This is also true for computers and tech in general.

I do have a friend, however, who is a software engineer at a large company where the CEO and other executives don’t understand software. They don’t understand what is reasonable to expect software to do, how it is made, how software projects are managed, or how a web-based service is run.

That might have been cute 30 years ago, but if you can’t find your Start menu in 2019, it’s no longer cute and you should be fired for incompetence. Computers aren’t some peripheral technology only used by experts and haven’t been for a very long time. Everyone has one on their desk. Some bare standard of competence should be required. “I’m not good with computers” is no longer a valid excuse in the workplace. It should be a firing offense if training doesn’t work.

I say this not because I am a computer expert, but because a basic standard of any job is that you should have much more than a passing familiarity with your main work tool. Why we make an exception for computers (with for what average users do are remarkably simply) I have no idea at all.

Kevin Drum and this dipshit should give a class in how to lie with data. They are masters at it.

My extra spicy, super hottest take of all time: housing, education, and health care are all cheaper today than the 1970s

Yes, you can show me a graph with lines going up over time faster than wages or CPI, but to see why that's a bad measure read this THREAD https://t.co/NeLOMuUFbj

— Jeremy Horpedahl 🍍 (@jmhorp) May 1, 2019

Ignoring for the moment all the issues with how no one can buy a square foot of housing a la carte, in 1973 the average home price was $33,000 and the average wage was $7,600 (round numbers for ease of comparison).

Looking at it in a more sane way than the Horpedahl putz, that means the average worker required 4.3 years of earnings to buy the average house in 1973,

How about now? I’ll use data from 2017 (2018 would be worse). Using the same census.gov data, the average selling price in 2017 was around $320,000 and and the average income in 2017 was $48,000.

This means that in 2017, the average worker would have to work 6.7 years to buy the average home — an increase of 2.4 years of labor required or 36% more. Remember, no one can buy a square foot of housing. This framing is absurd and only a fucking spreadsheet jockey could produce such specious donkey vomit. Also, his “analysis” ignores agglomeration effects, inequality, the Great Recession, and a dozen other important factors.

By the way, it gets even worse if you use median income instead of average. The median person income in the US in 2016 was only around $32,000, for a “years of income to buy” of 6.9 years.

I know he said later that he meant to say that he was using 1978 data, but 1973 or 1978 makes little difference to the analysis. He’s clearly wrong in every possible way and like a lot of classroom-intelligent people, he’s masterful at lying with data. This is how his type get ahead, with their Slate-esque contrarian hot takes and hoodlumish hoodwinking of the (as they see it) lower orders.

I will not stand for that shit. Health care and education are even more expensive than housing when compared to the 1970s, by the way. What an unpardonably shoddy thinker.