starter Home / No bidding war. / Gary just... bought it.
That was back when land was plentiful and cheap, and homes had fewer features and comforts. Now all the desirable land is taken, and existing homeowners don't want to increase density, so prices go up and newcomers get pushed farther out. NIMBYs and exclusionary zoning are a large part of the problem.
> The Pension / Your employer saved for your retirement.
I dislike the old-style "defined-benefit" pensions, because you are completely at the whim of your employer. They set the arbitrary terms of tenure (how much pension you receive in relation to how many years you work), pay-in, and payout. You're also reliant on your company staying solvent to pay you in retirement. Nope, I much prefer "defined-contribution" self-funded pensions where your account is segregated from everyone else, and usually you get to choose excellent low-cost broad-market index funds. In Canada, DC is RRSP, and I guess in the USA it's 401(k) and IRA. DC also allows you to job-hop much more easily because the amount you contributed to your retirement account is clearly yours and not a matter of company policy.
> One-Income Household / Dad worked. Mom stayed home.
I think that arrangement was bad for women's autonomy and rights, but someone more qualified than me can speak about it.
> National Park Vacation / Pay $5. No reservation required.
Well, the growth in parks didn't match population growth. Or there's a growth in domestic and international tourism in general.
> The Savings Account / The bank paid you 8% a year
I'm pretty sure that happened during a period when annual inflation was 10~15%, meaning that you lost money by "saving" cash. Also, interest is taxed at a much higher marginal rate than capital gains, so it's dumb to invest in cash instead of stocks. It is true, though, that in much of my adult life, the savings account interest rate is around 0~2%, making it a completely meaningless financial product to me.
> c. 1994 / The Family Computer / $2000
You can buy an entry-level laptop for about $500 since the year 2010. The barrier to entry in getting a computer went down gradually each year.
> c. 2000 / The $1 Slice / A massive, greasy slice of New York style pizza
I bought a $1 slice in NYC in the year 2019 and it was a decent size. I haven't visited afterward so I can't say.
> The DVD Collection / You owned your media.
You can still buy Blu-ray discs of your favorite movies. Most people choose not to out of short-term convenience.
> Flying / Free bags, shoes on
Those features aren't "free". It costs the airline money and opportunity cost to move your luggage (excess room can be used for paid cargo shipments). Those features have just been unbundled so that people who don't need the feature don't pay it, people who need it pay it, and you don't have the non-users subsidizing the users. That's like saying a $50 buffet is "free" even though you'd be equally satisfied with a $20 meal paid à la carte.
> 401k Matching / Free money
Lolno, there's no such thing as free money. "Employer pays" still affects how much the employer spends on you, which ultimately affects their calculation on who to hire and how much to pay them. It only affects the split of how much of the employer's money gets paid to you as an unrestricted salary versus restricted programs like healthcare insurance and pensions.
> The 99-Cent App / No accounts
I'm pretty sure you need an Apple or Google account to buy the app in the first place. After you bought the app, you can reinstall it for free on any newer phone that you buy.
> The Subsidized Smartphone
I heard that the old days were not good, because the 2-year contract forced you to buy a higher tier cellular service plan than if you brought in a fully paid-off phone. Also, there are significant fees for breaking the 2-year contract.
> Buying a House in a City / you could still buy a 2-bedroom in Austin for $210,000
Yeah, thank NIMBYs for that again. When residential construction can't keep up with demand (mostly due to regulatory reasons), prices go up.
> The Stimulus Check / Billionaires blame inflation on you buying groceries with it.
You don't believe that printing money causes inflation? WTF
> Remote Work / Your company saved millions on office real estate.
You make it sound bad. I think it was great - zero time spent commuting, access to amenities at home such as a kitchen, more privacy, better mood.
> The Subscription Everything / You own nothing.
Renting isn't necessarily worse than owning. There is a break-even point that is different for every person. Renting Netflix for $0.01/month would be awesome. Maybe most people will be happy to pay $10/mo to have access to an enormous media library. $100/mo would be unreasonable. Consider the alternative - how much per month does it cost to purchase physical media to derive the same amount of enjoyment from entertainment?
> The Tip Screen / barista ... ask you to subsidize their wages because the corporation won't
"The corporation" ultimately receives money from customers who pay for the product. If no customer paid tips, "the corporation" can't magically create money out of thin air to pay the employees more; the corp would need to raise prices on the menus (which I agree with).
No, the question isn't whether "the corporation pays", because that's nonsense; it's whether people are obliged to pay because it clearly says so on the menu price, or generous people "voluntarily" pay more towards the barista's wages because they are socially "expected to".
> The End. / You own nothing. You subscribe to everything. Your rent is higher than your parents' mortgage.
It's worth repeating: Renting is not necessarily worse than owning. For housing, many people have done the analysis and I can point you to a heap of YouTube videos explaining the situation. There are both financial and non-financial aspects (e.g. Realtor fees, breaking a mortgage) to this comparison.
There's 4,000 movies available for free on YouTube. More if you pay for YT Premium. That's just one example...any streaming stick will give you loads more.
True, you have to have Internet, but you're going to have Internet regardless.
Compare to the 1980s where you had to drive to a Blockbuster and pay $3 or $4 a pop for VHS.
And you can still rent movies. Heck, if you want to live in the 1990s, your local pawn shop or flea market has tons of DVDs you can buy for less than a 1990s rental.
All good points - and that 1980s rental cost would be ~$11 inflation adjusted - for a rental at VHS quality where you also had the costs of driving to pickup/return the tape.
Even with these cherry-picked examples, plug in how things actually were. That $8,200 station wagon with at 48 month loan and the terrible 80's loan rates of 10-12% would be like $750/month now. Most of those cars wouldn't make it to 50k miles without a major repair. There were almost no safety features, seat belts weren't required to be worn and you could drink and drive. This weird fetishization of the past is a mental illness.
Agree, but if we take a wholistic approach, most things were more affordable. This is a satirical take not a literal financial comparison and I designed it to be that, but I think no can disagree that life in 80s and 90s was way more affordable.
Some things yes and some things no. It is not and cut-and-dry as you think.
Look up the inflation adjust prices for a computer or a "big-screen" TV and realize almost no one pays anything near those prices for any consumer good. On the other hand there are a lot more people in the US and it is not like land is sprouting up from nowhere, so the price of land is a lot more.
Most things though fall into what people's personal preferences are. Cars have more luxury, house are bigger and have better finishes, movies are huge spectacles, one person can't watch 8 infants, you get more than an aspirin from formerly untreatable diseases; roll all this back and prices will drop.
I find this graphic a good one https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-pric...
Obviously it's partial (or else there would be a billion lines) but it gives a good broad view of what things have gotten more or less expensive.
- TVs, toys, software, and cellphone services are cheaper.
- Clothing, funishings, and cars roughly flat.
- Healthcare, education, childcare, food, and housing are all more expensive by more than 50%.
So this is the moment we are in, we can certainly find things that were cheaper but your average consumer buys a TV once every few years, they buy food and pay for housing every day.
I don't think people are ignorant of the upsides of this deal, they are just capable of also recognizing the downsides.
Almost nothing can make labor-dominated services drop though. I guess you could have guest worker visas that pay half the going wage, and there would be a lot of people that take that deal, but most Americans would hate that.
Grocery inflation is not nearly as bad as the food inflation overall, which is driven by food-away-from-home just absolutely skyrocketing.
Billions of words have been spilled about housing, so I will boil it down simply. It is a mixture of policy and preference. It doesn't have to be the way it is, we just need to collective will to change things.
Two of these items, health care and education, have been inflated in America specifically by poor policy choice (some of which was perhaps enacted for good reasons, but had unfortunate effects). So they might be more controllable if there is a will to modify the system (even if, in the former case, it will be difficult and require stepping on many toes that currently benefit from the mess).
The less said about the mess that is American health care, the better. It is the one area where monopoly effects plague almost every part of the system. Whether it is pharmaceutical companies charging monopoly prices for new drugs (knowing that consumers don't directly chose, or directly pay for, what is prescribed)... or often monopolistic hospitals conjuring up obscenely high prices, billed often deliberately confusing and obtusely, designed for insurers to negotiate down... or insurers (a quasi monopoly, since it's what your employer choses, and your employer has limited choice) themselves coming up with confusing plans with a myriad of exceptions, where even a fully insured person can end up bankrupt after a major heath scare.
In practice, the "Bennett hypothesis" (the idea that increased generosity of financial aid leads to higher tuition) is the most likely explanation that I see for high education inflation. Perhaps a symptom of just how loose things were could be seen with the "ITT Technical Institute" type institution that spent far more time recruiting students via slick advertisements and taking their student loan money, versus working with businesses and developing a solid education program that created employable students. A working system would've never let ITT Technical Institute last for as long as it did. I think the expanded loans were made with good intentions, but they unfortunately were not clamped down stringently enough.
It would be interesting to see this chart repeated for other countries. Many of them probably don't have the issue with higher education and health care that the US does, but perhaps one could find other interesting issues. Some of which is not controllable... and perhaps some of which is.
I 100% disagree with this and don't think it is particularly close? Sure there are some specific locations that are much more expensive, and there are some locations that are much cheaper. Overall if you want the same things it is way more affordable today than the 80s and 90s. But our standards have risen a lot and things that used to be considered middle class are now considered poor.
Anything that could be considered in the base layers of Maslov's heirarchy is certainly less affordable. Food, shelter, health, education. Sure lots of consumer goods have got cheaper, but if you've got a big TV and no house to put it in are you actually any richer?
Let's take these one at at time
1. Households in 1980 spent a large share of their income on food then today, and CPI tracks food expenditure and it's below wage increases. So this one is a victory for today vs the past.
2. Shelter is difficult because we expect much more today than the past, houses have gotten much much larger. One big issue is interest rates, which were about twice as high in the 80s than in recent times. If you want to buy a small house without air conditioning and other amenities that are now standard you can do it cheaper than what you would have paid back then. So another victory for today.
3. Health is once again hard, because a lot of the increased cost is for things that weren't around back then. We can just call this one a draw
4. Education. This is the one that is most clearly an increase above inflation. Some of this is due to decreased funding by governments, some due to admin bloat, but mostly it's just that labor is getting more expensive and education is a very labor focused sector. So victory for the past.
So overall I have to say you are incorrect, the past was more expensive than now and less affordable for a middle class person. I also have to say I find this whole thing kind of odd, I was born in the 80s and remember what it was like, I would not want to switch places with my parents economically.
If you want to buy a small house, you often can't. The rate of new construction has been low for a couple of decades, typically at or below 1% of the housing stock. Because people's preferences change over time, older homes are more likely in places that are not in demand anymore. New construction is mostly large homes and rental complexes due to political constraints. Condos and starter homes people could reasonably buy in their 20s are not getting built in sufficient numbers.
As for air conditioning and other modern amenities, they are not particularly expensive. Installing them can be, if you live in an area with a shortage of skilled labor.
I mean sure, in some places it might be hard to find a starter home. Do you think that wasn't true in the 80s and 90s as well? I can't find the data going back to the 80s with a quick search, but here is one that shows it's been going down since 2000 https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/08/who-is....
The narrative that millennials (of which I am one) are worse off economically than our parents is an attractive one to many people, but the fact is that it's not true, at least in the USA as a whole.
I think there is enough evidence that millennials had a slower start than their parents. They were worse off by many important metrics (home ownership in particular) in their 20s, but they've largely caught up by 40. Younger generation X was impacted in the same way, which is why you don't see much change since the 2000s.
The number of homes built by decade was relatively flat from the 1950s to the 2000s. When you adjust for population, it becomes clear that housing construction has slowed down over time. When the supply of new housing becomes scarce, it tends to favor the highest bidders: large single-family homes and financialized schemes such as market-rate rental complexes.
My great granddaddy spent the summer of 1918 in a shack on the farm, sequestered by his parents to protect him from the Spanish Flu.
No tv, no radio, no electric lights, no HVAC, no Internet.
It cost nothing for him to live there other than the food delivered by someone paid a pittance to leave a plate on the porch.
Comparing to past prices usually ignores current affordances we take for granted.
I myself suffered from owning a 9-in black and white TV until I was 31.
I'm not sure exactly what the cost was, but I'm pretty sure it was in line with a low end 36-in LED nowadays
I'm really curious how old you are. The great grand-dad part makes you think you're my age or a bit younger, but then I grew up very middle class and I don't know if I've ever even seen a black-and-white TV.
From googling just now, color sales exceeded black and white by the 70s. However, new black and white models were still being introduced even into the 90s in the U.S., particularly in the budget or portable segments, and were still being sold new into the 2000s.
Disagree. Presenting partial information like this distorts and confuses people's understanding.
You are right, I think I mention that most experiences on the site are satirical but I don't mention it on the landing page to this experience, will add this today, will also add "not inflation adjusted' until I change the numbers to adjust for inflation.
> if we take a wholistic approach, most things were more affordable.
I don't know exactly what "wholistic" means, but in actual numbers, corrected for inflation and median wage growth, this is 100% the opposite of true.
A few things are more expensive in CPI terms, housing among them. Almost nothing is actually significantly more expensive as a fraction of median income.
And it's really distressingly weird that people can't see this. I mean, if cars were so cheap in the 70's or whatever why did we inexplicably have so few of them?
Focusing though on the cost (you know, no one is going to prevent you from wearing a seatbelt) where is the equivalent today? A used Ford Focus off of Craigslist? A double-wide in a trailer park?
As another pointed out, I think we're "fetishizing" the affordability of the previous decades, not the cigarette smoke in the restaurants.
As per cherry picking: housing, transportation, education… These are kind of important. If it had only been, say, giant TVs I would agree it is cherry-picked.
Perhaps you think the examples themselves (Ford F-150, etc.) are what are cherry-picked?
Americans just won't buy these "cheap" cars. Almost every American car-maker, and most foreign car importers too, have dropped passengers cars from their lineup year-after-year leaving only SUVs and trucks. Look at what Ford and GM offer in Latin America; small, affordable cars. Every now-and-then they try to bring something similar to the US and it's sales numbers are always dismal. The US is mostly rich (by world standards) and has premium preferences. The huge gulf is between what people say they want and what they actually end up buying.
There was something on here a year or two ago about how increasing emissions standards made it infeasible to continue manufacturing small cars. Big cars had more lenient standards. Also I think Honda quit making the Fit during the pandemic, since parts were limited and the larger cars were more profitable. So I think it's more complicated than just that people don't buy smaller cars.
>Focusing though on the cost (you know, no one is going to prevent you from wearing a seatbelt) where is the equivalent today? A used Ford Focus off of Craigslist? A double-wide in a trailer park?
A brand new Nissan Versa for $17,300.
Work for an entire year after high school while living with your parents and saving money so you can attend a state school for <$10,000/year. Don't take out student loans so you can buy a premium laptop, luxury clothes, and travel. Don't get a new phone every one or two years. Don't sign up for 5+ streaming services. Don't buy coffee and toast from cafes.
https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/versa-sedan.html
It was common (at least here in europe) to simply buy your car, with the proliferation of finance and lease it is now the norm to essentially rent your own car for two to four years before inevitably having to trade it in for another, perpetually on the strap.
This has driven the actual price of vehicles both used and new to astronomical levels under the assumption that you will have it on-plan rather than own it outright.
Major things aside, it's the every day minor erosions in qol that depress me...for example cereal boxes used to be stiffer, chocolate had more cocoa solids, products were on average better quality, to get that same quality requires you to know and spend a lot more, we aren't imagining it, there was a sweet spot somewhere between 2003 and 2016.
People didn’t finance cars on 4 year loans back then. 3 years was the max, so even with 10% interest that’s only $60 extra a month for 3 years.
You're right, a 4 year loan in the 80's basically didn't exist.
And that major repair? Water pump that dad changed in like 30 minutes. Or engine rebuild he did with friends and some beers or did for the lady down the street for the cost of parts. Do people even help eachother fix eachother's cars anymore? We used to be a society helping. Now it's go to a mechanics shop that normally starts with the process of them seeing if they can scam you.
The fetishization of basic progress is wild. We EXTPECT our society to progress. People went from horses (where they literally had to shovel shit) to cars. 2026 'now we have seatbelts' is some bullshit progress metric for an entire ass society and isn't the 2026 hyped/sold/expected. That you have to reach to pulling up that example (versus my 'shoveling horse shit to having jet airplane looking 1950s/60s cars) shows things kinda suck. In exchange you can't fix the car and have to take it in. You can't just help out the single mom down the street and check out her problem for her. Tires are so expensive they have to go on the credit card and be a planned expense (my parents with hardly any money didn't have to live off credits cards to cover incidentals).
'Guys, things can't be bad, we have these amazing things called seatbelts now (invented in 1959)'.
Well anything can sound dumb, when you simplify it to something dumb. We have multiple airbags, anti-lock braking, seatbelt pretensioner, collision avoidance, crumple zones, fuel pump automatic shut off, backup cameras, rollover testing, ... Vehicles do an amazing amount of things to keep their occupants alive in a crash.
+ all the complexity that makes the stuff coming out the backend less polluting
Current year - 2026
Consumer vehicle Anti lock breaks - 1971 Consumer vehicle Airbags - 1973 Consumer pretensioner - 1981 Start of crumple zone incorporating - 1950s Consumer fuel pump shutoff /inertia switch - 1975 First roll over testing - 1938 Backup camera - iteration on mirrors/rear window
meh. Yes cars are safer now. But this is about affordability. And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain. You could get second hand cars that would still run for years, and you or a friend could fix them yourself. Drinking and driving has nothing to do with affordability so I don’t know what you’re going on about.
> And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain.
I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.
My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.
Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.
I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.
I grew up in that era too (born late 60s). My dad repaired the cars we had, and they definitely lasted a long time. Granted, I grew up in Europe (we had Peugeot, VW, etc.) so maybe the build quality of the US cars was worse--I can't say.
Yeah, they used way more oil than today, and they were more polluting, and they were less safe, and there were less rules (I can remember six of us kids piling into a VW Bug with my dad). But we're discussing affordability.
I can get to work with oil leaks and burning oil.
The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often? Meaning people could afford to replace them with new ones more often?
> The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often?
nobody was making that argument
cars weren't replaced more often; people drove the same car for longer than they do now, in part because they more easily repairable
Pensions used to be free and great, until the company stole from the pension before they went bankrupt and you were left with nothing.
You'll never guess who was responsible for the biggest pension scandal in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell (yes, father of Ghislaine)
I've seen this story in the Tetris movie, he came off as a terrible businessman who was stealing people's money to save his company from bankruptcy
Pensions used to be great when you had final salary ones.
Unfortunately people stopped smoking.
(the downside of 20th century work on increasing life expectancy is that most of it happens in retirement, making pensions much more expensive)
edit: I have not done the maths, but I would not be surprised to discover that the total average pension paid to someone retiring at age 65 in 2026 was much more than the total average pension paid to someone retiring at age 65 in 1986, while at the same time the weekly amount of the earlier one would be higher. Because the more recent one has to spread the money over more years.
(inflation adjusted as well)
I'd retire later if I got a higher pension rate.
i.e.
Opt to retire at 65, but you get a defined contribution pot
Opt to retire at 70, you get final salary pension.
FWIW, the UK state pension does go up if you defer it: https://www.gov.uk/deferring-state-pension/print
Yeah, but I want 2/3 of my salary when I retire, not £300/week.
Yeah that must have sucked tbh
Pensions used to be great when 0.1% expense ratio target date funds were not available.
It makes no sense to give someone else control of your savings in this day and age.
I think it depends on your financial literacy, I know a lot of people who have no idea how to invest their money, you would be surprised how many people would be more comfortable with someone else managing their life savings for them
You are absolutely right to want a pension in addition to just regular savings, because a pension has huge tax benefits. (UK)
Someone choosing to be illiterate and getting scammed out of their money still does not make sense. Life doesn’t get much easier than picking the target date fund with the year you expect to stop working.
Some of these felt very cherry picked. E.g. 8% interest rate in banks? That probably means mortgage rates were 10-15%, where as they are now 5-6%
$0 pensions? Thats just a lie? The pension comes out of your paycheck. Its literally a line item on your pay stub.
Also this site would be better if you overlay inflation or something to highlight when/where costs rose. E.g. using the CPI inflation calculator the $7400 for a new car would be $28k today. $28k wont buy you a F150 today (starts at ~40k) but its a good chunk of the way, and there are other cars you can buy for $28k easy.
8% savings accounts? It says today 0.01% below that, but there are definitely high yield saving accounts in the 4-5% range today...
So sure it's half as good, if 8% really was common back then... but weren't loan interest rates even higher back then than today too?
I think this is misleading unless you at least include the price after inflation. "OMG, transportation is out of control. The original Model T only cost $850!!" Well, $850 in 1908 was about $28,000 in 2025 [1], which not unreasonable, seeing as how the starting price (list) of a Honda Civic is about $24,000.
The 2025 Civic is a way better car, though.
[1] https://kevinsautos.com/faq/how-much-did-a-ford-model-t-cost...
I'm pretty sure I did not get to keep my shoes on through TSA in 2004. It may not have been mandatory nation-wide until ~2006, but the origin is a 2001 incident.
Yes I think the author is mixing it up with the liquids ban. And in my limited experience, at major airports with new scanners, people care much less about both of these now.
At the expense that you have to do human observed naked scans. Pre 2001 US would freak the fuck out about that. It's 2026 normal, but like most things it is pre 2001 very very not normal.
Nice work please continue with this effort.
On the car comparative. I have a 2010 RAV4, and my wife drives a 2023 RAV4. I love mine, but even if it was perfectly kept. It is smaller, lighter, it has less equipment, I have seen older RAV4s and they look even smaller than mine. What is is the opposite of shrinkflation ? I don't know if it is social pressures or what is is causing us to expect things that are bigger and more expensive.
Appreciate the feedback, will definitely be making some updates based on the comments I got here. There is social pressure definitely when it comes to buying decisions, I think over the past 15 years, the world has gone crazy in terms of car sizes where most people wanna drive only SUVs
Swolvolution. Expecting things to be bigger but in strange places and not necessarily for the better
"Hedonic treadmill"?
I'm annoyed that in the UK the prevalence of "SUV crossovers" has suddenly jacked all cars up by 10-20cm, especially at the bonnet line. Selection pressure (bollards are the natural predator) is at least keeping the width slightly under control.
Subsidized smartphone is definitely still here.
I got my 17 Pro ($1100) from ATT for free which is almost twice the cost of the phones back then. And my monthly cost is only $35/mo as well for the 3 year term, for unlimited data too, which is cheaper than the data plans back then.
I spent the last 2 months building ideagames.fun : satirical browser experiences about work, money, and modern life. The Middle Class Museum is a guided tour of things that used to be affordable. Starter homes. Pensions. Blockbuster Friday. Each exhibit has a "Today:" line. "Today: $450,000. You are renting Gary's basement." Built in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS — no frameworks, no backend, no database. Runs entirely in the browser. Would love any feedback on what works and what doesn't.
This is straight up AI generated economic disinformation. Are you seriously claiming that computers cost more in real terms today than 20 years ago?? Some of these goods (housing) do cost more, but a lot of these examples don't make any sense.
Most people would prefer housing to a fancier computer.
The productivity gains from fancier computers haven’t accrued to workers either.
A townhouse can still be had for <300k in Baltimore
Yeah, I am pretty sure that you can buy a house for less than $450k in multiple cities, commentary is meant to be humorous for most part
Inflation adjusted?
No, as it's mainly supposed to be a humorous/satirical take similar to other experiences on the site. I didn't intend for it to be a finance piece originally but I know if inflation adjusted, whole experience will change.
Looking at an inflation calculator, the average rate since 1980 has been 3.06% over 46 years. Compounded, 1.0306^46 = 4.0.
So, adjusting for inflation, a single income family in 1980 would be equivalent to a four-income family today. Since millennials currently get by with just two incomes, they actually come out way ahead when adjusted for inflation.
Not adjusting for inflation and quality really damages the integrity of the comparisons, as does cherry picking your base examples.
Taking your first, the $47K 3 bedroom starter home with a yard. In 2026 that would be $200K (cumulative inflation is a little over 4x[1]); picking a random US city[2] and looking on Zillow[3] I find that...yeah, you can get a comparable home today.
There are certainly arguments to be made about tradeoffs, quality issues (though those aren't as obvious as you might initially suppose[4]) and so on. But just listing unadjusted price comparisons like this is disingenuous.
[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1980?amount=1 [2] https://www.randomlists.com/random-us-cities [3] https://www.zillow.com [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4C62HC1HSo
Just "adjusting for inflation" isn't good enough. Minimum wage was $4/hr. Now its $8. An elementary school custodian could afford a mortgage, a car, support a family of 4 and go on vacation on just that single income. They had healthcare and a pension. You could work over the summer and pay for a year of college at a state school.
Yes, the house now is more energy efficient. The car is safer. But if the price of everything went up 4x-10x, and the median income only went up 2x, AND you have to pay for more things that used to be included, then everything is more unaffordable, inflation be damned.
In 1979, 13% of US hourly workers were making the federal minimum wage. By 2025, that number had dropped to 1%.
Inflation-adjusted wages have been at worst stagnant. Inflation-adjusting prices is necessary for these comparisons to be meaningful at all.
This is a website for engineers, you should be embarrassed to be posting these completely innumerate comments.
"An elementary school custodian could afford a mortgage, a car, support a family of 4 and go on vacation on just that single income. " Can I ask what you are basing this off of? I'm fairly skeptical of this claim.
The head custodian at my elementary school (in the 80s) was a friendly guy that loved talking with the kids. He'd talk about his life, ask us if we did anything fun over the summer, and tell us where he went with his wife and kids. The school was in a small town in the rural midwest, not particularly affluent, but not poor either.
The elementary school where my kids went (in a much more wealthy district) doesn't even have a custodian that I'm aware of, just a 3rd-party cleaning service that hires immigrants for as cheap as possible, and I'm sure doesn't offer healthcare or even full-time work. They have too many highly-paid administrators to afford a custodian.
Ok so you're moving the goalposts here. What you said was a custodian (who I'm assuming did a lot more than just clean) and now you've switched to a head custodian and are comparing him to contract workers. So you're comparing two different jobs in two different school districts. Now is it possible that they've eliminated or reduced those positions? Sure, but you haven't actually shown that at all. Like I could easily counter with the fact that the school my wife teaches at still has a head custodian but I don't know what his family situation is and we'd just be trading anecdotes. So do you have any actual evidence for your initial claim? Because the overall stats with wages and prices are the opposite from what you claim.
> Not adjusting for inflation and quality really damages the integrity of the comparisons, as does cherry picking your base examples.
But then they also need to make sure to also match salaries to inflation too.. Because wages have not kept up with inflation, which is the reason for most of this..
> wages have not kept up with inflation
This is not true.
https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-have-inflation-ad...
Thanks for the feedback. The whole experience/site is mainly satirical/humorous. It's not inflation adjusted cause I didn't want it turn into a finance piece tbh, but you're definitely right, if inflation adjusted most cards need to be re-built to account for inflation and better judge what we're getting today vs what we used to get
It's about money! How is it not a finance piece?
“JUST A PRANK, BROS‼”
I like to call it satire actually
So you're making fun of people who think the past was more affordable?
He has a belief that is mainly supportable only if he cherry picks specific examples that don't contradict his belief system.
no, cause I personally think the past was more affordable
I don't get the satire then.
Not adjusting for inflation makes it look completely stupid.
There's one good effort - comparing a car to the salary of a car-worker. But it only has half the comparison (what are today's car workers earning?). That's the comparison that Marx would recognize: how long do the people making something have to work to buy the thing they made?
Will review the numbers this week and see how I can update all numbers to adjust for inflation while keeping the satirical angle
"The summer job" card gets this exactly right and is a good example.
I'd paste the text, but you've somehow disabled select/copy/paste, UX strike number two.
Is the implicit expectation that people making something should have some correlation with their ability to buy that thing?
The assembly-worker making a Civic and a 7 Series BMW are doing effectively the same thing, but the BMW assembler shouldn’t be getting paid 3 to 4x.
The reference to Marx and (implicitly) the labor theory of value renders the GP unserious. Just looking at the people doing the assembly (and not all the people in the supply chain), ignoring the time aspect (I doubt there's any product that costs more than one of the people assembling it would expect to make over the time it would take them to single-handedly create the product from scratch), and so on.
It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.
> It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.
It may be so, but those feelings are part of the disconnect and they themselves cause all sorts of problems - or benefits, if directed appropriately, e.g. the IKEA effect is part of the same thing: we put in effort so we think the result is worth that effort.
Marx being wrong doesn't mean trade unions didn't rise for much of the 20th century on the basis of similar feelings, being in error didn't stop the USSR being one of the world's two superpowers for about half a century.
If the employees are satisfied their labours will bear fruits then they historically have not minded much that billionaires skim the cream; but when they are not satisfied, revolutions come. Those are messy and unpleasant, but they come anyway.
Sure. Lying to people and telling them they're somehow oppressed just because other people are more successful than they are can be used to stir up a revolution and get a lot of the useful idiots killed.
That's why it's important to call the nonsense out.
When someone's making billions and the goods and services they get you to pay are functionally mandatory even if theoretically avoidable, with costs going up because someone somewhere has apparently cornered the market, is it even a lie?
People asking "Why can't I afford a car from 9 months salary when my dad could? Why is a house 10x my salary not 3x like my dad's? Why can't my partner and I afford kids even on two incomes when our parents managed it on one?" don't want a series of ten hour-long degree-level lectures on economic theory to be able to understand the real answer, especially not when there's clearly a bunch of very rich people who keep loudly telling them that they ought to be happy because some stock index has gone up (when they don't own stocks) or that they've moved up the value chain (which if true doesn't answer why cars and houses are less affordable).
Give them an answer about Baumol's cost disease (easy to understand without much economics study), and suddenly you're back to Marxism but with different language, where Marx's "means of production" happen to be inalienable to the human form (or at least have been so far, plumbers are not yet quaking in terror at the videos of androids falling over while attempting to open a dishwasher).
Being untrue is what makes these things lies[1][2].
Arguing that they are emotionally compelling is just confirming that they're manipulative lies.
[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/New-cars/price-inflation [2] https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-have-inflation-ad...
Less idiots is a good thing retard.
Obligatory HN web design complaint: this uses horizontal instead of vertical scrolling, which is fine-ish, but does not work when using the scrollwheel.
Thanks for the feedback , will work on this today.
Lots of problems with this. The noted lack of inflation adjustment. The savings interest item ignores the fact that loan interest rates were 10%+ when you could get a good rate on your savings account. The student loan one is just wrong, the average student loan debt in 2026 is $43k. You ignore the point of the avocado toast (what used to be called the latte factor) simply so you can make some pithy comment. If you don't buy $14 toast 5 days a week, you can save $3500 per year. If you do that for 5 years you have a great addition to your downpayment for a home. Or you can use the money saved to buy a brand-new Nissan Versa, a perfectly fine starter car for a young couple with 1 or 2 young kids, for $17,000. Blockbuster Friday comes out to 4 movies a month for $16. Compared to $16 for a streaming service that you can watch every single night. And everyone knows the experience of going to a video rental store and walking the aisles for what felt like hours trying to find something to watch, just a different kind of scrolling. In 30 years of working in IT, cubicles have been the norm. 30m from where I'm sitting right now there is a ping pong table. The break room is huge and has plenty of large, cushioned seating that you can lie down on and take a nap if you need to. As well as small private meeting spaces if you just have to get away from everyone. This is not a tech startup or FAANG. The summer job is still true for most state universities. Utah State University 2026 tuition and fees is $4500 per semester.
If you don't want to pay subscriptions, don't subscribe to those services. You can trivially buy Bluray, DVD, and CDs. Or you can get DRM free music from multiple sources. You can stream spotify and youtube for free. OTA TV is still a thing.
Apparently, I'm in a contrarian and argumentative mood today.
This is US centric, but you can show this to anyone in any major city in the western world and they will nod.
The problem is global. Any time you are told the problem is immigrants in your country or that your local politicians didn’t build enough housing - that’s not the root cause.
The root cause is the inevitable centralization of all wealth in corporations who can dodge taxes. This affords them the ability to accrue assets endlessly, buy politicians, achieve monopolies and bump up the prices.
There are 3 things that need to happen to restore the first frames: 1) some things like housing and healthcare must not be asset classes. It is unsustainable to demand profit growth year over year from either. 2) the wealth needs to be redistributed. It is a systemic risk for corporations and individuals to have accrued as much wealth and power as nations (and it doesn’t seem to be good for the mental health of those at the top) 3) we all need unions so workers can advocate for themselves and even the playing field. Including tech.
I’m not a communist, I think capitalism broadly works, but it requires regulation. We deregulated and it’s made a mess, we need to wind that back and patch the bad logic.
Yeah, I actually live in Toronto, and this was one the design decisions I was thinking about before building this, it's just that more people relate to the US. And I agree with the reasons you listed, immigration imo can be controlled, like what I see here in Canada, they seem to control the flow based on economic state and demand year to year.
A bunch of refutations:
None of the prices are inflation-adjusted. That gives more sticker shock than reality.
> The Starter Home / No bidding war. / Gary just... bought it.
That was back when land was plentiful and cheap, and homes had fewer features and comforts. Now all the desirable land is taken, and existing homeowners don't want to increase density, so prices go up and newcomers get pushed farther out. NIMBYs and exclusionary zoning are a large part of the problem.
> The Pension / Your employer saved for your retirement.
I dislike the old-style "defined-benefit" pensions, because you are completely at the whim of your employer. They set the arbitrary terms of tenure (how much pension you receive in relation to how many years you work), pay-in, and payout. You're also reliant on your company staying solvent to pay you in retirement. Nope, I much prefer "defined-contribution" self-funded pensions where your account is segregated from everyone else, and usually you get to choose excellent low-cost broad-market index funds. In Canada, DC is RRSP, and I guess in the USA it's 401(k) and IRA. DC also allows you to job-hop much more easily because the amount you contributed to your retirement account is clearly yours and not a matter of company policy.
> One-Income Household / Dad worked. Mom stayed home.
I think that arrangement was bad for women's autonomy and rights, but someone more qualified than me can speak about it.
> National Park Vacation / Pay $5. No reservation required.
Well, the growth in parks didn't match population growth. Or there's a growth in domestic and international tourism in general.
> The Savings Account / The bank paid you 8% a year
I'm pretty sure that happened during a period when annual inflation was 10~15%, meaning that you lost money by "saving" cash. Also, interest is taxed at a much higher marginal rate than capital gains, so it's dumb to invest in cash instead of stocks. It is true, though, that in much of my adult life, the savings account interest rate is around 0~2%, making it a completely meaningless financial product to me.
> c. 1994 / The Family Computer / $2000
You can buy an entry-level laptop for about $500 since the year 2010. The barrier to entry in getting a computer went down gradually each year.
> c. 2000 / The $1 Slice / A massive, greasy slice of New York style pizza
I bought a $1 slice in NYC in the year 2019 and it was a decent size. I haven't visited afterward so I can't say.
> The DVD Collection / You owned your media.
You can still buy Blu-ray discs of your favorite movies. Most people choose not to out of short-term convenience.
> Flying / Free bags, shoes on
Those features aren't "free". It costs the airline money and opportunity cost to move your luggage (excess room can be used for paid cargo shipments). Those features have just been unbundled so that people who don't need the feature don't pay it, people who need it pay it, and you don't have the non-users subsidizing the users. That's like saying a $50 buffet is "free" even though you'd be equally satisfied with a $20 meal paid à la carte.
> 401k Matching / Free money
Lolno, there's no such thing as free money. "Employer pays" still affects how much the employer spends on you, which ultimately affects their calculation on who to hire and how much to pay them. It only affects the split of how much of the employer's money gets paid to you as an unrestricted salary versus restricted programs like healthcare insurance and pensions.
> The 99-Cent App / No accounts
I'm pretty sure you need an Apple or Google account to buy the app in the first place. After you bought the app, you can reinstall it for free on any newer phone that you buy.
> The Subsidized Smartphone
I heard that the old days were not good, because the 2-year contract forced you to buy a higher tier cellular service plan than if you brought in a fully paid-off phone. Also, there are significant fees for breaking the 2-year contract.
> Buying a House in a City / you could still buy a 2-bedroom in Austin for $210,000
Yeah, thank NIMBYs for that again. When residential construction can't keep up with demand (mostly due to regulatory reasons), prices go up.
> The Stimulus Check / Billionaires blame inflation on you buying groceries with it.
You don't believe that printing money causes inflation? WTF
> Remote Work / Your company saved millions on office real estate.
You make it sound bad. I think it was great - zero time spent commuting, access to amenities at home such as a kitchen, more privacy, better mood.
> The Subscription Everything / You own nothing.
Renting isn't necessarily worse than owning. There is a break-even point that is different for every person. Renting Netflix for $0.01/month would be awesome. Maybe most people will be happy to pay $10/mo to have access to an enormous media library. $100/mo would be unreasonable. Consider the alternative - how much per month does it cost to purchase physical media to derive the same amount of enjoyment from entertainment?
> The Tip Screen / barista ... ask you to subsidize their wages because the corporation won't
"The corporation" ultimately receives money from customers who pay for the product. If no customer paid tips, "the corporation" can't magically create money out of thin air to pay the employees more; the corp would need to raise prices on the menus (which I agree with).
No, the question isn't whether "the corporation pays", because that's nonsense; it's whether people are obliged to pay because it clearly says so on the menu price, or generous people "voluntarily" pay more towards the barista's wages because they are socially "expected to".
> The End. / You own nothing. You subscribe to everything. Your rent is higher than your parents' mortgage.
It's worth repeating: Renting is not necessarily worse than owning. For housing, many people have done the analysis and I can point you to a heap of YouTube videos explaining the situation. There are both financial and non-financial aspects (e.g. Realtor fees, breaking a mortgage) to this comparison.
Yeah it's really messed up that middle class people can't afford to...rent movies...anymore?
There's 4,000 movies available for free on YouTube. More if you pay for YT Premium. That's just one example...any streaming stick will give you loads more.
True, you have to have Internet, but you're going to have Internet regardless.
Compare to the 1980s where you had to drive to a Blockbuster and pay $3 or $4 a pop for VHS.
And you can still rent movies. Heck, if you want to live in the 1990s, your local pawn shop or flea market has tons of DVDs you can buy for less than a 1990s rental.
All good points - and that 1980s rental cost would be ~$11 inflation adjusted - for a rental at VHS quality where you also had the costs of driving to pickup/return the tape.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/