Check the prices of the flagship 1975 Ferrari, the flagship 1975 Hasselblad camera, or, I don't know, a 1975 Cessna 182 in reference to median 1975 household income.
Then check it again for 2026.
Oh, but we have GPS, Amazon Prime, and doomscrolling now.
Why would universal economic growth imply everyone owning more of a resource with a limited supply?
There's only so much gold in the world (which is kind of the point) - if people in $INSERT_COUNTRY owned more of it per capita, that would mean global inequality has increased, and thankfully we've seen the opposite of that.
Workers have become ~90% more productive over the last forty years, and received very little of that value, while the US throws off ~$5T in profits per year to shareholders. There is a reason socialism has become palatable politically recently to the electorate, and will continue to be until the labor situation changes.
> The top 10% of households by wealth had $8.1 million on average. As a group, they held 67.2% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households by wealth had $60,000 on average. As a group, they held 2.5% of total household wealth.
> The top 20% of households by income had $4.3 million in wealth on average. As a group, they held 71.1% of total household wealth.
The bottom 20% of households by income had $180,000 in wealth on average. As a group, they held 3% of total household wealth.
Top 10% owns 93% of equities. Middle class wealth is primary residence real estate, representing roughly 60% to 80% of total household wealth.
> In any event, stock market booms have traditionally produced the largest rewards for those who are already wealthy. That's because the wealthiest US households have most of their assets tied up in equities, while most middle-class families have their assets tied up in housing, researchers said in a 2020 study. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of Americans held just 1% of all stocks in the third quarter of 2023.
> The latest data show that 42.0 percent of full-time working Americans do not have access to retirement plans, 44.1 percent do not participate, and 50.5 percent do not receive an employer match. (Note that these figures are for employed workers between the ages of 18 and 65, excluding government and self-employed workers.)
> Even for those who do have access, traditional defined benefit pensions have become much less common as defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, have become the primary type of retirement plan. This shift has increased the risks and responsibilities for individuals in planning and managing their retirement. Yet research shows that many households are ill-equipped for this task and have little or no retirement savings. As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
I guess the corollary to this is that the more money you have, the less efficient you can convert money to tangible wealth (there's an actual studied conversion 'factor' for different kinds of wealth).
Wealth, in financial theory, is the present value of all expected future cash flows an individual or asset can generate over time, discounted back to today's value using a specific rate of return. It measures accumulated economic potential rather than just cash in hand.
Are there limits to future economic potential? I argue yes, it is a function of demographics, which are in structural decline. Therefore, I would agree it only becomes harder over time to chase after the current amount of total potential wealth, which will decline into the future.
> "As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics. But the real surprise is that the fall has been concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer and less educated women. We fit a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950: the common component peaked in 1978, and what drives fertility down today are country-specific trends, 219 of them negative and not one leveling off. None of the commonly cited mechanisms can account for this pattern, so we offer a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. Children come in integers, so it takes very little to move a cohort’s fertility rate from 1.8 to 1.3. And nothing in an economy pushes fertility back to 2.1. We close with the main economic consequences, in particular slow growth."
I'm sorry—vapid trappings of conspicuous consumption? You've just named three vacuous toys, whereas GPS and e-commerce deliver real value to working people.
Doomscrolling, I agree, is a devastatingly poor substitute for a real civic life.
The whole point is that it is not to the "working people" that the "real value" is "delivered". The real people got the crumbs and were told to appreciate it.
Almost all of the value went to those who one might call "unreal" people.
it absolutely did. Those were the crumbs I was referring to.
It enrages me, because "they" took all the value, and told us "my god, how immoral and vulgar it would be of you to covet the vapid trappings of conspicuous consumption! Instead, how wonderful it is that you can drive your car from your house to our offices in the morning, and our businesses in the evenings, avoiding traffic in service of shareholder value, while teaching our systems everything about yourself, so that we can market even more goods and services to you, even more insidiously, all thanks to GPS!"
They told us this while driving the Ferraris and flying the private airplanes.
And so many of us now come and say "oh, how immoral -- desiring an object of desire! Isn't it so nice that we can now build shareholder value more productively using GPS?"
I don't know, friend. I am not a moral absolutist.
There's nothing that makes my heart tremble like starting the propeller of a small GA airplane. On that moment I reconnect with my nine year old self. You may call me evil, vulgar, stupid, shallow, vicious even. I know what I feel inside. The rest of the world can disappear on that moment.
Not many people buy GA aeroplanes, so it's a sensible decision for those to receive a lower weighting than other consumer goods in a general purpose index like the CPI.
There is a divergence between the prices of goods the US produces and those that consumers purchase, as measured by the GDP IPD and CPI respectively, but that is not something that is appropriate to measure using one highly idiosyncratic good, nor even a basket of goods like "things I personally want to purchase", if one is wishing to produce numbers that others agree are reflective of the average experience of many.
But also, the very point of this entire thread was that even these highly idiosyncratic goods were orders of magnitude more accessible to the median American household back in 1975.
Despite that very same household being orders of magnitude more productive in 2026, thanks to GPS (and the rest of technology).
"Idiosyncratic" doesn't mean "we expect it to me less accessible", it means "we expect it to behave in its own special way so just taking a random one of them doesn't tell us anything about the average experience".
Given the number of goods and services there are in any given economy, you can probably find at least one good of each of the following categories:
A) that was very inaccessible in the 70s, and accessible now,
B) that was very accessible in the 70s and still very accessible now,
C) that was very inaccessible in the 70s and still very inaccessible, and
D) that was very accessible in the 70s and very inaccessible now (in addition to the one that you already picked)
None of those four tell us anything about whether "things people usually purchase" or "things the economy generally produces" have gotten more or less accessible, because different goods have gotten more or less expensive at different rates. You can easily point towards increasing inequality, which shows that the median American is getting a smaller share of income, and the divergence between CPI and GDPIPD, which serves to show that what people purchase on average (CPI) are getting more expensive faster than what the economy produces on average (IPD). (by about 30% on average according to FRED)
Insisting on intentionally using less useful evidence to support your claims is like making a strawman of your own argument, when clearly a stronger argument exists.
My friend, the 2026 Cessna 182 is basically the same airplane as it was in 1975, with digital screens instead of analog gauges, except now it costs about $750,000.
That's a whopping $735,000 increase over its base price of ~$15,000 USD back in 1975 for a brand-new airplane.
I promise, those avionics aren't worth $735,000. We've just gotten much, much poorer.
EDIT: Heck, if this doesn't convince you, here's another set of numbers:
1. $15,000 of 1975 dollars is about ~$95,000 of 2026 dollars
2. A heavily used 1975 Cessna 182 today costs about $150,000
What improvements in GA since 1975? They are very slow to change from what I understand. There are a ton of airframes from that era still flying today.
I mean, yeah at the top end things have gotten nicer.
>What improvements in GA since 1975? They are very slow to change from what I understand.
Which is exactly why they make a great comparison point. Harder to get bad faith sidetracked by "but your modern car has airbags" and "but your modern house is marginally bigger" type commentary when the actual product has barely changed.
Check the prices of the flagship 1975 Ferrari, the flagship 1975 Hasselblad camera, or, I don't know, a 1975 Cessna 182 in reference to median 1975 household income.
Then check it again for 2026.
Oh, but we have GPS, Amazon Prime, and doomscrolling now.
Thanks, I'd rather take the Cessna.