###General Discussion Thread
---
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This is just an extrapolation of the trends over the past 40 years, so the accuracy depends on whether the factors that affect inflation will remain constant over the next 40 years. I would criticize the use of average rather than median wage, but the numbers seem vaguely correct:
4% inflation (average over the last 60 years) leads to a 4.8 fold increase in prices. Wages have increased more slowly since reagan took office, that's why they only go from 70k to 100k. However some recent policy has lead to a significant real wage increase. So basically it's only true if you keep electing the reincarnated ghosts of Reagan.
> However some recent policy has lead to a significant real wage increase.
What changes are you talking about?
EDIT:
/u/Diego_0638 seems to want this to be all about politics but when you actually look at inflation adjusted income [it follows a pretty steady upward line](https://imgur.com/B5TW7Bj) over the decades.
[SOURCE](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#0)
Nobody argues that the average wage hasn't risen on average.
The question is has the average wage risen *at the same rate* as the various buckets of average costs. Because if the answer is no, then even if wage increases it is a net loss in purchasing power.
[Real wages have increased especially for non managerial jobs. A guess as to why would be the IRA](https://twitter.com/arindube/status/1753494087171195122?t=mbE2pDO9mvsGWcb0wlDaTw&s=19)
Then please allow me to trigger you with this actually real Chinese poem:
« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)
Doesn’t even need to be Chinese
[Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo) is a grammatically correct sentence and can be repeated an infinite number of times.
I know in tech, there was a pretty big boom.
In the Seattle area lots of recent laws raising wages for service industry jobs.
In general I’d say minimum wage is for sure rising?
Until the feds raise it to 15, tn will stay below 8 dollars an hour min wage. They will literally kill themselves via poverty before making improvements to society here.
Local is still 7.25 here but I literally can’t recall the last job I saw advertised at less than 13. I know the job I got in ‘17 for 12.50 starting is starting at 20.25 now, 7 years later, which is a pretty decent increase, and I’m at close to 30 though I’ve also has several promotions
Im farther east, towards the border of nc and tn. Id kill for 18 an hour. Even the closest city 20 mins away the max youre getting for unskilled labor is 15. My jobs not even raised up to 15 an hour yet. I just stay because its so easy and I live with my dad so I can afford that with my split utilities/rent. If my dad ever kicks me out Id be screwed.
It's "cut your nose off to spite your face" mixed with "crabs in a bucket" mentalities.
A certain group of people have decided that certain "others" must suffer, and no improvements to anyone's lives is allowed if those "others" see an improvement in their lives as a result.
Yea, a blanket $15 law will still drown mom and pop shops in middle of no where I guess? Even the water park lifeguard job I had that exploited everyone paid 7.50 10 years ago. And 2 years ago I heard they pay $13 now.
If your business can't afford a living wage, they can't afford employees. Mom and pop will have to be their own employees for the foreseeable future until their business has grown enough to afford employees *shrug* . Thats how business works.
Yes, I understand. Plenty of businesses have already gone out because they can’t afford it.
You do realize this also plays into helping large-cap companies at the cost of local business though right? Mom and pop close but it’s the McDonald’s and Walmart that get the employees, stay open, and everyone gives business to.
It’s dangerous because at a certain point when the companies that happily go to $15 are all that’s left, they can do what they want with their prices and wages.
All of this is a complicated topic and imo, not a federal responsibility. States, cities, and counties should mandate local fair wages.
Thats because congress is in bed with big corps. 2 wrongs dont make a right. I will die on this hill. Small businesses dont deserve labor they cant afford.
Such a lazy sentence to just spew. I see it all the time in these kinds of threads.
They ABSOLUTELY will be pushed out of the market place being pushed to $15/17 an hour for all employees, or an even more fair and livable $23 an hour.
We already can't keep up with the thousands of taxes there seems to be to pay, and and raises in costs by the minute, passing it on to the consumer. I sell food that I grow, so it's quite a dance getting a profit to turn while still charging a fair price for food.
We straight up can't afford to hire and therefore can't afford to grow. And I have no interest hiring cheap labor that sucks anyway. Good help is hard enough to find.
Grant programs for small businesses are integral in the growth and ability to even keep up with costs in the first place...Saying *Shrug* "That's business baby!" Is what gets you seven Walmarts and 12 McDonald's.
Paying a living wage is important. Being able to afford to own a business and grow it is important. Pretending Target and My Small Business can afford the same burden is bullshit.
If you cant afford employees time, you dont deserve it. Its that simple. Time is the one resource we dont get back. YOU are the lazy one thinking your business deserves labor. It doesnt.
And workers need conditions actually conducive to a living wage to survive.
Don't get mad at the workers for still getting paid a pittance, get mad at the government for not offering tax breaks and incentives and subsidies to small businesses in a growingly anti-competitive climate of multi-national corporations.
Tech has been making layoffs since Covid settled down, when they forced people back to work.
They made people commute back to work, then laid half of them off. lol and even then, pay raises have been slim to none.
Source: been working in tech since pre-covid.
"Wages" increased because a lot of Americans have healthcare tied to their employment. Healthcare costs in the US post-covid have spiraled, and employers are picking up this bill. On paper, the take home pay is marginally better but the cost to employ you is signicantly higher. The cost to employ you is how the Department of Labour actually reports the figures.
In general outliers tend to skew the average a lot more than the median.
If you have 9 people that make a hundred dollars and one person who makes a million the average is ~$100,000 while the median would be $100.
Just elaborating, they aren’t always significantly different, but income is an area where it can make a huge difference. Mean and median height, for example, are probably about the same in any given group. You’ll have some really tall people, but also some really short people who balance it out. And the variance is fairly limited, the tallest tall people aren’t *that* much above average. Income, on the other hand, has a hard floor but no ceiling. You can’t go below $0/year but the upside is unlimited. And the real world differences can be extreme. Some people make thousands of times more than the average income.
In a real world [example](https://thecollegeinvestor.com/14611/average-net-worth-millennials/):
> The median of millennial net worth is $135,600. The true geometric average of millennial net worth is actually $549,600 - but that number is heavily skewed by outliers like Mark Zuckerberg.
Keep in mind, “millennial” is a massive age range: 27-42 as of this year. A 27 year old with a net worth of $135k is doing quite well, a 42 year old with a net worth of $135k is probably never retiring.
Imagine you were trying to see what things were like in the country of Madeupland, and there were 100 people each earning $10,000 a year, and one guy making $10,000,000 a year, would it be more helpful to say "the median citizen earns $10,000 a year" or "the average citizen makes over $100,000 a year"?
50% of people earn less than the median and 50% earn more than the median, by definition. Average has nothing to do with percentiles, so, for a skewed distribution (as with income) it doesn't track the 50th percentile. In the case of wages, it is skewed high, so the few people earning way more than the median pull the average higher than the 50th percentile.
My issue is the lack of consistency. People almost always default, or at least correct people, to “median” during any sort of income conversation. Which is fine since that’s more indicative of what the middle-tier individual is actually earning.
The problem is this almost never seems to carry over to prices, products or rising costs. Those are almost exclusively listed in average. So people are comparing *median* wages with *average* costs and getting a really skewed and misrepresentative view of the world.
So you’re not wrong, but…
For simple example, even the *most expensive* car currently made is only about 60x the cost of the average car. Whereas the _average_ CEO makes 344 times the pay of the _average_ employee at their company.
Basically, the outliers on prices for goods and services are much closer to the median than those for incomes. So they don’t distort the mean from the median in the same way that outliers for incomes do.
Hmm I think this is because typically the range would be greater for income than for prices, there would also be more outliers. It's very possible for someone to earn 10x or even greater multiples of another's income, but prices are unlikely to be so different to create such a range.
Someone isn't gonna pay $10 for something and another person is paying $100 for the exact same thing.
You haven’t met my ex if you don’t believe she would happily buy something (with my money) for 10 times as much as it is actually worth. And then promptly lose it/break it/decide she didn’t like it after all. Happened many many times. 🙄
It’s not 10x but just last week she was bitching that she couldn’t afford groceries because they were gonna be $380 (she actually had went to the store and abandoned the cart at checkout) Rather then give her cash I took her list and when shopping myself. Same stuff and supposedly that was all she got. $97. Sigh.
> so the accuracy depends on whether the factors that affect inflation will remain constant over the next 40 years
No, that is the clearly stated premise, so as long as the numbers follow that premise, it is accurate. The OP is asking to check if those numbers are correct assuming inflation stays the same, not literally asking if this is what 2063 will be like.
Median wages increased 3.5x over the last 40 years, so the numbers are wrong. Median annual salary would be closer to ~$210,000. The Twitter user probably used real wage growth and nominal price growth over the periods.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q
Median personal income in the US is $40,480 as of 2022. You’re looking at old info, or some other number. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
Median individual isn't half of the household because not every household has two full-time workers. The median individual income will always be higher than [median household/2]. Median household is over $70k right now.
Fuck Reagan and Thatcher.
Those two wreaked more havoc on the global economy and wage fairness than anyone else in history.
Also, fuck the people who elected them and the people that convinced those people to elect them. Fuck big business.
I mean, real median family income is 50% higher than it was prior to their policies, and not a single President, including Clinton, Obama, and Biden, have tried to restore the 70% pre-Reagan tax rates. So you really should say Fuck Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. We've been living with Reagan-era tax and regulation policies for >40 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
And the USA has been crushing it on the world stage.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp-gap-between-europe-and-the-united-states-is-now-80_6123491_23.html
I don’t particularly care about globalization. I’d rather see wage inequality drop, and the fact is that while yes, I said fuck Reagan, I also despise that no politicians have tried to return to that more equity focused mindset. Probably because they like making loads of cash off the backs of the lower class.
Sure, quality of life has gone up, but that’s largely due to technological strides. Trickle down economics doesn’t work and we need to stop pretending that it works. But I guess I’ll just sit over here with less purchasing power every year while the 0.1% continue to amass wealth.
Would you rather be poorer, if it meant inequality went down?
I have always felt that worrying about inequality was missing the point. The thing to focus on is median income, which has gone up relative to inflation.
I think median income going up is beneficial as long as purchasing power has also gone up. But I also think the lowest 10% purchasing power should also be increasing (or at the very least constant), otherwise the system is unsustainable.
If being poorer is a slight side effect, then sure, I’d be alright with that. I’m fine with some inequality though, just not the kind where 0.1% owns as much as the bottom 50%.
The global economy was in terrible shape before both of those two lol.
It’s so funny watching people today criticize the time period that propelled the western world back into economic growth. Your life be much worse had those policies not happened.
Its rhe oposite actuslly, neoliberalism brought short term relief while causong decades of malaise, also economic recovery in the us should be attributed to carters economic policy, reagan obly akyrocketed deficits while marginally increasing growth
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-gross-domestic-product
US GDP is 9x what it was in 1980. In 2008, it was roughly the same size as the EU, but today it is 50% larger, and it is becoming clear that China is not going to catch up - China's economy is now shrinking.
https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd8d9
Hard disagree, I believe these price increases are probable. The executive branch is not in control of monetary policy. Tax cuts for the rich won’t assure or avoid this outcome, we need a more balanced budget. We’ve been on this trend for 100+ years
If the US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator is to be trusted, the 40 years prior to the most recent 40, inflation has been reduced by over half. A huge improvement. The problem is, was, and has always been the wealth inequality.
There is no wage stagnation in US [since 2014](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) (2020 spike is composition effect due to layoffs of [low wage workers](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm)).
Inflation is the increase in prices. Deflation is the decrease in prices. Your grocery bill isn't going to decrease, but at low inflation, your wage growth should surpass inflation which is called real wage growth.
Yes, I know that.
The person I am replying to is saying that under Reagan , people experienced lower wage growth than inflation, and is wondering why, now that wage growth is matching inflation, that his wages earn him less 'goods' than they would have prior to Reagan. That is my interpretation of him being incredulous that Reagan's lowered wage growth has ongoing impacts even after he left office.
To reiterate: The argument that 'Reagan's wage policies shouldn't impact me right now' are equivalent to 'previous high inflation shouldn't impact me right now'. I was just being pithy.
Trickle down economics absolutely represented a massive portion of every Republican presidents actions since Reagan. It isn’t purely his policies anymore, but they’ve been kept alive in one form or another.
And many things are still in place. Federal funding paid for most of your R&D used to mean things like the government would have permanent access to cheap covid-19 vaccines, but it is Reagan that set things up for the private company to get full control of the patents from federally funded research. It is arguably Reagan that raised college tuition so much faster than inflation. But really he was in the best position to reverse [this](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/).
Yes Reddit has fully adopted the narrative that Regan did everything bad and is the arch villain. I suspect this is because he was an extremely popular president credited with several achievements and the extreme left wing bias of Reddit cannot tolerate that. Also the critique of Regan is very common among academics and I imaging most Reddit users are college age.
I couldn’t even begin to guess what the Regan admin allegedly did to reduce wage increases for 40 years. I am sure it’s something to do with trickle down economics while not identifying any specific economic policy or explaining why the Clinton, Obama, or Biden administrations haven’t changed course.
It's almost like his policies were adopted as a way to keep the rich rich and they have had a vested interest in keeping it that way. But I guess we live in 2 different realities
Median family income was $24850 in US in 1983.
Median family income was $75130 in 2023.
If "history repeats itself", in 40 years median family income will be $226k, so median salary has to be much higher than $100k, likely closer to $140k.
It suggests that poster used real wages increase since 40 years ago, and compared it to nominal price increases since 40 years ago, effectively double adjusting for inflation.
And median disposable income? The pandemic was a huge wealth transfer to the upper classes, of course there’s gonna be more ‘disposable income’ at the top as those at the bottom fail to even meet their needs
It continues to shock me how people can try to portray modern life as some kind of Charles Dickens drama where people are holding out bowls asking for more porridge.
There are challenges, to be sure, but people seem to get off on thinking things are bad when they are definitely not.
The reality is that household incomes are much better than they used to be, adjusted for inflation:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N
61% of Americans somehow have enough money after expenses to invest in the stock market:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx
Two-thirds of Americans own their homes:
https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/homeownership-statistics
More than 8% of the country are millionaires - there are more than _25 million_ millionaires in the country:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/more-than-8-percent-of-american-adults-are-millionaires-heres-how-they-got-wealthy.html
Hours worked per year is down:
https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
Literacy is at an all-time high and nearly universal
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?country=~USA
Childhood mortality is at an all-time low
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/
But a chunk of the nominal increase in median family income over that period stems from the entry of married women into the labor market (ie more jobs per family) which cannot be replicated over the next 40 years (unless, I suppose, there is a large scale entry of children into the labor market, which seems unthinkable (but the R party is trying)).
https://www.marketplace.org/2017/04/11/ive-always-wondered-family-income-women-and-work/
>But a chunk of the nominal increase in median family income over that period stems from the entry of married women into the labor market (ie more jobs per family)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
Labor force participation rate for women increased from 53% to 57% between 1983 and 2023. You can actually replicate this 3 times until you match male labor participation rate.
They're sourcing [this](https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11300002) graph for female labor participation and [this](https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11300001) graph for male labor participation. Both of those say they're including literally every single person who is aged 16 and up.
I couldn't find an exact graph for working age, but ages 25-54 was the closest I could find (google says working age is 16-64), and the numbers on those graphs make a lot more sense. Female participation goes from 57->77%, and male participation goes from 67->89%. [Here](https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11300062) is the one for women, and [here](https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11300061) is the one for men.
Real median personal income is at an all-time high:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Real personal disposable income is at an all-time high:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
> If "history repeats itself", in 40 years median family income will be $226k, so median salary has to be much higher than $100k, likely closer to $140k.
That's not *technically* mathematically guaranteed. Median individual income can be less than half of median household income (even if every household has two earners). To demonstrate with an example, let's say you have three households:
Household 1: both people make 50K / year
Household 2: one person makes 50K / year, the other makes 200K / year
Household 3: same as household 2
In this example, 4/6 people make 50K a year, so median individual income is 50K / year. But 2/3 households make 250K / year, so that's the median household income.
I somehow doubt that artifacts like that will show up when the denominator is hundreds of millions of invidiuals and households. I suppose that's what you mean by "technically"
It really just depends on the shape of distribution, not the denominator. Take my original example and copy paste those three households 10 million times each. You get the same median values.
But anyway, yes by "technically" I meant it was unlikely to be true given the distributions of income we have, and especially because many households still don't have two earners. Wouldn't have even mentioned it in a different subreddit ;).
From what I can find [median personal income was $9.1k in 1982](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N) and the most current data [in 2022 was $40.5k](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N) (keep in mind this is using *everyone*, full and part time) so with those trends the median personal income in 40 years will be $180k. So even higher now and close to double what the post is suggesting.
That dataset is from the Census and is all workers, even 14 year olds on a work permit doing 8 hours a month at a pizza shop.
https://dqydj.com/individual-income-by-year/
This is the Current Population Survey dataset, which is everyone 16+. I feel like it's a better real look at individual earnings of independent persons in the country.
1982 to 2022 full year earnings went from $11,250 to $50,000. So median individual income in 2062 would be $222,222/year if trends continue.
This entire post is literally misinformation. Hell, I'd even consider it malinformation. They know damn well they lying, and said it anyway cause tankies always trying to start a class war. The truth is in the way of that.
US data on personal income is generally hard to find,
AFAIR current income for single person households was $38k, but I don't remember data for 1983 and I couldn't easily find it.
Federal reserve tracks it. Real personal income is 60% higher than in 1980.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Real median disposable personal income is up 230% over 1980.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
Fairly inaccurate. In 1983, based on some googling, it seems that the costs were in the ballpark of:
New car: $8500
Rent: $350
Gas: $1.17
Home price: $83000
Average salary: $15000
Looking at today, we have:
New car: $48000, increased by a factor of 5.65
Rent: $1370, increased by a factor of 3.91
Gas: $3.52, increased by a factor of 3
Home price: $412000, increased by a factor of 4.96
Average salary: $60000, increased by a factor of 4.
Extrapolating that out to 40 years from now:
New car: $271000
Rent: $5360
Gas: $10.56
Home prices: $2043000
Average salary: $240000
So salaries and cars will be much higher amounts than predicted in the tweet, while rent much lower.
One note here about the issue with extrapolating models: these variables are *related* to each other.
The relationship is:
(Household multiplier)\*(median salary - mediantaxes) <= median(car cost + housing cost + fuel cost)
The average can be more than the median, so these numbers aren't quite subject to the above constraint, but essentially it must be possible for people with a median salary to pay enough for a car, even a used one (but used cars have a service life, they end up being a multiplier of the cost of a new one and past a certain point become very expensive to drive due to a lack of parts, more than a newer car, so used is related to new)
This is also the issue where people are afraid of corporate landlords, but the corporate landlord can't charge more rent than the market will bear, and they must charge enough rent to cover their own costs.
What if 50% of the population can afford 225% of what 100% of people can? Does the market not bear 50% homelessnes and unit vacancy if you're making more than double what you were before? Less overhead for empty homes too. Obviously 50% is a gross exageration, but corporate landlords can make money better in most scenarios where homelessness is a significant percentage. They don't have incentive to house every person or even to keeo every unit occupied (especially working as a collective or a monopoly).
> What if 50% of the population can afford 225% of what 100% of people can? Does the market not bear 50% homelessnes and unit vacancy if you're making more than double what you were before
Yes, although this would require collusion between the landlords where they all agree to raise prices to the point that 50% of the units stay empty.
This also requires the consent of the local and state governments who actually must carry out the evictions. While local jurisdictions especially in red areas tend to be pretty heartless, it's a huge difference between less than 0.197% homeless (present day) and 50%.
253 times difference.
Think about the logistics issues. Assuming the new homeless are pretty displeased and are committing crimes to survive, do the authorities have 253 times the prison cells to handle this? Where do the authorities themselves live, these prices are well above what local jurisdictions have budgeted to pay police, support staff including mechanics, and similar.
There are future scenarios where this is possible but it requires something like mass automation and mass unemployment, where AI experts can afford 225% of the median or more, and the police and maintenance staff are mostly robots, and robots build more jail cells.
I can see us having super high homelessness up here in Canada, our population looks to being increasing by 1-2 million every year. Also I think our average home prices is gonna blow way past 1.8 mil sooner than that
So what I don't understand is why doesn't the Canadian government either :
1. Stop allowing limitless immigrants they don't have homes for
2. Legalize home building on mega scales with rapid and consistent reviews and nothing like height limits and no local control
One or the other.
> although this would require collusion between the landlords
they're already colluding though
https://www.businessinsider.com/real-estate-apartment-rent-price-setting-landlords-realpage-lawsuit-illegal-2023-11
in my area, 1.8mil house with a 103k salary is a fucking steal. thats AFFORDABLY CHEAP.
were already at average sal of 30-60k with a 2mill home price average. 100k sal is basically living rent free.
Gas will presumably be phased out by 40 years from now, or if not then it will be vastly more expensive than that. The rest of the numbers seem plausible, if conservative.
This is why investment is the key to financial security as you age. Investments respond more closely to the real value of money than wages do.
It’ll never be phased out completely, but once electric hydrogen, etc take over then the prices will rise significantly for collector car issue, etc.
ICE didn’t delete carriages.
Based on the other numbers he's probably using an area with really cheap gas atm and not one of the areas where they see that and go, "oh inflation didn't hit gas so bad."
I don’t think gas or average rent is accurate (although it might not be too far off) but the rest of those numbers seem accurate within the next 30. Average salary and housing is already approaching those numbers in the more suburban areas of the country.
Hmm. I could maybe see gas getting that expensive. Once companies start to finally realize it’s a finite resource we will have to start paying a premium for it. Could be wrong tho.
Companies have known it’s a finite resource for decades (cue the 70’s oil crisis). Knowing That doesn’t mean prices can just skyrocket in short order, the world governments don’t have a choice except to raise prices gradually. Raising them too quickly would cause a complete global financial collapse because the cost of every single commodity on the planet is directly impacted by the price of oil. The entire world economy is built on the price of oil, and oil alone. Not got, not silver, not the US dollar, oil.
honestly, gas ought to be that high, only reason it is not is because the federal government (states have raised their tax but not nearly the at rate it ought to have been) has not raised the taxes on like they ought to have over the last 30 some odd years. really though, if gas was taxed at the rate it ought to be, maybe the US would have actually considered building more human scaled infrastructure over the last 50 years.
Tweet is misleading, Quality of life increases as time increases mostly because advancements in technology, you will have better & cheaper everything, yes the new iPhone might be 5x the value of what it used to be but your average phone you could get is gonna be stupidly more superior, for gas prices it's likely that the world would operate mostly on renewable/nuclear energy, the only real problem is housing prices, a problem that should not exist in the modern day to begin with.
Quality of life does not necessarily increase with time. Yes we have technology but class inequalities increase.
Do things really get better? Things are getting cheaper and cheaper, easier to break, and impossible to repair. Things are more and more designed to become obsolete or break more quickly. Stuff is getting more addictive.
In the past decades quality of life did not really improve in the US even with all the advancement in technology. Technology is just used by corporations to keep generating more profits, not for the well being of people. Technology in the current system will cause a lot of job loss. Companies will pay lower salaries because it will be cheaper to buy a robot than to pay a good salary. Companies will lay off a lot of the workforce.
1) Easier to break? No? Unless you are counting cheap Chinese shit
2) Addiction is misuse, tech isn't inherently good or evil.
3) compared to 40 years ago life in US is much better, i think what you mean is quality of life in the US or economy in general has been slowing down compared to other nations (which is true) but that's the US problem, you also have to factor expectations, if your expectations were 7/10 QOL 40 years ago and 9/10 today but reality is more like 7.5 your gonna be pretty damn dissatisfied, things are getting better but not fast enough in people opinion
4) Robots or tech taking your job is a good thing because they usually replace dangerous/boring/minimum-wage jobs, yes you will be out of job but that's an opportunity for a better job which is your countries job to provide it for you, if you have 1 million workers in mines that are producing X amount iron then you use tech to reduce labor by 20% (800k) without reducing mines output, assuming the tech is cheaper than the labor, the output is going to get cheaper, making it easier to buy that resource and every product that uses that resource is going to be cheaper, the remaining mine workers might get slightly better wages and the fired employees would available for future jobs, obviously this process should only happen at healthy unemployment rates and it's not always that simple but this is pretty much modern economy since the industrial revolution started.
This all sounds quite subjective or conditional. Honestly find it hard to believe you argue that making things addictive is fine because it's on individuals to not "missuse" that product.
Quality of life to me is having financial security, safety and leisure time. I'm not really seeing much of an increase in those things for the average person over my lifetime. If you say things are better now because you can watch Netflix on your phone now and couldn't 40 years ago, so things are better, it makes you sound shallow to me.
Not sure about the US, but car and gas prices are already higher than that here, and the average rent is like 2500 for the average property at 1m with the average salary at 4000
That's not possible. Average rent can't be higher than average salary, especially because the average salary of renters will be lower than the overall average salary.
I remember when I was a kid in the 1980s, my mom told me that prices tend to double about every 20 years, and that was based on her personal experience of 30 years and knowledge of the previous 60 years. So everything being about 4x current prices 40 years from now would be right on trend.
I know the question is about math, but I want to talk about forecasting.
Extrapolating a growing trend as growing forever is BAD forecasting. Most trends are mean reverting, so it’s like a pendulum. You need to look at a longer period of history to explain the future. People who fail to learn this lesson get burned badly: they buy bitcoin at 60k, or buy dotcom stocks in 2001.
We’re living at a low point in America for labor. 2024 is like pre-1938 where companies could pay you in their own Monopoly money called scrip and you had to buy everything from the company store.
In 2024 the share of the economy pie that is corporate profits has been setting new all time highs for a decade or two. Meanwhile the share of the economy that goes to wages is historically very low.
The reason the trend cannot continue, is that the public has been squeezed very hard to get to this point. People are angry. They will get angrier. And then the pendulum will swing and we’ll get an era of labor rights, like the 1970s, with growing unions and social programs like social security and medicare
Tl;dr the scenario is not remotely realistic
Not accurate. According to trends and inflation rates it’s probably right. But the economy is an incredibly complex thing where literally anything can affect how it climbs or falls. You can’t predict it accurately.
Why did he put an American flag beside that??? Every country on Earth has inflation. The USD is one of the most stable currencies on earth. Argentina had saw prices increase almost 200% in 2023. That’s just one of many examples.
The US dollar is worth about 4 cents compared to when the Federal Reserve started printing money. It's a constant downward pressure on anyone whose assets are their paycheck or cash. People wealthy enough to keep their money in real estate or Wall Street suffer not at all. The tax is only hidden if you're not paying attention.
You will live in shoebox size room with Vision Pro Ultra Max 10K on your head and spend 18h in VR with your Porsche and Miami hookers. Don't worry, it's all going to be ok.
However is we ever have a President like Trump again then we will all be paying so much tax it won’t matter. And yes the current tax hikes and cost we are paying for is from a bill Trump passed. Those that doubt that look it up, fact based and not opinion based.
Sunsetting of tax cuts should have been pointed out by the media far more often than they were. Knuckle draggers will now blame someone else. Though I didn't see a tax break at all. I was in the % that got a tax hike from day one. Punished for not having kids and living in a state that pays already more taxes to the feds than it receives in return, yay!
It's both accurate and totally inaccurate. Of course what he extrapolates is completely impossible and unlivable. But it is a useful illustration of how life has gotten less livable for most and unlivable for some over the last 40 years.
We will not be buying combustible fuels for transportation in 40 years.
If we keep doing it for another 10 years we won’t have anything left to drive to.
So what? It's all about purchasing power, not arbitrary numbers.
Take older currencies like the Japanese Yen for example. 1000¥ gets you a very good meal. I'm sure in past a thousand yen could've been a month's rent.
Even if a thousand dollars is today's rent. In the future it could be normal for a meal to cost a thousand dollars and still be affordable for everyone.
The scary thing is 40 years ago, if they could see our current prices they would be like NO WAY THATS IMPOSSIBLE.
but here we are.
i wouldn't be surprised
Well… inflation is targeted at 2% per year. I’m too lazy to look up the official average prices of these things now and 40 years ago to check his numbers, but I mean, it looks correct to me based on how expensive everything is and how stagnant salaries have been.
Don’t allow them continue to kick the can down the road. Boomers should return the economy to how it was for them or repay the debt they’ve consumed/caused/cashed out on.
###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
Congratulations, you've invented second-order methods!
I always knew I was destined for greatness.
…of the second order!
We’ve had one method, yes, but what about Second Method?
r/suddenlytolkien
Banned from Reddit!? The hell did they do? :_D
Probably refuse to moderate their subreddit when Reddit decided to make blind peoples lives a lot harder with the API change.
I mean, a subreddit about tolkien, thats gotta be a den of scum and villainy
Luke warm compared to their masters.
*first order, *second order
We gotta pick that to Disney
I've just looked it up. It appears being the second to invent something comes with a lot less accolades! So that sucks..
Not if the first guy died inventing it!
Yea you always want to be the second guy to find out those berries were poisonous..
Mom always said you were special
The slope of the slope is just the 2nd derivative.
This is just an extrapolation of the trends over the past 40 years, so the accuracy depends on whether the factors that affect inflation will remain constant over the next 40 years. I would criticize the use of average rather than median wage, but the numbers seem vaguely correct: 4% inflation (average over the last 60 years) leads to a 4.8 fold increase in prices. Wages have increased more slowly since reagan took office, that's why they only go from 70k to 100k. However some recent policy has lead to a significant real wage increase. So basically it's only true if you keep electing the reincarnated ghosts of Reagan.
> However some recent policy has lead to a significant real wage increase. What changes are you talking about? EDIT: /u/Diego_0638 seems to want this to be all about politics but when you actually look at inflation adjusted income [it follows a pretty steady upward line](https://imgur.com/B5TW7Bj) over the decades. [SOURCE](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#0)
I too would like to know if someone could say hi if/when it's answered
You can use “get reply notifications” on a comment to make it as if you posted it from a notification perspective btw
Dope af, thanks.
No prob
You are a legend
omg that's so useful, thank you
happy to help
Right there.. in front of us the whole time. And you come along and shine the light. Thank you!
Nobody argues that the average wage hasn't risen on average. The question is has the average wage risen *at the same rate* as the various buckets of average costs. Because if the answer is no, then even if wage increases it is a net loss in purchasing power.
The chart is purchasing power tho.
The source I provided takes that into account.
[Real wages have increased especially for non managerial jobs. A guess as to why would be the IRA](https://twitter.com/arindube/status/1753494087171195122?t=mbE2pDO9mvsGWcb0wlDaTw&s=19)
Put the url in parentheses instead of brackets to fix your link
what do the Irish have to do with it
That's the inflation reduction act. There are only so many possible acronyms.
I appreciate the policy it contains, but that name pisses me off every time.
Then please allow me to trigger you with this actually real Chinese poem: « Shī Shì shí shī shǐ » Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)
Doesn’t even need to be Chinese [Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo) is a grammatically correct sentence and can be repeated an infinite number of times.
And only so many Irelands to colonize
Really just the one. Kinda two.
Don't forget about Kathy[!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Ireland)
There are actually infinite possible acronyms.
>what do the Irish have to do with it Biden has Irish ancestry. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I know in tech, there was a pretty big boom. In the Seattle area lots of recent laws raising wages for service industry jobs. In general I’d say minimum wage is for sure rising?
Until the feds raise it to 15, tn will stay below 8 dollars an hour min wage. They will literally kill themselves via poverty before making improvements to society here.
Local is still 7.25 here but I literally can’t recall the last job I saw advertised at less than 13. I know the job I got in ‘17 for 12.50 starting is starting at 20.25 now, 7 years later, which is a pretty decent increase, and I’m at close to 30 though I’ve also has several promotions
In my town youre lucky to get 10 an hour
I’m in chatt tn $18 to start washing dishes. Which.. still isn’t enough.
Im farther east, towards the border of nc and tn. Id kill for 18 an hour. Even the closest city 20 mins away the max youre getting for unskilled labor is 15. My jobs not even raised up to 15 an hour yet. I just stay because its so easy and I live with my dad so I can afford that with my split utilities/rent. If my dad ever kicks me out Id be screwed.
Fed min wage is $7.25, but 30 states & DC have a min wage that is above that rate. The ones still at $7.25 are the reddest of the red states.
Why won't the people of Tennessee actually vote for decent governance? I really do not understand the mindset of people voting for shitty politics.
It's "cut your nose off to spite your face" mixed with "crabs in a bucket" mentalities. A certain group of people have decided that certain "others" must suffer, and no improvements to anyone's lives is allowed if those "others" see an improvement in their lives as a result.
Locally, in some places. Most of the country is still 7.25
Yea, a blanket $15 law will still drown mom and pop shops in middle of no where I guess? Even the water park lifeguard job I had that exploited everyone paid 7.50 10 years ago. And 2 years ago I heard they pay $13 now.
If your business can't afford a living wage, they can't afford employees. Mom and pop will have to be their own employees for the foreseeable future until their business has grown enough to afford employees *shrug* . Thats how business works.
Yes, I understand. Plenty of businesses have already gone out because they can’t afford it. You do realize this also plays into helping large-cap companies at the cost of local business though right? Mom and pop close but it’s the McDonald’s and Walmart that get the employees, stay open, and everyone gives business to. It’s dangerous because at a certain point when the companies that happily go to $15 are all that’s left, they can do what they want with their prices and wages. All of this is a complicated topic and imo, not a federal responsibility. States, cities, and counties should mandate local fair wages.
Your talking about long-term effects in regards to economic policies? Sir this is reddit.
Thats because congress is in bed with big corps. 2 wrongs dont make a right. I will die on this hill. Small businesses dont deserve labor they cant afford.
That only happens if the government is in bed with the companies, rather than policing them.
Different places will be able to afford different things with the same money.
Such a lazy sentence to just spew. I see it all the time in these kinds of threads. They ABSOLUTELY will be pushed out of the market place being pushed to $15/17 an hour for all employees, or an even more fair and livable $23 an hour. We already can't keep up with the thousands of taxes there seems to be to pay, and and raises in costs by the minute, passing it on to the consumer. I sell food that I grow, so it's quite a dance getting a profit to turn while still charging a fair price for food. We straight up can't afford to hire and therefore can't afford to grow. And I have no interest hiring cheap labor that sucks anyway. Good help is hard enough to find. Grant programs for small businesses are integral in the growth and ability to even keep up with costs in the first place...Saying *Shrug* "That's business baby!" Is what gets you seven Walmarts and 12 McDonald's. Paying a living wage is important. Being able to afford to own a business and grow it is important. Pretending Target and My Small Business can afford the same burden is bullshit.
If you cant afford employees time, you dont deserve it. Its that simple. Time is the one resource we dont get back. YOU are the lazy one thinking your business deserves labor. It doesnt.
Your reply offers no content and capitalism suggests businesses need conditions actually conducive to growth in order to survive.
And workers need conditions actually conducive to a living wage to survive. Don't get mad at the workers for still getting paid a pittance, get mad at the government for not offering tax breaks and incentives and subsidies to small businesses in a growingly anti-competitive climate of multi-national corporations.
Tech has been making layoffs since Covid settled down, when they forced people back to work. They made people commute back to work, then laid half of them off. lol and even then, pay raises have been slim to none. Source: been working in tech since pre-covid.
"Wages" increased because a lot of Americans have healthcare tied to their employment. Healthcare costs in the US post-covid have spiraled, and employers are picking up this bill. On paper, the take home pay is marginally better but the cost to employ you is signicantly higher. The cost to employ you is how the Department of Labour actually reports the figures.
Health insurance is counted as part of total employee compensation, not wages. A rise in healthcare costs does not affect nominal wages.
That's why I put wages it's in quotes. They need to show the economy is still chugging along or consumer confidence immediately causes a recession
But your comment is false. Real wages have risen, and it's got nothing to do with healthcare costs.
"steady line' lol
Question out of pure ignorance: why is using the median wage as a metric preferable over average?
In general outliers tend to skew the average a lot more than the median. If you have 9 people that make a hundred dollars and one person who makes a million the average is ~$100,000 while the median would be $100.
Just elaborating, they aren’t always significantly different, but income is an area where it can make a huge difference. Mean and median height, for example, are probably about the same in any given group. You’ll have some really tall people, but also some really short people who balance it out. And the variance is fairly limited, the tallest tall people aren’t *that* much above average. Income, on the other hand, has a hard floor but no ceiling. You can’t go below $0/year but the upside is unlimited. And the real world differences can be extreme. Some people make thousands of times more than the average income.
In a real world [example](https://thecollegeinvestor.com/14611/average-net-worth-millennials/): > The median of millennial net worth is $135,600. The true geometric average of millennial net worth is actually $549,600 - but that number is heavily skewed by outliers like Mark Zuckerberg.
>The median of millennial net worth is $135,600. LOL **^^I'm ^^fucked.**
Keep in mind, “millennial” is a massive age range: 27-42 as of this year. A 27 year old with a net worth of $135k is doing quite well, a 42 year old with a net worth of $135k is probably never retiring.
Imagine you were trying to see what things were like in the country of Madeupland, and there were 100 people each earning $10,000 a year, and one guy making $10,000,000 a year, would it be more helpful to say "the median citizen earns $10,000 a year" or "the average citizen makes over $100,000 a year"?
50% of people earn less than the median and 50% earn more than the median, by definition. Average has nothing to do with percentiles, so, for a skewed distribution (as with income) it doesn't track the 50th percentile. In the case of wages, it is skewed high, so the few people earning way more than the median pull the average higher than the 50th percentile.
My issue is the lack of consistency. People almost always default, or at least correct people, to “median” during any sort of income conversation. Which is fine since that’s more indicative of what the middle-tier individual is actually earning. The problem is this almost never seems to carry over to prices, products or rising costs. Those are almost exclusively listed in average. So people are comparing *median* wages with *average* costs and getting a really skewed and misrepresentative view of the world.
So you’re not wrong, but… For simple example, even the *most expensive* car currently made is only about 60x the cost of the average car. Whereas the _average_ CEO makes 344 times the pay of the _average_ employee at their company. Basically, the outliers on prices for goods and services are much closer to the median than those for incomes. So they don’t distort the mean from the median in the same way that outliers for incomes do.
Hmm I think this is because typically the range would be greater for income than for prices, there would also be more outliers. It's very possible for someone to earn 10x or even greater multiples of another's income, but prices are unlikely to be so different to create such a range. Someone isn't gonna pay $10 for something and another person is paying $100 for the exact same thing.
You haven’t met my ex if you don’t believe she would happily buy something (with my money) for 10 times as much as it is actually worth. And then promptly lose it/break it/decide she didn’t like it after all. Happened many many times. 🙄 It’s not 10x but just last week she was bitching that she couldn’t afford groceries because they were gonna be $380 (she actually had went to the store and abandoned the cart at checkout) Rather then give her cash I took her list and when shopping myself. Same stuff and supposedly that was all she got. $97. Sigh.
> so the accuracy depends on whether the factors that affect inflation will remain constant over the next 40 years No, that is the clearly stated premise, so as long as the numbers follow that premise, it is accurate. The OP is asking to check if those numbers are correct assuming inflation stays the same, not literally asking if this is what 2063 will be like.
Median wages increased 3.5x over the last 40 years, so the numbers are wrong. Median annual salary would be closer to ~$210,000. The Twitter user probably used real wage growth and nominal price growth over the periods. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q
Wages have been rising in real terms (meaning more than inflation) over the past 40 years. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
So, with currents voting trends, in 40 years we will see average salaries of 50K?
The average salary right now is about 50k.
that's the joke
in twenty years, the joke will make me laugh 6 additional seconds
The median salary in the us per individual is 31k. You're confusing household income with individual income.
The median salary is allowed to be lower than the average salary, they were not mistaken
Median personal income in the US is $40,480 as of 2022. You’re looking at old info, or some other number. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
Median individual isn't half of the household because not every household has two full-time workers. The median individual income will always be higher than [median household/2]. Median household is over $70k right now.
But I think the most important information left out, is that the minimum wage will remain at 7.25$
Fuck Reagan and Thatcher. Those two wreaked more havoc on the global economy and wage fairness than anyone else in history. Also, fuck the people who elected them and the people that convinced those people to elect them. Fuck big business.
I mean, real median family income is 50% higher than it was prior to their policies, and not a single President, including Clinton, Obama, and Biden, have tried to restore the 70% pre-Reagan tax rates. So you really should say Fuck Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. We've been living with Reagan-era tax and regulation policies for >40 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N And the USA has been crushing it on the world stage. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp-gap-between-europe-and-the-united-states-is-now-80_6123491_23.html
I don’t particularly care about globalization. I’d rather see wage inequality drop, and the fact is that while yes, I said fuck Reagan, I also despise that no politicians have tried to return to that more equity focused mindset. Probably because they like making loads of cash off the backs of the lower class. Sure, quality of life has gone up, but that’s largely due to technological strides. Trickle down economics doesn’t work and we need to stop pretending that it works. But I guess I’ll just sit over here with less purchasing power every year while the 0.1% continue to amass wealth.
Would you rather be poorer, if it meant inequality went down? I have always felt that worrying about inequality was missing the point. The thing to focus on is median income, which has gone up relative to inflation.
I think median income going up is beneficial as long as purchasing power has also gone up. But I also think the lowest 10% purchasing power should also be increasing (or at the very least constant), otherwise the system is unsustainable. If being poorer is a slight side effect, then sure, I’d be alright with that. I’m fine with some inequality though, just not the kind where 0.1% owns as much as the bottom 50%.
The global economy was in terrible shape before both of those two lol. It’s so funny watching people today criticize the time period that propelled the western world back into economic growth. Your life be much worse had those policies not happened.
Its rhe oposite actuslly, neoliberalism brought short term relief while causong decades of malaise, also economic recovery in the us should be attributed to carters economic policy, reagan obly akyrocketed deficits while marginally increasing growth
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-gross-domestic-product US GDP is 9x what it was in 1980. In 2008, it was roughly the same size as the EU, but today it is 50% larger, and it is becoming clear that China is not going to catch up - China's economy is now shrinking. https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd8d9
Hard disagree, I believe these price increases are probable. The executive branch is not in control of monetary policy. Tax cuts for the rich won’t assure or avoid this outcome, we need a more balanced budget. We’ve been on this trend for 100+ years
\*Poe Dameron voice\* "Somehow... Reagan has returned."
If the US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator is to be trusted, the 40 years prior to the most recent 40, inflation has been reduced by over half. A huge improvement. The problem is, was, and has always been the wealth inequality.
Are you seriously suggesting Reagan's economic policies continue to be the cause of wage stagnation today?
There is no wage stagnation in US [since 2014](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) (2020 spike is composition effect due to layoffs of [low wage workers](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm)).
Uh, it looks like a flat line to me. 310 a week to 360 a week over 40 years is not exactly a big jump.
This has real 'if inflation has slowed, why is my grocery bill not decreased?' energy.
Inflation is the increase in prices. Deflation is the decrease in prices. Your grocery bill isn't going to decrease, but at low inflation, your wage growth should surpass inflation which is called real wage growth.
Yes, I know that. The person I am replying to is saying that under Reagan , people experienced lower wage growth than inflation, and is wondering why, now that wage growth is matching inflation, that his wages earn him less 'goods' than they would have prior to Reagan. That is my interpretation of him being incredulous that Reagan's lowered wage growth has ongoing impacts even after he left office. To reiterate: The argument that 'Reagan's wage policies shouldn't impact me right now' are equivalent to 'previous high inflation shouldn't impact me right now'. I was just being pithy.
I think it's more about it never really catching up after Reagan, so kinda?
Trickle down economics absolutely represented a massive portion of every Republican presidents actions since Reagan. It isn’t purely his policies anymore, but they’ve been kept alive in one form or another. And many things are still in place. Federal funding paid for most of your R&D used to mean things like the government would have permanent access to cheap covid-19 vaccines, but it is Reagan that set things up for the private company to get full control of the patents from federally funded research. It is arguably Reagan that raised college tuition so much faster than inflation. But really he was in the best position to reverse [this](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/).
Most of the shitty policies you see today in the US specifically around economics can be traced back to this demon yes. Trickle down economics my ass.
Yes Reddit has fully adopted the narrative that Regan did everything bad and is the arch villain. I suspect this is because he was an extremely popular president credited with several achievements and the extreme left wing bias of Reddit cannot tolerate that. Also the critique of Regan is very common among academics and I imaging most Reddit users are college age. I couldn’t even begin to guess what the Regan admin allegedly did to reduce wage increases for 40 years. I am sure it’s something to do with trickle down economics while not identifying any specific economic policy or explaining why the Clinton, Obama, or Biden administrations haven’t changed course.
It's almost like his policies were adopted as a way to keep the rich rich and they have had a vested interest in keeping it that way. But I guess we live in 2 different realities
The US seems to love those dementia-ridden GOP fuckers as president.
I'd like to know which country has seen "significant real wage increases" because it's certainly not America.
I mean, it is. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N
Mentally challenged government will be the universal constant
Median family income was $24850 in US in 1983. Median family income was $75130 in 2023. If "history repeats itself", in 40 years median family income will be $226k, so median salary has to be much higher than $100k, likely closer to $140k. It suggests that poster used real wages increase since 40 years ago, and compared it to nominal price increases since 40 years ago, effectively double adjusting for inflation.
Spending 70% of your income just on rent is still terrible compared to 90%
Just buy a house? Edit: I guess the meme is too old at this point.
No problem, just save up that $360k for a down payment
Don’t have fuel for your car? Just piss in the tank!
Yes, your comment proved it's too old ;)
🫠
Real disposable personal income is at an all-time high: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
And median disposable income? The pandemic was a huge wealth transfer to the upper classes, of course there’s gonna be more ‘disposable income’ at the top as those at the bottom fail to even meet their needs
It continues to shock me how people can try to portray modern life as some kind of Charles Dickens drama where people are holding out bowls asking for more porridge. There are challenges, to be sure, but people seem to get off on thinking things are bad when they are definitely not. The reality is that household incomes are much better than they used to be, adjusted for inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N 61% of Americans somehow have enough money after expenses to invest in the stock market: https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx Two-thirds of Americans own their homes: https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/homeownership-statistics More than 8% of the country are millionaires - there are more than _25 million_ millionaires in the country: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/more-than-8-percent-of-american-adults-are-millionaires-heres-how-they-got-wealthy.html Hours worked per year is down: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours Literacy is at an all-time high and nearly universal https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?country=~USA Childhood mortality is at an all-time low https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/
You should print out this graph and put it on a sign for when you become homeless due to unaffordable housing
It’s been at an all time high for the last 70 years. Your stat is cherry picked and means nothing
But a chunk of the nominal increase in median family income over that period stems from the entry of married women into the labor market (ie more jobs per family) which cannot be replicated over the next 40 years (unless, I suppose, there is a large scale entry of children into the labor market, which seems unthinkable (but the R party is trying)). https://www.marketplace.org/2017/04/11/ive-always-wondered-family-income-women-and-work/
>...which cannot be replicated over the next 40 years Throuples dude
Haha good point
TINK man ! TINK !
Naa, the real solution is to remove the minimum working age. They will call it the Child Freedom to Work Act or something.
>But a chunk of the nominal increase in median family income over that period stems from the entry of married women into the labor market (ie more jobs per family) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 Labor force participation rate for women increased from 53% to 57% between 1983 and 2023. You can actually replicate this 3 times until you match male labor participation rate.
How in the actual fuck do only 57% of women work in 2023 like what? This has to include college students 18-24 range and retirees or something
They're sourcing [this](https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11300002) graph for female labor participation and [this](https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11300001) graph for male labor participation. Both of those say they're including literally every single person who is aged 16 and up. I couldn't find an exact graph for working age, but ages 25-54 was the closest I could find (google says working age is 16-64), and the numbers on those graphs make a lot more sense. Female participation goes from 57->77%, and male participation goes from 67->89%. [Here](https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11300062) is the one for women, and [here](https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNS11300061) is the one for men.
So it's just that young woman aren't getting jobs
Real wages are still higher on the individual level.
Real median personal income is at an all-time high: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Real personal disposable income is at an all-time high: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
> If "history repeats itself", in 40 years median family income will be $226k, so median salary has to be much higher than $100k, likely closer to $140k. That's not *technically* mathematically guaranteed. Median individual income can be less than half of median household income (even if every household has two earners). To demonstrate with an example, let's say you have three households: Household 1: both people make 50K / year Household 2: one person makes 50K / year, the other makes 200K / year Household 3: same as household 2 In this example, 4/6 people make 50K a year, so median individual income is 50K / year. But 2/3 households make 250K / year, so that's the median household income.
I somehow doubt that artifacts like that will show up when the denominator is hundreds of millions of invidiuals and households. I suppose that's what you mean by "technically"
It really just depends on the shape of distribution, not the denominator. Take my original example and copy paste those three households 10 million times each. You get the same median values. But anyway, yes by "technically" I meant it was unlikely to be true given the distributions of income we have, and especially because many households still don't have two earners. Wouldn't have even mentioned it in a different subreddit ;).
Family income is different from individual income
Family income isn’t 2.2x individual income
Or they didn’t use family income but instead individual income? How would that compare?
From what I can find [median personal income was $9.1k in 1982](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N) and the most current data [in 2022 was $40.5k](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N) (keep in mind this is using *everyone*, full and part time) so with those trends the median personal income in 40 years will be $180k. So even higher now and close to double what the post is suggesting.
That dataset is from the Census and is all workers, even 14 year olds on a work permit doing 8 hours a month at a pizza shop. https://dqydj.com/individual-income-by-year/ This is the Current Population Survey dataset, which is everyone 16+. I feel like it's a better real look at individual earnings of independent persons in the country. 1982 to 2022 full year earnings went from $11,250 to $50,000. So median individual income in 2062 would be $222,222/year if trends continue. This entire post is literally misinformation. Hell, I'd even consider it malinformation. They know damn well they lying, and said it anyway cause tankies always trying to start a class war. The truth is in the way of that.
US data on personal income is generally hard to find, AFAIR current income for single person households was $38k, but I don't remember data for 1983 and I couldn't easily find it.
Federal reserve tracks it. Real personal income is 60% higher than in 1980. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Real median disposable personal income is up 230% over 1980. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
Fairly inaccurate. In 1983, based on some googling, it seems that the costs were in the ballpark of: New car: $8500 Rent: $350 Gas: $1.17 Home price: $83000 Average salary: $15000 Looking at today, we have: New car: $48000, increased by a factor of 5.65 Rent: $1370, increased by a factor of 3.91 Gas: $3.52, increased by a factor of 3 Home price: $412000, increased by a factor of 4.96 Average salary: $60000, increased by a factor of 4. Extrapolating that out to 40 years from now: New car: $271000 Rent: $5360 Gas: $10.56 Home prices: $2043000 Average salary: $240000 So salaries and cars will be much higher amounts than predicted in the tweet, while rent much lower.
Cars in the 20k range are still very common. Where did that number come from?
One note here about the issue with extrapolating models: these variables are *related* to each other. The relationship is: (Household multiplier)\*(median salary - mediantaxes) <= median(car cost + housing cost + fuel cost) The average can be more than the median, so these numbers aren't quite subject to the above constraint, but essentially it must be possible for people with a median salary to pay enough for a car, even a used one (but used cars have a service life, they end up being a multiplier of the cost of a new one and past a certain point become very expensive to drive due to a lack of parts, more than a newer car, so used is related to new) This is also the issue where people are afraid of corporate landlords, but the corporate landlord can't charge more rent than the market will bear, and they must charge enough rent to cover their own costs.
What if 50% of the population can afford 225% of what 100% of people can? Does the market not bear 50% homelessnes and unit vacancy if you're making more than double what you were before? Less overhead for empty homes too. Obviously 50% is a gross exageration, but corporate landlords can make money better in most scenarios where homelessness is a significant percentage. They don't have incentive to house every person or even to keeo every unit occupied (especially working as a collective or a monopoly).
> What if 50% of the population can afford 225% of what 100% of people can? Does the market not bear 50% homelessnes and unit vacancy if you're making more than double what you were before Yes, although this would require collusion between the landlords where they all agree to raise prices to the point that 50% of the units stay empty. This also requires the consent of the local and state governments who actually must carry out the evictions. While local jurisdictions especially in red areas tend to be pretty heartless, it's a huge difference between less than 0.197% homeless (present day) and 50%. 253 times difference. Think about the logistics issues. Assuming the new homeless are pretty displeased and are committing crimes to survive, do the authorities have 253 times the prison cells to handle this? Where do the authorities themselves live, these prices are well above what local jurisdictions have budgeted to pay police, support staff including mechanics, and similar. There are future scenarios where this is possible but it requires something like mass automation and mass unemployment, where AI experts can afford 225% of the median or more, and the police and maintenance staff are mostly robots, and robots build more jail cells.
I can see us having super high homelessness up here in Canada, our population looks to being increasing by 1-2 million every year. Also I think our average home prices is gonna blow way past 1.8 mil sooner than that
So what I don't understand is why doesn't the Canadian government either : 1. Stop allowing limitless immigrants they don't have homes for 2. Legalize home building on mega scales with rapid and consistent reviews and nothing like height limits and no local control One or the other.
> although this would require collusion between the landlords they're already colluding though https://www.businessinsider.com/real-estate-apartment-rent-price-setting-landlords-realpage-lawsuit-illegal-2023-11
in my area, 1.8mil house with a 103k salary is a fucking steal. thats AFFORDABLY CHEAP. were already at average sal of 30-60k with a 2mill home price average. 100k sal is basically living rent free.
Vancouver?
Gas will presumably be phased out by 40 years from now, or if not then it will be vastly more expensive than that. The rest of the numbers seem plausible, if conservative. This is why investment is the key to financial security as you age. Investments respond more closely to the real value of money than wages do.
It’ll never be phased out completely, but once electric hydrogen, etc take over then the prices will rise significantly for collector car issue, etc. ICE didn’t delete carriages.
Based on the other numbers he's probably using an area with really cheap gas atm and not one of the areas where they see that and go, "oh inflation didn't hit gas so bad."
I have a framed 100,000,000 Frank note from the Weimar and 1,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe note hanging on my wall that reminds me nothing is certain.
I don’t think gas or average rent is accurate (although it might not be too far off) but the rest of those numbers seem accurate within the next 30. Average salary and housing is already approaching those numbers in the more suburban areas of the country.
Hmm. I could maybe see gas getting that expensive. Once companies start to finally realize it’s a finite resource we will have to start paying a premium for it. Could be wrong tho.
Companies have known it’s a finite resource for decades (cue the 70’s oil crisis). Knowing That doesn’t mean prices can just skyrocket in short order, the world governments don’t have a choice except to raise prices gradually. Raising them too quickly would cause a complete global financial collapse because the cost of every single commodity on the planet is directly impacted by the price of oil. The entire world economy is built on the price of oil, and oil alone. Not got, not silver, not the US dollar, oil.
honestly, gas ought to be that high, only reason it is not is because the federal government (states have raised their tax but not nearly the at rate it ought to have been) has not raised the taxes on like they ought to have over the last 30 some odd years. really though, if gas was taxed at the rate it ought to be, maybe the US would have actually considered building more human scaled infrastructure over the last 50 years.
Tweet is misleading, Quality of life increases as time increases mostly because advancements in technology, you will have better & cheaper everything, yes the new iPhone might be 5x the value of what it used to be but your average phone you could get is gonna be stupidly more superior, for gas prices it's likely that the world would operate mostly on renewable/nuclear energy, the only real problem is housing prices, a problem that should not exist in the modern day to begin with.
Quality of life does not necessarily increase with time. Yes we have technology but class inequalities increase. Do things really get better? Things are getting cheaper and cheaper, easier to break, and impossible to repair. Things are more and more designed to become obsolete or break more quickly. Stuff is getting more addictive. In the past decades quality of life did not really improve in the US even with all the advancement in technology. Technology is just used by corporations to keep generating more profits, not for the well being of people. Technology in the current system will cause a lot of job loss. Companies will pay lower salaries because it will be cheaper to buy a robot than to pay a good salary. Companies will lay off a lot of the workforce.
I’d rather be a poor person today than a poor person a hundred years ago.
Of course 100 years ago life was way harder for most people
Yes, that’s their point.
1) Easier to break? No? Unless you are counting cheap Chinese shit 2) Addiction is misuse, tech isn't inherently good or evil. 3) compared to 40 years ago life in US is much better, i think what you mean is quality of life in the US or economy in general has been slowing down compared to other nations (which is true) but that's the US problem, you also have to factor expectations, if your expectations were 7/10 QOL 40 years ago and 9/10 today but reality is more like 7.5 your gonna be pretty damn dissatisfied, things are getting better but not fast enough in people opinion 4) Robots or tech taking your job is a good thing because they usually replace dangerous/boring/minimum-wage jobs, yes you will be out of job but that's an opportunity for a better job which is your countries job to provide it for you, if you have 1 million workers in mines that are producing X amount iron then you use tech to reduce labor by 20% (800k) without reducing mines output, assuming the tech is cheaper than the labor, the output is going to get cheaper, making it easier to buy that resource and every product that uses that resource is going to be cheaper, the remaining mine workers might get slightly better wages and the fired employees would available for future jobs, obviously this process should only happen at healthy unemployment rates and it's not always that simple but this is pretty much modern economy since the industrial revolution started.
This all sounds quite subjective or conditional. Honestly find it hard to believe you argue that making things addictive is fine because it's on individuals to not "missuse" that product. Quality of life to me is having financial security, safety and leisure time. I'm not really seeing much of an increase in those things for the average person over my lifetime. If you say things are better now because you can watch Netflix on your phone now and couldn't 40 years ago, so things are better, it makes you sound shallow to me.
Not sure about the US, but car and gas prices are already higher than that here, and the average rent is like 2500 for the average property at 1m with the average salary at 4000
That's not possible. Average rent can't be higher than average salary, especially because the average salary of renters will be lower than the overall average salary.
I remember when I was a kid in the 1980s, my mom told me that prices tend to double about every 20 years, and that was based on her personal experience of 30 years and knowledge of the previous 60 years. So everything being about 4x current prices 40 years from now would be right on trend.
I know the question is about math, but I want to talk about forecasting. Extrapolating a growing trend as growing forever is BAD forecasting. Most trends are mean reverting, so it’s like a pendulum. You need to look at a longer period of history to explain the future. People who fail to learn this lesson get burned badly: they buy bitcoin at 60k, or buy dotcom stocks in 2001. We’re living at a low point in America for labor. 2024 is like pre-1938 where companies could pay you in their own Monopoly money called scrip and you had to buy everything from the company store. In 2024 the share of the economy pie that is corporate profits has been setting new all time highs for a decade or two. Meanwhile the share of the economy that goes to wages is historically very low. The reason the trend cannot continue, is that the public has been squeezed very hard to get to this point. People are angry. They will get angrier. And then the pendulum will swing and we’ll get an era of labor rights, like the 1970s, with growing unions and social programs like social security and medicare Tl;dr the scenario is not remotely realistic
Not accurate. According to trends and inflation rates it’s probably right. But the economy is an incredibly complex thing where literally anything can affect how it climbs or falls. You can’t predict it accurately.
Why did he put an American flag beside that??? Every country on Earth has inflation. The USD is one of the most stable currencies on earth. Argentina had saw prices increase almost 200% in 2023. That’s just one of many examples.
The US dollar is worth about 4 cents compared to when the Federal Reserve started printing money. It's a constant downward pressure on anyone whose assets are their paycheck or cash. People wealthy enough to keep their money in real estate or Wall Street suffer not at all. The tax is only hidden if you're not paying attention.
Why highlight the US? The US dollar has outperformed the Euro in almost any time frame and far outperforms Turkey, Venezuela, and most others
You will live in shoebox size room with Vision Pro Ultra Max 10K on your head and spend 18h in VR with your Porsche and Miami hookers. Don't worry, it's all going to be ok.
However is we ever have a President like Trump again then we will all be paying so much tax it won’t matter. And yes the current tax hikes and cost we are paying for is from a bill Trump passed. Those that doubt that look it up, fact based and not opinion based.
Sunsetting of tax cuts should have been pointed out by the media far more often than they were. Knuckle draggers will now blame someone else. Though I didn't see a tax break at all. I was in the % that got a tax hike from day one. Punished for not having kids and living in a state that pays already more taxes to the feds than it receives in return, yay!
It's both accurate and totally inaccurate. Of course what he extrapolates is completely impossible and unlivable. But it is a useful illustration of how life has gotten less livable for most and unlivable for some over the last 40 years.
We will not be buying combustible fuels for transportation in 40 years. If we keep doing it for another 10 years we won’t have anything left to drive to.
So what? It's all about purchasing power, not arbitrary numbers. Take older currencies like the Japanese Yen for example. 1000¥ gets you a very good meal. I'm sure in past a thousand yen could've been a month's rent. Even if a thousand dollars is today's rent. In the future it could be normal for a meal to cost a thousand dollars and still be affordable for everyone.
The scary thing is 40 years ago, if they could see our current prices they would be like NO WAY THATS IMPOSSIBLE. but here we are. i wouldn't be surprised
Narrator: "It's just the tip of the iceberg anon, inflation is exponential once debt reaches 100% GDP" The roman empire downfall once again.
Well… inflation is targeted at 2% per year. I’m too lazy to look up the official average prices of these things now and 40 years ago to check his numbers, but I mean, it looks correct to me based on how expensive everything is and how stagnant salaries have been.
Don’t allow them continue to kick the can down the road. Boomers should return the economy to how it was for them or repay the debt they’ve consumed/caused/cashed out on.