Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
rectang | on: America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
That stability claim is an average for all American households, gathering together high-income households and long-tenure homeowners along with poor renters. But in a K-shaped economy where the wealthy do well and the rest do worse, averaging the two forks of the K hides the hardship of those on the lower fork.

From https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi...

> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. And in inflation-adjusted terms, the median rent is up 75 percent over these six decades while the median renter income has risen by just under 15 percent.

laughing_man | parent
That's not dispositive, though, since it may be that people spend more on rent because they can, i.e. other things have become relatively less expensive.
rectang | root | parent | next
When real income goes up 15% but rent goes up 75%, people are absorbing a cost, not flaunting their wealth.
rayiner | root | parent
The average house is double the size of what it was when the boomers were young.
astura | root | parent
A lot of people spend more on housing because standards have greatly increased. The average square footage of living space per person has doubled since the 1970s and tripled since the 1950s. A modest home in 2020s was a luxury house in the 50s. Families have gotten smaller and houses have ballooned.

Even when I was a kid in the 1980s I didn't know a single person whose household had multiple bathrooms, a dishwasher, or air conditioning. Not a single one.

Part of the reason why standards have increased is because incomes have increased.

rayiner | root | parent
Our 1960s house in one of the richest suburbs in the country (Mclean, VA) was 1,800 square feet. The average new house today is over 2,200.