Scott Alexander

I'm not denying this is true, I just can't fully trace the economic logic that causes it.

Ransom Cozzillo writes, quote, It's obviously still possible, as you note, that housing cost increases, which are a very real issue, are carrying a disproportionate burden of the vibes.

However, I think it's worth noting that around 70% of Americans are homeowners, so those rising prices actually make the majority of people wealthier.

Also, the homeownership rate for millennials isn't tracking much behind that for the boomer at the same ages, a couple percentage points.

Yes, the younger generation is paying more inflation-adjusted for those houses.

That's not ideal.

But also, it can't really be said they're getting negative vibes from being locked out of homeownership or something.

End quote.

6.

Comments on inflation.

Citizen Penrose writes, quote,

here quoting Scott, saying, and then responding, Like you said, if inflation has historically actually been much higher, it provides a very parsimonious explanation for all the other data.

CPI might do a good job measuring short-term changes in inflation, say year-to-year,

but it's very unclear that it can be used to make long-term comparisons between different decades, as all figures in this post implicitly do.

I liked this post a lot about ways CPI figures can be systemically wrong stretched over time.

It's a post to devinhelton.com.

The metric which that post suggests as a more realistic measure of real incomes is how many hours of median wages are required for a 30-year-old man to provide a running car, a house, 2,000 calories of food daily.

I asked ChatGPT's deep research to calculate an index for that basket of goods, and the index has been on the secular decline since around 1970, and in 2025 was only about half of the 1970 value.

That is, it takes twice as many working hours to provide those goods now.

There's a link to the ChatGPT chat thread there.