I also think people are remembering their financial situation at the end of their childhood when their parents were more established in their careers and comparing that their early-career selves. When I was born, my mom painted houses and my dad was a lawnmower salesman, we were a two income household but solidly lower-middle class and we lived in an apartment. By the time I graduated high school, my mom owned her own house painting business and my dad was a marketing director at that lawnmower company and we had a nice house in a nice suburb.
> Maybe they grew up in Omaha but are now trying to raise a family in New York or San Francisco. Maybe the “good school” they went to wasn’t actually as good as the ones they’re hoping to send their kids to. Maybe in the process of going to law school, they picked up a fancier peer group with higher lifestyle expectations than their parents had.
And just to add onto this, maybe the neighborhood or town where they grew up has itself become more in-demand, has lots more amenities, etc. Regardless of whether we ought to view that as net-positive or net-negative––certainly it's positive for some and negative for others––there are plenty of communities that were once cheap because fewer people wanted to live there and are now are more in-demand.
Of course, I don't know exactly how to situate that within the general debate of "are things better or worse for me than when I was a kid?". Part of the issue, at least in California, seems connected to the fact that housing stock just didn't kept apace with the demand to live here.
Separately, if it is true that economic opportunities are less evenly distributed, does that have any impact on our ability to interpret statistics that aggregate across lots of different parts of the country? For example, if all the economic opportunities are concentrated in Region A (but Region A also has unaffordable housing), and Region B has all the affordable housing (but no economic opportunities), averaging across those regions might make things seem more comparable than people in each communities feel them to be. That said, I think your later figure seems to account for this, i.e.,:
> On the other hand, there are a number of other cities, including Dallas, Minneapolis, and Atlanta, with healthy economies and relatively affordable housing.
The suburbs don’t scale well, and are a single-lifecycle product. This has frustrating side effects. As late as the early 80s most regions were just ending the first cycle of suburbanization, so most of the big problems hadn’t kicked in yet:
1. The first generation of suburbia represented tons of housing all in close proximity to the center city. Suburban development causes horrendous traffic congestion by design (no through streets to disperse traffic on), but if the distance you’re driving is still low then this can be tolerated.
Today, in the second and third generation of suburbia, the best locations have been taken. New development at reasonable prices does exist even in places like LA or SF, but that development is out on the edge (just like it’s predecessors). But now cities have sprawled so much that development on the edge is typically over an hour from the employment centers *without traffic* and much longer in traffic.
2. Suburbia is designed to be frozen in time, change is bitterly resisted because it messes up the homogeneity that people specifically paid for. It’s also typically cheap construction. So go around the country and you’ll find a *lot* of suburban areas from the 50s-80s that stagnated or significantly declined. These are now the best affordable housing options, but it means a different lifestyle. For the boomers, affordability was living in a shiny new place just a bit further out. Today it’s living in a run down suburb from the 70s that hasn’t been updated and has a lot of pawn shops.
The suburban model is a lose-lose engineering disaster. If a place is prosperous, the design pattern causes crippling congestion and ensures that all available land nearby is rapidly consumed until commute times are terrible. If a place is not, then Sears and Walmart move out and the neighborhood is quickly full of abandoned or marginally used properties which quickly become a vicious cycle.
But the first-generation suburbanites hadn’t had time to experience any of that, it was all upside in the beginning. IMO this is the biggest reason people today perceive that quality of life is declining even when the charts and graphs say it’s flat or possibly better in some ways.
Or as the saying goes, we wanted flying cars but got 140 characters.
Objectively, jobs have gotten worse. Workers have gotten more productive, but that increased productivity has not turned into higher pay. Hourly jobs were always crappy, but unions and government regulation were able to ameliorate things. Regulated rates meant that truck drivers could earn a living. Laws required workers to be offered predictable schedules and actually get paid for the work performed. Thanks to unions, high value industries like shipping, rail and large scale manufacturing offered better pay, paths to seniority and good benefits including pensions.
Working directly for one's employer meant that worker and corporate values were better aligned than with the independent contractor and outsourcing models current. The janitor at a large corporation would make a lot more than the janitor at a small one as high tax rates meant the largesse was shared.
Nowadays, almost all hourly jobs are dead end jobs. The mid-level jobs that once existed have been eliminated by structural changes and computerization. Even assembly lines had low skill and high skill slots, but those high skill slots have been deskilled.
Salaried jobs have gotten worse as well. The number of hours spent at work has risen dramatically over the years. It has gotten so bad that working a 40 hour, five day week is considered a form of quitting. That alone should be telling.
The housing situation has gotten worse. Land use regulation has made it impossible to build starter homes even in the places with relatively low real estate prices. The typical mortgage on a typical house cost 600 work-hours in the 1960s, but settled out around 800 in the 1980s. Most housing being built requires one own and operate an automobile, an expense that should be included in housing costs.
I agree that it is hard to measure living standards in an objective fashion. The 1950s and 1960s were no paradise with work characterized as the "rat race" and job related ulcers a standing joke. The imposed conformity was brutal. Being a stay at home mother, a role so many women were forced into, could be a nightmare.
I tend to look at it in terms of possibilities. GDP with all its flaws has some merits. If nothing else, it places an envelope on what is possible. We have greatly grown that envelope, but it is hard to see where it has enhanced our lives. We buy computers and smartphones instead of radio sets and print media, but we are still working forty hour weeks or much longer. I often wonder how many people would really choose a flying car over a three day work week?
I also think people are remembering their financial situation at the end of their childhood when their parents were more established in their careers and comparing that their early-career selves. When I was born, my mom painted houses and my dad was a lawnmower salesman, we were a two income household but solidly lower-middle class and we lived in an apartment. By the time I graduated high school, my mom owned her own house painting business and my dad was a marketing director at that lawnmower company and we had a nice house in a nice suburb.
> Maybe they grew up in Omaha but are now trying to raise a family in New York or San Francisco. Maybe the “good school” they went to wasn’t actually as good as the ones they’re hoping to send their kids to. Maybe in the process of going to law school, they picked up a fancier peer group with higher lifestyle expectations than their parents had.
And just to add onto this, maybe the neighborhood or town where they grew up has itself become more in-demand, has lots more amenities, etc. Regardless of whether we ought to view that as net-positive or net-negative––certainly it's positive for some and negative for others––there are plenty of communities that were once cheap because fewer people wanted to live there and are now are more in-demand.
Of course, I don't know exactly how to situate that within the general debate of "are things better or worse for me than when I was a kid?". Part of the issue, at least in California, seems connected to the fact that housing stock just didn't kept apace with the demand to live here.
Separately, if it is true that economic opportunities are less evenly distributed, does that have any impact on our ability to interpret statistics that aggregate across lots of different parts of the country? For example, if all the economic opportunities are concentrated in Region A (but Region A also has unaffordable housing), and Region B has all the affordable housing (but no economic opportunities), averaging across those regions might make things seem more comparable than people in each communities feel them to be. That said, I think your later figure seems to account for this, i.e.,:
> On the other hand, there are a number of other cities, including Dallas, Minneapolis, and Atlanta, with healthy economies and relatively affordable housing.
Thanks for the post!
The suburbs don’t scale well, and are a single-lifecycle product. This has frustrating side effects. As late as the early 80s most regions were just ending the first cycle of suburbanization, so most of the big problems hadn’t kicked in yet:
1. The first generation of suburbia represented tons of housing all in close proximity to the center city. Suburban development causes horrendous traffic congestion by design (no through streets to disperse traffic on), but if the distance you’re driving is still low then this can be tolerated.
Today, in the second and third generation of suburbia, the best locations have been taken. New development at reasonable prices does exist even in places like LA or SF, but that development is out on the edge (just like it’s predecessors). But now cities have sprawled so much that development on the edge is typically over an hour from the employment centers *without traffic* and much longer in traffic.
2. Suburbia is designed to be frozen in time, change is bitterly resisted because it messes up the homogeneity that people specifically paid for. It’s also typically cheap construction. So go around the country and you’ll find a *lot* of suburban areas from the 50s-80s that stagnated or significantly declined. These are now the best affordable housing options, but it means a different lifestyle. For the boomers, affordability was living in a shiny new place just a bit further out. Today it’s living in a run down suburb from the 70s that hasn’t been updated and has a lot of pawn shops.
The suburban model is a lose-lose engineering disaster. If a place is prosperous, the design pattern causes crippling congestion and ensures that all available land nearby is rapidly consumed until commute times are terrible. If a place is not, then Sears and Walmart move out and the neighborhood is quickly full of abandoned or marginally used properties which quickly become a vicious cycle.
But the first-generation suburbanites hadn’t had time to experience any of that, it was all upside in the beginning. IMO this is the biggest reason people today perceive that quality of life is declining even when the charts and graphs say it’s flat or possibly better in some ways.
Or as the saying goes, we wanted flying cars but got 140 characters.
Objectively, jobs have gotten worse. Workers have gotten more productive, but that increased productivity has not turned into higher pay. Hourly jobs were always crappy, but unions and government regulation were able to ameliorate things. Regulated rates meant that truck drivers could earn a living. Laws required workers to be offered predictable schedules and actually get paid for the work performed. Thanks to unions, high value industries like shipping, rail and large scale manufacturing offered better pay, paths to seniority and good benefits including pensions.
Working directly for one's employer meant that worker and corporate values were better aligned than with the independent contractor and outsourcing models current. The janitor at a large corporation would make a lot more than the janitor at a small one as high tax rates meant the largesse was shared.
Nowadays, almost all hourly jobs are dead end jobs. The mid-level jobs that once existed have been eliminated by structural changes and computerization. Even assembly lines had low skill and high skill slots, but those high skill slots have been deskilled.
Salaried jobs have gotten worse as well. The number of hours spent at work has risen dramatically over the years. It has gotten so bad that working a 40 hour, five day week is considered a form of quitting. That alone should be telling.
The housing situation has gotten worse. Land use regulation has made it impossible to build starter homes even in the places with relatively low real estate prices. The typical mortgage on a typical house cost 600 work-hours in the 1960s, but settled out around 800 in the 1980s. Most housing being built requires one own and operate an automobile, an expense that should be included in housing costs.
I agree that it is hard to measure living standards in an objective fashion. The 1950s and 1960s were no paradise with work characterized as the "rat race" and job related ulcers a standing joke. The imposed conformity was brutal. Being a stay at home mother, a role so many women were forced into, could be a nightmare.
I tend to look at it in terms of possibilities. GDP with all its flaws has some merits. If nothing else, it places an envelope on what is possible. We have greatly grown that envelope, but it is hard to see where it has enhanced our lives. We buy computers and smartphones instead of radio sets and print media, but we are still working forty hour weeks or much longer. I often wonder how many people would really choose a flying car over a three day work week?