Greentexts, memes, everything 4chan.
$1,731 in today's USD is $37,392. That new car would be $18k, rent was just over $500. There's places in the US where average rent is close to that, and I bet if we removed NYC and the Bay area the national average wouldn't be super far off.
Education and staples are where you're getting drilled on a daily basis. Harvard costs many times the average national income rather than being a fraction of it.
Someone's overlooking the low low cost of buying a house back then. Essentially 2 years of salary. Housing where I live is now 20 years of median salary and about 19 years of average salary, and far more once you consider a loan.
Didn't overlook it, I simply didn't comment on it. You also have to be careful about comparing where you personally live and the national average. Because the national average includes a lot of places that are shockingly poor.
Median price of a (not new construction) house in the US as of November 2023 is 387k. Using the $3900 in the OP, that's about 83k today. The average home price in 2023 is apparently 492k. Either way, it's waaaaay higher than 1938
There’s places in the US where average rent is close to that, and I bet if we removed NYC and the Bay area the national average wouldn’t be super far off.
Sorry but I think you're mistaken or several years out of date. I live in a midwestern city that overall has pretty reasonable cost of living. I also used to be a Property Manager for one of the bigger national companies. Our class B properties here were ~$800 for a 1 bedroom up until Covid, $1050 for a 2 bedroom. Now they're 1300 for a 1 bedroom and 1600 for a 2 bedroom. House prices around here have done the same thing. I think it's 800+ to be in a trailer park.
Not to mention people saying, "just ignore every major metro in the US which happens to make up a majority of the population" in response to housing being expensive is ignoring that most people are dealing with housing being way too fucking expensive. Like sure if I go buy a plot of dirt with a house 2 hours from a major population center then of course it'll be affordable. Too bad there's 0 jobs out there and 0 reason to live in the sticks for most people.
274 million people live in or near population centers, with only ~57 million living in rural areas. We can't just ignore that the places with most of the people are becoming unaffordable due to draconian zoning policy and lack of government push for more housing.
I avoid the official income averager for just that reason. It skews to make things look like they aren't as bad as they really are.
If you just look at the prices of houses and labor, you get a much different story.
Back in 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the average house was $11,000.00. A high school grad could buy a house.
Or, think of it this way. The 'offical' rate tells us that $1 million in 1960 would be $10 million today.
In 1960, $1 million meant a Beverly Hills mansion, a half dozen luxury cars, and enough left over to buy a block of businesses.
Today, $10 million will get you a condo in Manhattan.
The average income, according to a quick search, was $975. Comparing this to the current US median wage of $32k (and keep in mind the 1937 figure is arithmetic mean, the median was likely lower), incomes went up at a rate far beyond inflation as well. Not everything is affected equally. Though without living in the US and mostly guessing from prices here I'd guess many things on the list went up even more, like movie tickets.
The same search also suggested that the 1937 average wage was 25% lower than the 1932 one, so it seems 1937 was actually a pretty shit year.
We owe the last two generations a big thank you for the absurd cost of housing right now. They made it a major portion of their wealth, and they prevented new housing from being added. People my parents' age were able to buy a house while waiting tables and being teachers. You couldn't even afford a down payment on a house where I live with that kind of income.
To be fair, this was in a recession during the great depression. The unemployment rate was 19% in June 1938.
To add to this, a new car in 1938 was $860 according to this, but essential information was left out. What that actually converted to in today's money $18,709.33 which is a lot less than what I'm paying today but only by about half. I don't disagree with wanting to get back to this point or better. But the picture seems to assume the reader already knows this?
Honestly big ups to the Milk industry for keeping milk inflation down relative to the rest.
but uh… curse them for their awful practices and ruining the environment etc etc
Well..it's heavily subsidized, so you pay for it in taxes and then pay for it at the store.
Average income of $1,731/yr is equivalent to $37,393 in present dollars. Current average wage is $63,795.
Yes but a house would only cost $84,240 in todays dollars. It's all relative.
Which begs the question, is $1,731 really equivalent to $37,393? Because it sure sounds like we aren't using the right metric for that conversion.
I live in a house built before the year in question and paid not too much more than that price for it (~$95,000) in 2018. For reference the house is in a working class suburb of a small city in the Midwest, so it's not a housing hotspot but not out in the middle of nowhere.
There's no insulation in the exterior walls, I had to rebuild the dangerously steep basement stairs, and I've spent about five grand on asbestos abatement so far with more in the near future. Those are just problems with the original construction, I'm excluding issues caused by age or mistakes made by previous owners.
Cheap housing from that era doesn't meet even the most basic safety related modern building codes (to say nothing of energy or environmental codes). Modern housing is more expensive because cheaper housing is a goddamned death trap.
A house may have been more affordable, but food was fucking expensive. A gallon of milk was more than $10 in today's dollars.
Felt like nerding out on this.
You can use the rule of 72 to figure compounding inflation (or interest) in your head. Just take 72 divided by your inflation rate and you get how long it takes for a price to double. Example: Assuming 3% yearly inflation , It would take 72/3 or 24 years for the price to double. Then, just double the starting price for each 24 year period. So assuming a car was 1,000 in 1950, it would cost about 2,000 in 1975, 4,000 in 2000, and 8,000 in 2025 if inflation for that product was exactly 3% yearly.
A couple percentage points difference makes a huge difference in how long it takes for a price (or investment to grow). The stock market has an average yearly interest rate of like 8%. That translates into a investment portfolio doubling every 9 years instead of the 24 years it would be for 3%. So 45 years in the market would turn an initial 1k investment into a ~$32k investment.
Of course, you could also use an online compound interest calculator(simple one here), but I like to know how to do the calculation myself personally.
But then you get greedflation periods (maybe never before like the past four years?) where you see some brands raising their car prices 50% since 2020 (inflation over that period an already high 21%).
Funny they don't also post the median salary.
The median was about $1200, or about $26,000 today.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-families/41272167ch7.pdf
As pissed as I am about the current state of afairs, violent revolutions tend to turn into a total shit show real quick.
Revolutions are a response to material conditions. Typically it was already a shit show, then the revolution happens and it gets even shitter very briefly, before working itself out over time.
It would be kinda funny if, in like two hundred years, historians refered to this time period as "The Total Shit Show."
Damn, that's a lot of sugar. Everything else seems to be sold in "reasonable" amounts, why is the sugar so out of proportion?
Poundful of sugar helps the medicine go down
TBH food and postage appear to have been hella expensive.
Kurt Vonnegut's book 'Mother Night' takes place around 1965. There's a line where a shut in almost swoons when strawberries come back in season. Today you can get fresh fruit any month.
Even when I was a kid fruit was seasonal. Strawberries, blueberries, watermelon, pineapple, kiwi, etc. were all seasonal.
I remember being excited when my favorites started showing up in stores through the year. Watermelon was the big one and seedless wasn't the normal, it was great.
I love the fact that guiotines have become a part of normal conversation.
#KILLTHEBILLIONAIRECLASS. #HEDGEFUNDSSHOUKDBEILLEGAL #DERIVATIVESCANTBEWORTHMOREASTHEORIGINAL
i don’t know wages then, so this doesn’t tell me anything except hey, prices go up.
You can tell by the average income (2nd line), it being almost 50% of the price of a new house says pleeenty
Chasing lower prices? How about higher incomes?
NYT: "Per capita income in 1938; Average Figure Was $5l5, Compared With $679 in Boom Year and $376 in 1933 NEW YORK STATE HIGHEST Yearly Earnings Show a Mean of $822, With Mississippi Lowest With $205"
