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We’re mostly living better than our parents
- khrbrt 4y agoThose charts praising truck and SUV sales should be juxtaposed with charts showing the increase in road fatalities for cyclists and pedestrians or the rise in CO2 concentration and average temperatures.
- lightbendover 4y agoStrollers are 72% cheaper? When I was a baby my parents had a single $15 stroller from Walmart. I don't know a single family with small children with less than 2 ~$500+ strollers.
- D13Fd 4y agoHonestly in most cases people don’t need strollers at all, or they would be fine with a cheapo umbrella stroller for $18.99 from Wal-mart. People just can’t seem to help over-spending on baby stuff.
- jcrash 4y agoBull shit. Fruits and veggies. What about enjoying life?
- jjoonathan 4y ago> 1. We’re eating more fresh fruit Is this supposed to be a joke? "Let them eat fruit?" > 9. Comparing wage growth to the cost of necessities It's here, far below the fold, that the real story begins. Spoiler: health care, housing, and education did not get cheaper. Which you already knew, because you pay out the ass for them, and that's not a feeling one forgets. But we are eating more fruit, so I guess on the balance everything is fine.
- markus_zhang 4y agoHC, schooling and housing are essentially gov subscriptions. We all "love" subscriptions.
- buescher 4y agoAvocado is a fruit, right?
- jjoonathan 4y agogee, I should just eat 88 fewer avocados every day and use the savings to pay my rent!
- nikanj 4y agoThe big ticket items (housing, healthcare, education) got exponentially more expensive, but at least hammers and avocados are cheaper.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoYeah education especially, it's gone up 520% of inflation, plain extortion. "Youngest adults" meaning ages 18-25 who include the legal women that don't want to have babies immediately and whom everyone wants to fuck, and the young men who look their best in their "pretty boy" like Ashton Kutcher appearance, because they have the thick hair and best skin and are skinny, and sure enough the same is true for them there's lots of men and women out to fuck them. Or exploit them. So all of them, youngest adults. They are being harmed. Colleges--meaning not the faculty or the adjuncts who are true to the students but the administrators in the bloated bureaucracies--just charge up the ass. They say the students don't pay for that but they absolutely do, they lump that in with Tuition. It's not Tuition, in my case the money spent on administration was mostly to persecute me (I got lynched). There should be three categories: tuition (strictly professor salaries, fuck that adjunct status promote them to professors), Room and Board (or better yet call it Rent and let students pay for food on their own), and then Administration. Just like other non-profits. In some colleges the professors are the administrators, there's no bureaucrats. And the harsh part is for youngest adults, you need to go through the gauntlet--the time you're told is the best time in your life, when it's really the absolute worst--to participate in the economy with dignity. Otherwise you get a shit job.
- l33t2328 4y agoI’m confused about what your paragraph about people wanting fuck college students has to do with the price of college.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoSo that pretty boy was me. Self-referential. The only thing older adults want out of youngest adults, really, is their youth. They have no assets except for their admission letter, and no way to enforce their contracts to pay for college. Older adults want to exploit that youth. And they youngest adults don't want to be prostitutes, so they go to college, but that doesn't change things by enough.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoHave some patience with them. They were lynched ffs.
- haswell 4y ago> But we are eating more fruit, so I guess on the balance everything is fine. Nowhere did the post claim this. Intake of fresh fruits/vegetables is associated with a meaningful decrease in mortality rate, and are increasingly seen as the best way to promote a healthy gut/microbiome (vs. taking probiotics). If you interpret this post as "n reasons that everything is fine", then you might be right - everything is definitely not fine. But if you interpret this post as "in a world where a lot is going wrong, and that's usually all we hear about, here are n things going right", it's a more useful read. To me, this falls into a category similar to the book Factfulness [0], which seeks to correct misconceptions about the state of the world by examining certain areas of progress over a broader historical context. Personally, I think an occasional break from the doom and gloom to focus on "here are some things that have improved" is necessary. That doesn't have to mean that everything is fine. - [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness
- jjoonathan 4y agoAn honest analysis would weight its concerns by importance. This was not an honest analysis.
- haswell 4y agoI don't think you or I can issue judgements about honesty without understanding the author and their motivations. We can conclude that the analysis is poor, or misses key factors, or is only useful when answering a narrow set of questions, or requires additional disclaimers / context. But concluding that the author is dishonest takes us in a direction that is no longer focused on how the analysis can improve, and instead seeks to question motives directly, instead of expanding our shared understanding of the subject. I do think the glaring issue with the piece is that we (the royal we) have not agreed on the list of factors that should be measured when examining living standards, nor the weights of those factors. The post doesn't really attempt to justify its chosen measures either, and would carry more weight if based on earlier scholarly attempts to quantify quality of life.
- 4y ago
- nostromo 4y agoThought experiment: do you wish you were born 40 years earlier? I suspect most of us do not wish this, and I think the primary reason is because our lives are much better now than 40 years ago. Healthcare and housing is more expensive, yes. But healthcare is also much better. (Things that were once death sentences no longer are.) Our houses are more expensive, but also larger even though our families are smaller. The technology we have access to is amazing. Traveling the world is more affordable and not just something the richest person you know has done. Not to mention human rights have expanded for lots of protected classes. Overall I think the doom and gloom of some younger folks about how terrible it is today and how great things were for previous generations is just wildly misplaced. There are lots of reasons to be thankful we're living in the present and not the past.
- alexfromapex 4y agoQuantity of life due to healthcare has increased but quality of life I would wager has barely moved the needle. The problem is when Americans say they are dissatisfied with healthcare today it’s conflated with them being dissatisfied with the cost instead of the healthcare industry recognizing that patient satisfaction is low.
- jjoonathan 4y agoI love tech and I'm doing great. I'm not representative and neither are you. > healthcare is also much better ε more QALYs for 8x the cost. Boo. > Our houses are more expensive, but also larger Because they only built houses for rich people, thereby spiking prices into the stratosphere and forcing more people to go without homes for longer. If you're looking for a silver lining, this ain't it. > human rights have expanded for lots of protected classes. That's a much better silver lining. Usually I find myself arguing with Team Optimism, because I think all the problems we have are solvable and many people disagree. The article doesn't read like a genuine case for optimism, it reads like a PR piece for someone who is part of the problem and wants to deflect attention.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago> Thought experiment: do you wish you were born 40 years earlier? Absolutely yes. Rare divorces, booming economy, a society able to communicate instead of cancelling people, burning cars or locking everyone at home. Technology improves our lives up to a point. I agree with you a lot of things improved (thanks capitalism) but our culture is a complete mess and I'd rather live on another planet. To minimise the problem I moved to a country that many would call backwards. At least they won't teach my kids that men can menstruate. I'm sorry for my kids, hopefully things won't get too much worse in the next couple of decades and hopefully we'll find another country to move to, once idiocracy takes control of this one as well.
- AngeloAnolin 4y agoDeclaring we're living better through the lens of 24 graphs doesn't cut it. There's probably a thousand variables to consider as well as the variability of individual needs that could be summed up collectively. Yes, we have made a lot of strides, but at the same time, the complexity of living life has increased. We got better technology, choices, health, rights and freedom but stating that things are better in terms of how life is lived and what's available can be misleading to some degree.
- alexfromapex 4y agoImagine if the key performance indicator was happiness or life satisfaction, instead of how many blueberries we’re eating
- jjoonathan 4y agoWell, the important thing is to fill the list with small picture things that support their thesis and bury the big picture things that don't.
- AngeloAnolin 4y agoThe story loses its objectivity and becomes too reliant on the subjectivity of the writer(s).
- hikingsimulator 4y agoExactly. Something ever important to hammer on and repeat is that data does not alone make facts.
- alexashka 4y agoSure, so what? The question is, what could the richest country on earth have done in 40 years, besides outsourcing all its shit to poor countries?
- Kapura 4y agoPretty rich to see this story pop up on hacker news above the headline "Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric"
- jdlyga 4y agoWell, we're in the tech industry. I'm sure people working service jobs, health care workers, or teachers might have different opinions.
- orzig 4y agoAnd I think that the gains in healthcare discussed are under selling the point. I don’t have time to pull data, so discount my opinion appropriately, but just think about the minimally invasive surgeries that are feasible today, the life-changing drugs for things like cystic fibrosis, and the convenience of telehealth
- tsimionescu 4y agoThe chart for college tuition increases is pretty telling when compared to the chart for consumption patterns (where the article claims that the decreasing percentage out of total spending for food and clothing was explained by the increase in the price of healthcare). Also, none of the charts discuss child-care costs, nor travel & leisure.
- aetherson 4y agoIt's a little weird that the author decided to lead with fruits and vegetables, and leave things like, "fewer people die of heart disease and cancer" a long way down. That said, for those scanning the comments, I suggest you RTFA, which is a pretty good overview for the length that it has to play with. The people in the comments who are Really Upset about it aren't doing a very good job of summarizing it.
- sha256sum 4y agoLooking through the comments, Really Upset sounds like an exaggeration. It's hard to conclude a "better life" when the stress of paying outrageous healthcare, childcare, housing, education costs outweigh things like "increased food consumption", which is what I'm seeing in the comments. Interesting charts nonetheless.
- jjoonathan 4y agoThe article chooses to spend its attention in a very non-neutral manner. This is a common PR tactic and has a name: > Shit Sandwich - Urban Dictionary > A way of giving crappy news to someone. The news is dressed up as, first a positive statement then the bad news, and then a positive statement It's not only fair to criticize the article for its thesis and aggressive framing, it's absurd to defend a shit sandwich on the basis that it's only 1/3 shit.
- bdowling 4y agoThe other side of increased life expectancy is that the average person will work longer before he can afford to retire.
- usrn 4y agoBirthrates are down, people are getting married later and divorcing more often, people aren't growing as tall, life expectancy is declining. Using the measures that don't change over time we are not living better than our parents. EDIT: >I'm sorry, getting married earlier has an intrinsic positive correlation with quality of life? Yes, to the degree that civilizations often experience high degrees of social instability when it gets into the late 20s among the elites/elite aspirants.
- cafard 4y agoWhich people aren't growing as tall? My cohort, roughly defined--co-workers of comparable age, cousins--often have children taller than they are.
- jokethrowaway 4y agoIt's complicated - some countries are growing taller, some are getting shorter (especially the poor strata of the population). It's heavily linked to diet and malnutrition (which nowadays can happen whether you're rich or poor).
- lightbendover 4y agoI'm sorry, getting married earlier has an intrinsic positive correlation with quality of life?
- TimPC 4y agoThat home ownership being more affordable is going to completely disappear as interest rates go up. Yes monthly payments were slightly lower with tiny interest rates but the assets themselves were unreasonably high in price. With interest rates now skyrocketing payments will go through the roof.
- cudgy 4y agoBut home prices will likely drop, which will hopefully more than offset the increased interest cost. Plus, you can refinance a loan for lower overall costs, but there is no way to reduce the principal of a mortgage other than forking over hard-earned cash.
- TimPC 4y agoSo far in my market even accounting for the drop in prices, monthly payments were slightly larger.
- notch656a 4y agoI always get a chuckle when people say things like "well a house is more expensive but you have smartphones, the internet, a washing machine, and a blender!" For a lot of people, technology is a tool to live a better life, not end on its own. If post-internet technology doesn't get me housing as cheap as pre-internet or food as cheap as pre-internet, education/childcare, or healthcare as cheap as pre-internet, then that pretty much crosses off the most important necessities. Not saying this is the fault of technological progress per-se.
- droptablemain 4y agoA huge chunk of Millenials and Gen-Z cannot afford to start families and have children. That in itself is a major fail for our species, and should tell you everything you need to know.
- Jddndjxu 4y ago
- pavlov 4y agoIt's a failure of countries like the USA, not the entire species.
- mod 4y agoDon't you think it's telling that you're saying they can't afford it, meanwhile much poorer people are still having children and starting families? The hidden catch in your comment is perhaps that they can't afford to have children and raise them in the way you (or whomever) thinks they should. I don't think it's a fail for our species at all. I could agree to disagree that it's a failure of some of our current societies.
- notch656a 4y agoMuch poorer people can't afford it either. Something like half of births in US are on medicaid premiums paid for in part by taxpayers who themselves can't afford to have kids.
- frostwarrior 4y agoIt CAN be true if you get outside America. In South America, considering the past economic crises, we're somewhat better than our parents.
- Dig1t 4y agoIt takes very little effort to come up with a slew of negative things to say in response to this article, there are obviously lots of problems in society we still need to fix (like healthcare). But I think that articles like this are very important to read and understand, because a lot of things in here are true. If you spend all of your time concentrating on all the bad things that need to be fixed in society, everyone involved in the conversation will constantly feel like the future is bleak and usually the conversation will devolve into a political cesspool. Understanding and appreciating good things is as equally important as understanding and trying to fix the bad things.
- activitypea 4y agoThe idea that house prices aren't that bad for most people is a joke. Renting or buying decent housing in any kind of economic center has been hard for the past decade, and impossible for the past year.
- mips_avatar 4y agoWe urgently need to change the road safety goalposts. Deaths of people inside of vehicles have lowered, but the new larger vehicles are deadlier to pedestrians, and their "safety" headlights are blinding anyone not in the vehicle.
- mcguire 4y agohttps://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedestrians19.pdf https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedes... See Figures 6 and 15.
- mips_avatar 4y agoOh perfect, this report is fascinating
- onion2k 4y agoI never quite understand what I'm supposed to take away from articles like this. I mean, sure, life is objectively better than it was 30 years ago. And better still compared to 70 years ago. And heck, if you compare it to 500 years ago we're not dying of collera or living in a hut, so Go Team! Right? Comparisons to the a bygone time that you can't go back to are pointless. No one is suggesting that things are 'good' now, or even 'acceptable'. There are significant, systemic problems that cause millions of people to live worse lives than they need to, so we still have a loooong way to go. I guess looking around and saying "It's not pointless. Things do get better. It's worth trying." has some value, but this sort of article really comes over as more "Stop complaining. You've never had it so good.", and fuck that.
- foogazi 4y ago> I never quite understand what I'm supposed to take away from articles like this. Progress > I mean, sure, life is objectively better than it was 30 years ago That’s good - there are places on earth that can’t say that
- Dig1t 4y ago>Comparisons to the a bygone time that you can't go back to are pointless. I just think this is so wrong. If you were halfway through a weight loss journey, is it not heartening and helpful to look at the scale every day and see your progress? Comparing your current self to your past self and seeing what you have done RIGHT is just as important as understanding what you are currently doing WRONG. Not only that but it also gives people hope for the future, which is very important in giving people motivation to actually put in effort and work for a better future.
- csw-001 4y ago1 in 10 Americans is going hungry...^1 It's not always about how many blueberries we are all eating as a group - justice demands we consider who is getting to eat at all. It would be great if we could close some of that food security gap with the savings "we" are experiencing on cheaper hammers and batteries. I really enjoy charts and analysis like this, and sometimes a controversial headline is what is needed to start a discussion - so thanks for sharing. I think this analysis begs for follow-up charts showing how these items and spending vary by race, class, location, etc. When we say "we" are mostly living better, who exactly is in that group? Seems like that's an important consideration in asking whether "we" are achieving our goals as a society. 1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-u-s/frequency-of-food-insecurity/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
- foogazi 4y ago> 1 in 10 Americans is going hungry Is that more or less than before ? I found this - food insecurity peaked in 2010 and is now the same as 2000: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-security-and-nutrition-assistance/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
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- FollowingTheDao 4y ago"We’re eating more fresh fruit" Who the fck is "we"? By we he means the wealthy, because go to any lower income area and it is a food desert. Economists are pros at making numbers tell any story they like. What he is hiding is that those statistics are all skewed by inequality. Put 3 people with $100,000 each in a room with a millionaire and the average person is worth $325,000. Take half of the money away from the 3 people and turn the millionaire into a two millionaire and the average person in that room is worth $537,500! Look how much better we are doing!!!!!!! And all this "better"? You think it does not come with a cost, one that we are just beginning to have to pay for?
- KingMachiavelli 4y ago> But down payment requirements have gotten looser too! According to the National Association of Realtors, the average homebuyer in 1989 put 20 percent down. In 2021, it was 13 percent. I think this is important and two-sided stat. There's a mixture of programs that make obtaining large mortgages actually very easy. FHA loans and state down payment assistance programs have certainly helped many 'afford' housing. However, I think many who lived through the 2008 crash are skeptical of purchasing homes with less than 20% down. Essentially you have to be informed enough to seek out these programs but not informed enough as to be petrified knowing these programs are keeping home prices high. In any case these graphs don't show generational differences and several obscure them. The graphs show homes have gotten larger, apartments have gotten smaller, yet rents overall have increased which is related to why younger generations are paying much more per sqft.
- Dig1t 4y agoIt's so interesting how an article filled with positivity inspires such a vehement negative response. Is there a name for this effect? It seems like there should be.
- cudgy 4y agoSure. It’s called gaslighting blowback.
- breadbreadbread 4y agoCntrl-F: "DEBT", "INTEREST", "CLIMATE" ... No results Found
- jokethrowaway 4y agoThis is pretty ridiculous. We're eating way more fruit and vegetables and less meat than our grandparents. I'll add another one: we also have lower cholesterol. And our heart related incidents and cancer incidence is going up. Sure, survival rates may be better, as the article points, but the problems are getting worse. It's not even hard to make the link that maybe it's really a diet issue and we should be eating more meat and fats and less carbs - exactly the opposite of what 50 years of brainwashing by the USDA (and whoever is paying their bill) recommended.