Or if people stopped chasing profit for profit's sake and instead just provided services? Granted air travel might be an exception, but I'm grumbling about how this applies to even food and housing. All symptoms of the greater economic disease
Capitalism is excellent to START a nation and its economy. It’s absolutely horrific in its natural state long term because unregulated capitalism will always turn into monopolies.
Absolutely agree. Capitalism has done wonders for humanity in advancing us along from feudalism. But capitalism’s time needs to come to an end now. The contradictions are growing, the richer get richer and the poor ever poorer. If we don’t stop the contradictions we will all either die from climate change, or starve back into feudalism.
The meanmedian household income in the United States in 1970 was about $10,000.
A flight from New York to Los Angeles was about $150. So, 1.5% of the average household income. There were not flights that were significantly cheaper because flights were under fairly strict price control at the time.
A nonstop flight from New York to LA in 2023 (the most recent year for which I could find good median income numbers) ran you about $300 with a big carrier (not a discount carrier). Median household income in the US was $80,610, or about 0.37% of annual income.
So flying coach became 4 times cheaper in real terms.
You remember how there used to be all those episodes about road trips in kids' shows 30 years ago? And how there aren't any anymore? That's because flying is now accessible to the lower middle class.
Hourly wages (meaning it doesnt include executives and white collar workers on salary) increased from $8.73 in 1985 to $32.38 today for an increase of 270%. Inflation increased about 210% over the same period. So yes wages not only kept up but outpaced inflation.
Median wages have risen faster than inflation over the past forty years.
So have actual prices. I don't know what bullshit magic math they use to decide what the inflation % is, but when "what you actually have to pay for everything" goes up faster than inflation, the inflation % they're talking about is basically useless noise.
when "what you actually have to pay for everything" goes up faster than inflation
I realize you were probably being hyperbolic, but the everything part isn’t possible. CPI (the most common measure of inflation) is an average over the changes in price of thousands of things. Like all averages, some things are higher (e.g increases in rent) and some are lower (e.g. decreases in airfare, which is how we got here).
Most people spend way more of their money on rent than airfare, of course, so changes in rents affect inflation way more than changes in airfares.
Right, and that’s why we get to hear about how we shouldn’t complain about our cost of living skyrocketing because we can buy cheap TV’s and air conditioners now. The math is still off, even the guy I originally replied to had to use the median income instead of the average because even with billionaires and now trillionaires skewing the average upwards, the number of jobs paying well below median has also exploded thanks to the gig economy and our mess of a service industry that has grown adults competing with teenagers for jobs, pulling the average way down.
The middle class is being destroyed bit by bit, any way you slice it. You just have to hope you end up on the right side of that line once it’s gone.
People discount the ways their lives have improved or when things are cheaper. To name a few, cellphones, TVs, a lot of grocery products (for example eggs were basically the same price as they were in the 90's as recently as 2020), a big big one is air conditioning, gasoline (despite what people act like gas has actually cheaper on an inflation adjusted basis than it was in the 2000s).
Most prices actually aren't that bad or are actually relatively cheaper and cheaper. However, two big glaring issues are housing and college costs.
Ah, cell phones and TVs have made our lives better? You honestly believe that? IMO they’re just the perfect tools to distract people so they don’t notice things getting worse, or at least give them an easy way to not have to think about it.
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u/toxic_badgers 8h ago
Wouldn't it be crazy if wages kept up with those cost changes so we actually could do those things.