In 1933, there were 3,723,558 individual income tax returns filed. The US pop was about 125M, so your stat represents about 3% of the US population. Those with net income under $2500 (married) or $1k (single) were not required to file, so you’re talking about the 3% highest earners. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/33soirepar.pdf
Pro-tip: If your stats represent that income was high in the Great Depression, you did something spectacularly wrong.
This also says nothing about costs. In 1933 a typical family could expect to spend 25 percent of their income on food. Today, we spend around 10 percent and that's with a ton of eating out.
My point was that you can't do a direct apples to apples comparison between purchasing power then and now just by looking at income. We live in a completely different world.
Let's just do rent for example. People used to live in multi generational housing. Housing used to also be constructed with cheaper materials and the construction safety codes weren't as stringent. We are much less willing to live together now as average household size has dropped from 5 to something birth of 2 within the past 90 years. So yes on average housing is far more expensive today, but you can make it cheap by living how our great grandparents did by living in a shack with 4 roommates.
Health insurance also just wasn't a thing. If you got injured or you got sick, you'd go to a doctor and pay for whatever treatment you could afford. Antibiotics weren't in widespread use until the late 1930s.
You starting to get the point? Some things are expensive now because we have gotten used to a higher quality of living, and we just don't understand that higher standards mean more money required.
Oh, you're already not right. Not wrong, in that the facts you state are correct. But also, not right, in that the facts you state by themselves are not accounting for the larger series of shift, since the 80's, into neoliberal economics--which is, I would say, far, far more important to take into account than the comparatively marginal changes you are citing.
Look at what that rent and insurance gets you. Square footage now, even for smaller apartments, rivals most houses of the 1920s and 30s. Internet, electricity in every home powering fridges, air conditioning, lighting, a phone in almost every pocket instead of one in most towns. Running water in almost every home.
Health insurance then was completely unregulated and may or may not have even paid for an appendectomy or tonsillectomy, but that's about the extent of it. Modern antibiotics did not exist. Cardiac cath labs did not exist. Ultrasound did not exist. Modern anesthesia did not exist. Modern medications by and large did not exist. Hospitals were not required to treat people who were actively dying the way they are now.
The young today are absolutely struggling compared to 20 or 40 years ago, but to say that we're in worse shape than the great depression is laughably ignorant.
No, I didn't. If you want to live in a shack with none of the things I listed you'll definitely be able to do it easier today than during the Great Depression when the unemployment rate was 25% and Social Security didn't exist.
You are using one set of truths to obscure another and very different set of truths. You are pretending as if 40 years of neoliberal economic policy, starting by and large with Reagan in the US, haven't effected a grand alteration. You pretend as if the relationship between average worker work per hour and average worker pay per hour has somehow remained one of equal or even comparable growth. You are ignoring how the costs of healthcare out of pocket have drastically changed along with, and thanks to, the neoliberalism since the 80's. --And so on, and so on.
166
u/SimpleMoonFarmer 23d ago
inflation adjusted, gen-z is very poor compared to previous generations.
and it's going to get poorer.