8 ms·

Is this really surprising? When it was just Netflix charging a few dollars a month for loads of content, it was great. It was easier than safer than pirating,

• ajross 3y ago
  > and cost of living biting hard for the average person This is a meme that won't die. This is simply false. Real wages, real per capita GDP, real median income et. al. are all higher now than before covid. There was a 13 month burst of inflation (which correlated almost perfectly with wage growth, FWIW), and it seems like everyone lost their minds.
  • polygamous_bat 3y ago
    > Real wages, real per capita GDP, real median income et. al. are all higher now than before covid. You literally said nothing about cost of living here?
    • ajross 3y ago
      I literally did? That's what "real" means: having more real wages means you can buy more stuff. It's already adjusted for price rises. Check out FRED if you don't believe me: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N You and the upthread commenter are just citing a meme. It is not true. Period.
      • elashri 3y ago
        Real here means only that these numbers are adjusted for inflation. It does not change the fact that they are a poor measure for cost of living.
        • TremendousJudge 3y ago
          I don't agree with GP's original point (also afaik US minimum wage hasn't increased), but the way inflation is measured is with a basket of common goods that serve as proxy for "cost of living". If cost of living, the number in dollars, went up, it means prices rose, which means there was inflation. Maybe it wasn't measured "correctly" (the basket of goods isn't reflective of what people actually need to live), but in principle an increase in your "real" salary means you're better off and beating the rising cost of living
          • ghaff 3y ago
            The problem with looking at streaming service pricing in the context of inflation is that a lot of people have also dropped their cable TV subscriptions. I probably subscribe to too many streaming services but I'm still paying half of what I was paying for just cable TV alone.
      • quadrifoliate 3y ago
        Your first graph for Median usual weekly real earnings shows a fall from 393 in Q2 2020 to 365 in Q2 2023. Your third graph for Real Median Household Income shows a fall from 76,660 in 2020 to 74,580 today. Even though I find it hard to take the reported inflation numbers seriously because they aren't calculated off a fixed basket of goods any more [1], those graphs don't seem to say we have more "real" wages now compared to 2020. I am confused as to why you seem to be arguing for the opposite. Am I reading them wrong or something? ---------------------------------------- [1] From https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.... — "The new methodology takes into account changes in the quality of goods and the effects of substitution. Substitution, the changes consumers make in response to price increases, also changes the relative weighting of the goods in the basket. The overall result tends to be a lower CPI."
  • tsukikage 3y ago
    > This is a meme that won't die. This is simply false. My weekly shopping bill begs to differ.
    • ajross 3y ago
      Then you are particularly unlucky in that your salary didn't keep up with inflation. It did (and more) for everyone else, on average. Check the FRED links I posted elsehwere in this subthread. If you don't believe in economics, why bother to make an economic point? It's really upsetting to me to watch this notionally rationalist community descend into this kind of memery.
      • squigz 3y ago
        "Memery" being people sharing their own experience that happens to differ from the norm...?
        • ajross 3y ago
          No, people making blanket statements about the economy based on their personal experiences (and similar anecdotes they read from forums like this one). Look at the data!
          • squigz 3y ago
            The person you replied to above this was sharing their own experiences, not making any statements about the economy.
  • kozinc 3y ago
    Sure wages may be higher, but prices are higher too, and they've increased more than the wages - and that means cost of living has increased.
  • orwin 3y ago
    This meme is backed by US government data https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-27... """ Highlights: - Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2021 estimate of $76,330 (Figure 1 and Table A-1). - Householders under the age of 65 experienced a decline in median household income of 1.4 percent from 2021, while householders aged 65 and over did not experience a significant change in median income between 2021 and 2022 (Figure 1). - The money income Gini index decreased by 1.2 percent between 2021 and 2022 (from 0.494 to 0.488); this represents the first time the Gini index has shown an annual decrease since 2007 (Figure 3 and Table A-3). - Between 2021 and 2022, the number of full-time, year-round workers increased by 3.4 percent, compared to a 1.7 percent increase in the number of total workers. This suggests a continuing shift from working part-time or part-year to full-time, year-round work. - In 2022, 65.6 percent of working women worked full-time, year-round. This is the largest share on record. The real median earnings of all workers (including part-time and full-time workers) decreased 2.2 percent between 2021 and 2022. Median earnings of those who worked full-time, year-round decreased 1.3 percent (Figure 4 and Table A-6). """ Note that in the US, it is extremely hard to have the number for both income and wages. In my country, wages are a smaller proportion of average income every year, but i'm unable to see if it's the same in the US.
    • ajross 3y ago
      2021-22 is cherry-picked to land dead center in the middle of the inflation burst. Check the FRED charts I posted elsewhere in this thread and look to numbers before covid. They literally say the opposite.
      • orwin 3y ago
        It's inflation adjusted. On the income graph you shared, the same decline was present (but it stopped in 2022 too, which is the last data we have, so 'cherry-picked'). Also nothing about the gini coefficient. Also, if wages are a shrinking percentage of income, that mean rent will slowly bring more money home than work, which is terrible news.
      • orwin 3y ago
  • trey-jones 3y ago
    So you have plenty, that's cool. Believe me, there are plenty of us out here that are feeling the crunch right now.
  • quadrifoliate 3y ago
    In 2020, the price of a Netflix standard plan was $13. Now it's $16. That's a 23% increase. The "premium" (why 4k is premium in 2023 beats me, but okay) plan has gone up 43%, from $16 to $23. [1] Has your salary gone up 20-40% since 2020? Mine has gone up, but at less than 20%. And Netflix is only one of the costs, groceries and food seem to have gone up by ridiculous amounts like 50% or so. That's why the cost of living bites hard. Sure, incomes have gone up. Prices seem to have gone up more. I fail to see how this is a meme. ---------------------------------------- [1] Source: https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes
    • ajross 3y ago
      > Sure, incomes have gone up. Prices seem to have gone up more. I fail to see how this is a meme. It's a meme because of the "seem to have" part. You believe it because it feels true, even though it's actually false. People measure this stuff. What you say is wrong. Wages have grown faster than prices over the past 4 years. Period. You can't just throw out decades of research and process development on CPI indicators because of your Netflix bill!
      • quadrifoliate 3y ago
        > People measure this stuff. What you say is wrong. Can you send me a link that shows measurements of: a) X: The price of a specific standardized basket of goods used for CPI, broken down by exactly how much it cost in 2019 v/s 2023 (linking to a magic number for the whole basket is not acceptable, this needs to demonstrate exact prices of specific items, like the price of 160z of cheese. Varying baskets are also not acceptable, because then you're not measuring the same thing). b) Y: The exact median income of a household in 2019 v/s 2023 I'll accept that prices have gone down and things have gotten better if X/Y as of 2019 is less than X/Y as of 2023. > You can't just throw out decades of research and process development on CPI indicators because of your Netflix bill! It's the other way round -- you can't just handwave some “decades of research and development” at people and claim that they should magically feel better off than four years prior. A lot of times this R&D is motivated by pressures that are unrelated to measuring the economic wellbeing of families, and any research is going to have its flaws that don't exactly match up to how the median family is feeling economic pressures. People who claim that the research is correct need to share specifics.
  • Xiol32 3y ago
    Ah yes, I forgot the US is the only country. Silly mem