booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

economic conditions for the average individual worker

My point is that there are at least 20 million people who were not in that category in July 2020 who ended up in that category in April 2025. So the economic conditions for the average person who worked at some point in that 5-year period is going to be a big improvement as the employment rate increases.

So if you try to stabilize the cohort you're looking at, whether it's the 140 million who were employed in July 2020 or the 160 million who were employed in April 2025, then tracking the moving median needs to be accounted for.

A comparison between July 2019 and July 2020 makes this obvious. The weekly earnings shot up from $964 to $1016 (5% increase in a year that only saw 1% inflation), but nobody would consider that to be an improvement in conditions. Instead, many of the bottom earning workers just got laid off, making their conditions worse. If that metric isn't a good standalone indicator of what average people are experiencing, it should be evaluated with the other metrics in mind, too.

All of these stats matter, because it shows multiple facets of a complex economic system.

Bottom quartile earnings are here.

Real Median Personal Income

I don't like using personal income as a metric that represents what's happening to regular people because it's noisy data that incorporates retirement income and investment income in the numerator, and includes in the denominator non-earners (including the idle rich, retired people, full time students).

But as part of a broader look at multiple metrics, it should be considered.

Others include the different categories of unemployment (including the underemployed, the weekly hours worked, marginally detached), read with other employment indicators like layoffs and volunary quits, job openings posted, people making unemployment claims for the first time, etc.

Wages didn't keep up with inflation

Counting back from July 2020, the average weekly earnings per worker came up just short. But the huge addition of workers during the economic recovery would have been expected to dent that further.

Compare the exact same comparison from July 2019 versus April 2025, we have weekly earnings going up from $964 to $1236 (28.2%), while the inflation over that time period was 24.6%. So workers gained across even that metric over this time.

But we'd never say that the economic conditions for regular people improved between July 2019 and July 2020. Those huge job losses during the first few months of the COVID recession were devastating for regular people, even if the average earnings among people who kept their jobs shot upward. It wasn't because their wages went up, it was that the people who were the lowest earners lost their jobs. As they reentered the workforce, they were taking higher paying jobs than the ones they were previously laid off from, so that overall average stayed stable with the artificially elevated July 2020 number, through improved bargaining power during the great resignation and some recovery of union power, especially in the summer of 2023.

That's why economic conditions for regular people can't be measured by a single metric, and all the different stats need to be read together.

The net economic power of workers went down.

The aggregate economic power of workers went up, because the actual number of workers went up by 20 million, or 14% of the workforce as of July 2020, and the number of unemployed or involuntarily part time went down over that period of time. There were a lot more wages being distributed per unit population, even if the real wages slightly decreased per worker.

This article made a prediction that turned out to be wrong.

In the time since the headline in July 2020, the number of jobs in the U.S. rose back from 139 million to 159 million. (In January 2020, before COVID hit, there were 152 million jobs).

Average weekly earnings went up from $1016 to $1236, a 21.6% increase. That's come up short on the 23.4% inflation in that time period. But also, this number didn't drop for COVID, so these wages are higher than in 2019.

People can complain about how the economy isn't working for regular people, but the last 5 years were actually a pretty good run for wage earners.

Oh wow, windows! I don't think I can afford this place.

Relatively speaking? Appliances are cheaper than they were before.

Here's a Sears catalog from 1991. Appliances are at the end, past page 800 or so. Stoves are $400 or $500. Washer is $400, and a dryer is $300.

By official inflation numbers, things are about 2.3x as expensive now as in late 1991.

Median rent, the rent that the average person was paying, was around $450. Median rent today is about $1500, more than 3 times as much.

Today, a stove that looks like one of those things in the 1991 catalog costs about $500, maybe $600. Washing machines cost about the same. That's only a 25-50% increase, when overall prices have increased by 130% and rents have increased by 200% since 1991.

So yeah, when a stove was worth a whole month's rent, it was comparatively a bigger deal than today, when a stove is worth less than half a month's rent.

The same is broadly true of furniture and other home goods, too: prices have gone up slower than inflation, so in theory we could store more stuff in our cramped homes.

It's not a dismissal. It was stricken, with the option to refile the exact same substance in a new format.

And this kind of stuff happens all the time, like when someone forgets to attach a table of contents, a certificate of compliance, a certificate of word count, an incorrect word count, improperly formatted documents, etc.

This is a pretty common response to improper format, like certain courts that require a particular font, a particular page size, a particular spacing requirement, etc. Those usually have a written rule the court can point to and say "hey follow local rule so and so" and just make them re-file.

It's a little bit less common where someone violates an unwritten rule, and the court comes in and says "cmon you should've known better." But it happens.

All federal prosecutors report to political appointees of the President. Literally every federal prosecutor works for Trump's DOJ.

The marijuana smile cross skull is actually symbolism for 👊🇺🇸🔥which means "prayers up for our troops" and "we are currently clean on OPSEC."

Beef is a bad example. It used to be cheaper than chicken and similar to pork, but the real cost of that land use policy that would allow such grazing in the west, and then the subsidies that make factory farm feedlots possible, wasn't properly borne by the ranchers themselves. Today's cost of beef is a better reflection of the true cost of raising that meat, that inefficiently.

If you do the same analysis with chicken or pork, you'll find that we can and do afford to eat a lot more of those particular meats than we used to.

I fully expect beef to go like tuna, and slowly become a luxury item only for the rich within my lifetime. That is more of a trend with beef itself than broader trends in inflation generally.

Housing, education, and healthcare costs have grown much faster than inflation.

Food, energy, cars, appliances and home goods, furniture, apparel, and other durable goods have generally grown slower than inflation, at least between 1980 and 2020. Much of the last 5 years of inflation, though have eaten away at some of those gains of the previous 30-40 years in those categories.

Electronics, technology, entertainment, most services have generally gone down in price.

So the basket of what we buy is different, with different ratios. A time traveler from the 80's would be shocked to learn just how many ready made rotisserie chickens or pizzas you could buy for the wage equivalent to one hour of warehouse work, or how many big screen TVs you'd need to pay the average monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment. Plane tickets between New York and LA are basically cheaper than one month's rent in the cheapest possible home you can find in either of those cities. The ratios are all different than before.

But with housing costs high, it kind of puts all of the effort into that single basket. When it used to be that 1/3 your income could comfortably go into housing costs, now in many cities it's closer to half, even for people up the income scale, because the rest of life beyond having a roof over your head is just cheaper in comparison to that very basic need for shelter.

GDI is supposed to be basically equivalent to GDP, so it's not a better number to use. Sometimes the numbers diverge (see here for a discussion of this issue in 2022) because they use different methodologies to determine the number, but that's usually a sign that some kind of measurement is off, not that there's some kind of actual divergence in the true numbers of what they purport to measure.

And we moved away from Gross National Product/Income to Gross Domestic Product/Income because it was a better look at the domestic economy. We care more about the production/income within national borders rather than the production/income of a particular nation's residents.

I want one of these so bad

When you say "these," you're talking about a revolution, right?

Seriously. It's like looking at a map of a battle and assuming the arrows are actual terrain features.

The topic of the original posted screenshot is about inter-generational financial advice. I'm pointing out the need for intellectual humility when talking to a younger generation, by identifying a specific cognitive bias that tends to trip people up. And because this particular bias forms through experience, it tends to apply more to people with longer experience (that is, people who are older).

I thought my original comment wasn't judgmental, and didn't even purport to claim that all (or most) old people actually fall victim to the bias, to where they're acting upon that bias. I'm just pointing out that it's something to look out for, and to keep in mind, if you're ever in the position to be giving younger generations financial advice.

Coming in here and trying to defend old people against an imagined attack is, frankly, off topic and not particularly helpful.

"Blame" means to attribute for some negative result. There's no assigning fault here, just an observation, and an explanation behind that observation.

If I said "Bob is a fucking idiot," that's not blaming Bob for anything.

So yeah, I stand by my explanation behind the observation in OP's screenshot: that people tend to draw on past experiences even when those experiences are no longer as relevant, or are even actively misleading. And that the phenomenon I describe (that not all prices inflate at the same rate or preserve the same ratios to each other) exacerbates the problem.

Please stop blaming “old people”.

I'm not "blaming" anyone. I'm pointing out the mechanism that causes a portion of old people to be out of touch on these things. They rely on their own experiences to draw inferences that don't actually apply to others.

There's a famous Agatha Christie quote where she mentions that when she was young, she never imagined she'd be rich enough to own an automobile or poor enough to not have servants in her house. At some point, the affordability of one shot way past the other.

In my lifetime, I've seen huge cost increases in housing, and huge cost decreases in most technological products. When I was a kid, the normal TV size was something like 20 inches, and cost more than a month's rent for a typical apartment. In 1990, the average rent was $447, according to this. I found a Sears catalog from 1989 with a 25 inch TV selling for $549, and a 20 inch TV for $318. It would be hard to convince someone from 1990 that one day the cheapest, shittiest apartments in the poorest neighborhoods would rent for more than a 60-inch TV per month. Or that the typical ambulance ride costs something like a month's salary of a factory worker.

That's the real problem with old people's sense of money. The human tendency is to assume that all products cost the same multiple of those products prices in their early adulthood, so the luxury products of their youth remain the luxury products of today. These old people are stuck in some kind of Agatha Christie style of cost comparison, without the self awareness, and thinking that someone who owns a cell phone should be able to afford to buy a single family detached house, or couldn't possibly be bankrupted by a single Emergency Room visit.

It's nuanced. From your source (and consistent with the copyright laws in my country, the U.S.):

Copyright does not protect information about the ingredients or cooking methods.

The functionality of a recipe isn't copyrightable. The layout and the precise diction used, the explanations given (including editorial choices about where to put those explanations in the recipe) might be copyrighted.

So maybe the appropriate way to be safe is to do what some software companies do with their "clean room implementations," and define the ingredients and steps in a robust way, and ask someone who hasn't seen the original recipe rewrite those steps in their own words.

Of course, two can play at that game. A PR push, plus a re-listing of literally every recipe in the bestseller cookbook, using the exact same clean room technique, could get that whole cookbook published on the internet for free, with no compensation to this plagiarist or her publisher.