Scott Alexander

Is this Chris Best's secret plan for Substack?

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Golden Feather writes, quote, See for example one on Axios.com linked here.

No.

end quote.

Scott writes, Cremier, on X, objects to the chart showing each generation doing better than the last.

He writes that they, quote, divided by the square root of household size, end quote, but that this is, quote, problematic because it means Gen Z incomes are being inflated to the extent that they live with their parents, end quote.

I'm not entirely sure what he means by this.

If Zoomers were being counted as living in a large household, wouldn't that deflate their income by dividing by an artificially high denominator?

Maybe he means boomers are getting deflated because their adult kids are counted as part of their household.

But this wouldn't affect the 20-year-old band where he's doing most of the comparison.

In any case, he includes a couple sharing unit graph that avoids this problem.

Here's another graph.

Median market income by age and generation by sharing unit.

Scott writes, And it still shows every generation doing better than the last, albeit by a smaller amount.

Joel Long writes, quote,

I've not been able to find data to assess this, but my pet theory is that the basket of consumption middle-class people are chasing as normal has changed.

Anecdotally, I see this on 1.

Expected square footage per person in housing.

For example, kids sharing bedrooms seems much less universal than it used to be.