Doing this always makes people scream at me for being an out of touch elitist, but: the basket of {median house, new car, 2 kids to college} is more affordable today (51.5%) relative to median family income than it was in 1953 (52.3%) https://t.co/z6E41TWE5N pic.twitter.com/TzATNFUgGG

— Quantian (@quantian1) March 22, 2023

This is utter crap. It’s just complete dipshittery. Smart people think they can lie with impunity because they don’t usually encounter anyone more intelligent than they are.

Well, I am smarter than every single one of them and have read wayyyyyyyyyyyy more — which is lucky for all of you. Words have meanings, motherfuckers, and I know them all. To wit, lie number one:

The drawback to using family income measures is that they disregard persons living in nonfamily households, who tend to be disproportionately young or old.

Conversely, in some situations it is appropriate to exclude nonfamily households: for example, housing affordability. It is based on family income rather than household income, because nonfamily households are not typically buyers.

This clown is using “family” income rather than “household” income so that he can deliberately exclude those most affected by how much more expensive various life needs are now. That’s the first deception. The second bit of hokum is that the female labor participation rate roughly doubled since 1953, meaning the already-duplicitous “family income” is quite a different thing compositionally since that time. In other words, it takes more people earning more money to buy not even the same things available in 1953.

One of my points was covered more eloquently by someone else in another thread, so I will just stick that on down there at the bottom. But another very important factor this omits is health care costs. Toss that in and the calculus changes enormously. Of course, that’s exactly why it was left out.

Another issue is “Average college tuition rate.” Many colleges were completely free in 1953 so the average cost here is utterly meaningless. In most states, for a state school, your tuition would’ve been $0.

The US was also in recession in 1953. That probably also changes things a bit, but that’s incidental.

If what clown Quantian claims is in fact true, this would also not be true: “Millennials only hold 3% of total US wealth, and that’s a shockingly small sliver of what baby boomers had at their age.”

Here’s what I mentioned I’d put at the bottom — hedonic adjustments. This really distorts what is actually affordable.

Thread (1/16). How is that our economic statistics suggest workers have been making slow but steady progress in recent decades, while popular perception is that their family finances are coming under increasingly untenable pressure? I've been working on this, here's my answer:

— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) February 20, 2020

What puzzles me about doofballs like Quantian and his sophistry is attempting to figure out what they are trying to prove here? Do they just want to have us believe that Millennials and Gen Z are inherently lazy, and that’s why they are not buying houses nor building real wealth? What? I mean, they obviously have it much worse. An old girlfriend’s dad had his own apartment working part-time at a grocery store in the early 1960s, for fuck’s sake. That is completely impossible anywhere now.

Quantian is a liar. Reality tells a different story.