> Except, that doesn't tell the story for the majority of Americans. Housing costs are WAY up in cities as Americans migrate to where the jobs are, while housin

> Except, that doesn't tell the story for the majority of Americans. Housing costs are WAY up in cities as Americans migrate to where the jobs are, while housing costs are down in all the areas where jobs are disappearing. In practise, housing costs are actually significantly up for most Americans, but because the CPI is calculated across the entire nation, the government can claim inflation is low. I think this is basically wrong in that it's only true for a minority of Americans -- the kind that are overrepresented on this forum. If you're in tech or finance or law, then there are big payoffs to moving to San Francisco or New York, but this actually isn't the case for the typical American. When you compare cost of living it's clear pretty quickly that the median American is still doing just fine in the vast middle of the country. The median household income in the NYC metro is $83,160 and the typical home costs $571,556. In St. Louis, say, the median household income is $66,417 and the typical home is $222,076. For the average American, the second option is a much better deal. Sure, you make $16k more in NYC, but does anybody believe that the entire cost difference between the two metros is $16k per year? It's not even close. The median American is much better off in St. Louis. A lot of people reading this are in households that make many times the median household income and they have understandably concluded that their best options are in a few costal cities. But it simply isn't true for the typical American. There's kind of a dual (seemingly contradictory) error here in that people both under- and over-estimate how wealthy the U.S. is. They overestimate in that they forget that the majority of Americans are living on much less than the average software engineer, but they underestimate in that they forget that our poorest states are still much wealthier than than the average European country. See here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs-european-countries-and-japan-korea-mexico-and-china-and-some-lessons-for-the-donald/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs...