Not only that, but the quality of the food she has is sub-par compared to today. I built off of one of your earlier essays on this topic and tied it into a larger fear of the future.
The blue-collar nominal rate has increased by 2,758 percent since 1947. The unskilled rate has increased by 2,670 percent. Wages have generally increased much faster than prices for almost all products. Except for products and services heavily influenced by government policy.
My wife’s family still lives in northern Spain. Nearly every household still grows big, tall stalks of cabbage lined up neatly in a patch of ground next to the house. Cabbage is a staple of the Galician diet. Galicia is the poorest province in Spain, even today.
Caldo Gallego (Galician soup) can even be found on menus of Spanish restaurants in America. Cabbage is inexpensive, easy to grow and filling, which is why it has been used to supplement the diets of northern Spaniards, the Basque countries and Asturias for centuries.
Cabbage and potatoes are probably the only year-round vegetable they would’ve had to eat.
Americans eat a LOT more food than is shown in the 1947 photo. A typical family would scarf all of that in two days before heading down for their dialysis treatments
I doubt the average blue collar worker in a non-union shop makes $37.51 per hour (78K/year). On top of that, income taxes, social security taxes and sales taxes etc are much higher than in 1947.
Additionally, health care costs in 1947 were much lower than now.
Also, a huge difference is that now the American Life Style is balanced on the backs of two incomes, 80+ hour work weeks, with both husbands and wives working and latch kid kids.
It's actually a lot of work to figure all that out. For instance, many forms of health care were not available in 1947 so you'd just die or be crippled, for instance my mom had a knee and shoulder replacement over the last 4 years, which were not possible. She'd be bedridden or at the very least wheelchair bound and probably would pass on from the depression associated with same.
Stenting has extended lives, but was completely not available then. With everyone smoking up a storm, there was lots of heart attack and stroke death. Life expectancies were considerably lower.
Then the cars. A new car today averages close to $48k. Which is about 25.75x more expensive than 1947 ($1,864). They do last longer than in 1947, though.
The median home price is where you really have to look to see how outrageous living costs have become. The median home price this year is about $396k. In 1947 it was $2,938. A 134.7x increase. Simple inflation would suggest home prices of around 70-90k. Rents have gone up 56 times. Less exorbitant than homes, but still a rough doubling of its raw amount compared to 1947.
Obviously, a lot of this is location-specific, but it gives a good idea of why people are poorer now than then. Housing costs. You look at food when you want to tell a good news story.
Not only that, but the quality of the food she has is sub-par compared to today. I built off of one of your earlier essays on this topic and tied it into a larger fear of the future.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/apocalypse-always
Note that $37.15 includes benefits. Wage data source: measuringworth.com. Used the same source for 1947. Also see Bureau of Labor Statistics and https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf and https://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CES0500000008
The blue-collar nominal rate has increased by 2,758 percent since 1947. The unskilled rate has increased by 2,670 percent. Wages have generally increased much faster than prices for almost all products. Except for products and services heavily influenced by government policy.
My wife’s family still lives in northern Spain. Nearly every household still grows big, tall stalks of cabbage lined up neatly in a patch of ground next to the house. Cabbage is a staple of the Galician diet. Galicia is the poorest province in Spain, even today.
Caldo Gallego (Galician soup) can even be found on menus of Spanish restaurants in America. Cabbage is inexpensive, easy to grow and filling, which is why it has been used to supplement the diets of northern Spaniards, the Basque countries and Asturias for centuries.
Cabbage and potatoes are probably the only year-round vegetable they would’ve had to eat.
Americans eat a LOT more food than is shown in the 1947 photo. A typical family would scarf all of that in two days before heading down for their dialysis treatments
I doubt the average blue collar worker in a non-union shop makes $37.51 per hour (78K/year). On top of that, income taxes, social security taxes and sales taxes etc are much higher than in 1947.
Additionally, health care costs in 1947 were much lower than now.
Also, a huge difference is that now the American Life Style is balanced on the backs of two incomes, 80+ hour work weeks, with both husbands and wives working and latch kid kids.
It's actually a lot of work to figure all that out. For instance, many forms of health care were not available in 1947 so you'd just die or be crippled, for instance my mom had a knee and shoulder replacement over the last 4 years, which were not possible. She'd be bedridden or at the very least wheelchair bound and probably would pass on from the depression associated with same.
Stenting has extended lives, but was completely not available then. With everyone smoking up a storm, there was lots of heart attack and stroke death. Life expectancies were considerably lower.
Then the cars. A new car today averages close to $48k. Which is about 25.75x more expensive than 1947 ($1,864). They do last longer than in 1947, though.
The median home price is where you really have to look to see how outrageous living costs have become. The median home price this year is about $396k. In 1947 it was $2,938. A 134.7x increase. Simple inflation would suggest home prices of around 70-90k. Rents have gone up 56 times. Less exorbitant than homes, but still a rough doubling of its raw amount compared to 1947.
Obviously, a lot of this is location-specific, but it gives a good idea of why people are poorer now than then. Housing costs. You look at food when you want to tell a good news story.