There’s something weird about hourly wages to me. I had a grading job in 1983 that paid $12/hour. Which definitely felt good then, especially because I could grade papers while watching football games on Sunday. I know the math would make that number much higher, ~$36 in “current dollars.” What’s weird is that it didn’t feel that way back then or now. It’s just how I process it in my head I guess. The tuition at the school then I think was $17K/year and now it’s over $80K.

I use my great-grandfather as an example of how stagnant wages are. He was a bowling alley manager, he supported a family of 4 with just his salary. This was the 1950's. When he retired he built a brand new home on a lake.

He lived in a fascinating time of growth and expansion in the USA. He was born on a farm without a car or electricity. And he lived until the early 2000's with a cellular phone in his pocket.

I'd imagine that the $12/hr grading job at the $17k/year university is almost certainly not paying $48/hr now that they charge $80k/year, or $36/hr inflation adjusted.. if the job even exists. It's probably been efficiencied away into being some grad student TAs problem.

A lot of these pre-00s hourly wage/cost stories are kind of perplexing to me. It's interesting in how clearly they show the relative strength of labor in different eras.

I remember my dad telling me he worked in a record score & lived at home to put himself through college in the 70s. Going to college in the 2000s, this was obviously no longer in any way possible.

This was an era I was making $5/hr working retail myself, against gas that was $1.50/gal & eating off the $1 menu for my meal break.. it wasn't very much.

Looking at data, 30 years before when my dad was working he'd have made at least $2.10/hr against gas of $0.35-0.40/gal or so.

Currently the ratio in our home state would be $14/hr against gas of about $3.50/gal.

Just a data point but we hire some undergraduate graders every semester and I think the pay is around $14/hr.

I think this is because inflation in the US has two tiers.

There's the big "essential" stuff- housing, healthcare, education- which have skyrocketed in price and nowadays take a higher percentage of people's salaries. Then there's groceries, consumer goods, electronics, restaurants, which have gone up much slower. So in a way, that $12/hour was good in terms of the amount of non home cooked food you could get (or live music tickets or whatever other things you considered luxuries at the time).

The tiers are not essential vs non-essential.

The tiers are relative to the labor component.

Goods & services that have gotten more efficient over time as we've introduced technology, automation, (what we do on this site) or been offshored.. have gone up slower than inflation.

Everything that has a fixed, domestic labor component has gone up faster than inflation.

There's really no other magic trick to it.

Food is a great example. Something like 40% of the country lived & worked on farms in 1900. That number is now about 1%. That means 40% of the entire countries labor was required to feed 100%, and now it only requires 1%. So a 2.5:1 to a 100:1 ratio change of food labor consumers to providers.

Other areas like education & healthcare, the lack of efficiency is often a selling point. Look at colleges that advertise student:faculty ratios or K-12 districts that talk about classroom sizes. In my experience we've probably actually gotten less efficient as everyones gotten much more precious about the education their kids receive.

Housing might be neither. There we have artificially constrained supply, driving up prices and price volatility.

How would you drive down cost in housing? Automate building prefabricated homes of a simple common designs. Use smaller lots of land. Build smaller units. Build higher to put more units on the same land. Build multi-family/apartment style to reduce single family home costs (siding/roofing/boiler/yard/etc). Basically all the things government tends to ban and populace tends to frown upon.

Most stats have shown we haven't really made much labor efficiencies on housing construction. No one wants to live in a prefabricated / factory built home, which is what would drive down the labor costs dramatically. That said I'm kind of a weirdo and like to browse the container home websites frequently, lol.

Further, modern homes are bigger (and nicer) than our parents or their parents generation lived in.

Couple that with the land component being basically inflationary due to natural scarcity PLUS government zoning rules restricting lot sizes to be artificially high, banning multi-family construction, etc.

You have a lot (basically all) tipping the needle towards higher cost.

Given that the same house costs vastly different amounts in different places, it seems reasonable that those places drive the costs to be different. Maybe in rural Nebraska the actual cost of building materials and the technology of construction is relevant.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area the twin forces of NIMBYism and Big Government have made it difficult and uneconomical to build anything. The NIMBYs have enacted extremely restrictive zoning laws almost everywhere that prevents you from entitling projects on the front end, and well-intentioned over-regulation has driven up the cost actually building anything on the back end.

After you spend years in public hearings placating bored and angry old people, you then need to hire more professional services, pay higher impact fees, pay higher permitting fees, etc than practically anywhere else in the country. It'll cost me more to knock down my house here than it would cost to build the same plans somewhere else.

Yes, the land & zoning compliance costs in HCOL areas crowd out any of the actual building materials (and some of) the labor component.

My parents live on a 1 acre lot in a non-HCOL area, which costs 1/2 of what a parking spot in Manhattan sells for. Their 1 acre lot comes with a 2000 sq ft home.

You drive down housing costs by building more housing, full stop. Housing is expensive because the supply is extremely limited, and the supply is limited because it's too hard to actually build housing, because governments and NIMBYs seemingly don't want more housing.

There is tons of cheap, prefab housing available, they're called trailer parks. They're everywhere except where you want to be. The anti-NIMBY argument basically boils down to "If I can't have that house, no one should have it. Let's invoke the unfairness of life and have it torn down, or else build a vertical trailer park next to it."

I think the NIMBY argument is - no you can’t build stuff on your land because I don’t like it.

See it works both ways.

YIMBY argument is largely that government and neighbors shouldn’t have such a front ability to restrict development.

The YIMBY crowd basically boils down to "do whatever you want, I don't care, just don't stop me doing what I want". More basically, "government regulation bad, capitalism good". which happens to be one of the Republican party's main platform points (in theory, but only when it suits their own goals). The YIMBY crowd doesn't want to tear down your house, it wants to let YOU tear down your house and build something more profitable in its place.

Activists recently prevailed on my city's government to rewrite the zoning ordinance, making my block of single family homes eligible to be torn down and turned into 4-plexes. I personally don't have a huge problem with it - from a libertarian point of view - because in theory, that means exactly what you said. I can sell my property for more money or develop it and make more from it. The aspect of it that irritates me is that those weren't the conditions under which I bought the house, and the reasoning behind the change was a foolish sop toward social justice, and clearly comes from a place of sheer hatred born of jealousy toward anyone living in a single family dwelling. I wouldn't have bought the house to live in if I'd known that ten years later it would be surrounded by apartment buildings. And so that plus the castigation of people trying to maintain their space as "NIMBY" leaves me mainly with the attitude that they can have it, I'll take the profit and move somewhere they can't afford and have less leverage to screw up.

Again, trailer parks have been a thing for 70 years now. The innovation here has been rewriting zoning rules without actually rezoning, to bring the trailer park to people who can afford to live somewhere better. The funny thing about class warfare, though, is that people take their lack of class with them and end up making slums wherever they go, and other people manage to make a buck and stay ahead of them.

The only constant in life is change. Or as certain fictional character said, "Nothing is a line. Everything everywhere is always moving forever. Get used to it."

Buying a piece of land doesn't entitle us to control what happens on neighboring pieces of land.

My parents house used to be surrounded by farms and woods, now it's surrounded by homes.

100 years ago 5 story brownstones in NYC were surrounded by other brownstones, then by mid-rises, and now by high-rises.

The vacant lot next to me is now going to be developed into a house. If I wanted it vacant, I should have bought it and carried the RE tax indefinitely.

No one is banning single family homes. We are just trying to reconcile that the main cost lever is density, and in a country with growing population, mostly crowding into a few metropolitan areas.. if you want the next generation to be able to afford a place to live, we can't leave the real estate market ossified.

This is an attempt to change some laws set by the previous generation that restricts your right to develop your land, and freezes the housing market as it is, constraining supply.

If the state was literally banning the construction of single family homes, or taking yours away with eminent domain, you'd have more of a leg to stand on.

> The aspect of it that irritates me is that those weren't the conditions under which I bought the house

There were no conditions that the surrounding properties wouldn't change over time. You might have thought there were, but it was an illusion. If you want to control your neighborhood, buy it for yourself.

> the reasoning behind the change was a foolish sop toward social justice, and clearly comes from a place of sheer hatred born of jealousy toward anyone living in a single family dwelling.

This is ridiculous. The reason behind the change was likely because residents of your city want cheaper housing, and your government is trying to make that happen. Most Americans grew up in single family homes, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want to keep living there themselves, and any animosity towards single family homes is because these people are forced to live there because nothing else is available in their city, and they would rather spend their money on something else rather than a single family home.

Your suggestion that denser housing options like low-rise (plexes), midrise, or even highrise are "slums" is patently false.

Generally the government problem is government subsidizes demand for housing without subsidizing supply. More dollars chasing fixed goods.

Yes I think we agree here.

Restaurants have gotten more efficient over time? I don't think so. Not enough to explain why their price is so different from education or housing.

Class sizes haven't gone down in colleges, admin costs have gone up though.

What's common between them is they're essential services and the government increases their affordability. Student loans, mortgage interest deduction, tax breaks on healthcare spending (HSA, etc).

Yes, restaurants have gotten more efficient. When was the last time you went to a restaurant where you sat down and then someone walked over and took your order?

Okay it still happens but until the 1990s it was pretty much all restaurants except fast food chains. Now, it seems like most new restaurants use the "customer orders at the counter" model to save money on wait staff.

My original point was more on the farming end of things, but yes I'd argue there's clearly been efficiencies in restaurant service.

First, like it or not, chains are a form of efficiency in terms of management/procurement/logistics overhead.

Certainly more fast casual formats than before that reduce the need for front of house staff.

And as always with labor shocks, efficiencies get found. With the recent pandemic shock of restaurant shut downs & slow reopening... a lot of restaurants are back to full pre-pandemic high tables served (or more, in places like NYC where seating has expanded to large outdoors spaces never occupied 2019 or before), but never hired back their full staff.

> The tiers are relative to the labor component.

Im my experience, it seems more like the tiers are relative to the regulatory or barriers to entry.

Starting a hospital or college or building a home has regulatory barriers. And those prices have climbed dramatically the past two decades.

This is called the baumol effect. It's certainly part of the picture.

Indeed. IIRC it was .25 over minimum wage. I worked 20 hrs/week and that paid all my living expenses-apartment, utilities, food, bus pass.

Thanks for this, it’s always good to have up to date information.

What did you think of the rest of the story?

The story made me think of two things. First is my school, they had a huge shelving unit divided in ~4"x4" squares on the wall where all of the employee mail was placed.

Second was a story I read on hacker news fairly recently. There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.

I recently discovered that all of the newly built houses in my street in Japan have the exact same address. I thought the delivery guys were just wankers when they asked 'where do you live', but apparently me and all my neighbors share the same address, so delivery people have only the nameplates on the doors to go on.

Don't understand why they didn't create new addresses when they subdivided these plots from 2 to 6 houses.

Addresses in Japan have always been perplexing to me as a visitor. Tokyo has the x-y-z kind of grid system of increasing granularity, but then within the final level of granularity you kind of have to "know", or have a business card with a map on it to find anything. The building number addresses on a given street are more chronological than directional.

In spite of having been there a number of times, it was only GPS that got me to the point where I didn't need to basically give up finding something a few times a trip.

That’s really odd, if nothing else, it’s a problem for emergency services. If somebody has a heart attack, where does the ambulance go?

The streets aren't numbered anyway, so once you have a block (ban) you still need to loop round it to find the building by number (go)

Bad title but- https://geoawesomeness.com/how-the-crazy-japanese-addressing...

I can't find an image, but I was lost in Japan and had the address I needed, and a shopkeeper took out an ultra local map where each /shop/ was about the size of my thumb, to find where the address actually was.

> There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.

There may be more than one, but Costa Rica is definitely addressed this way. A hotel I stayed in was 70 meters behind the church of Saint somebody, there was a great restaurant who was “near the old tree” (and everyone knew which one!). It was impressive.

>the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area

I imagine it's pretty uncommon these days especially after all the E911 rationalization of the past 2-3 decades. But when I was growing up in a hardly back of beyond Philadelphia suburb we had a rural delivery route which was just a street name.

I imagine most everyone at a university in the US these days still has a physical inbox of some sort. But working as a not-officially-remote worker at a company, you basically can't get a work package to me unless we make special arrangements. (I basically give you my home address on the rare times I need something physically delivered.)

> There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.

Nicaragua and Costa Rica use a landmark based addressing system, where "From the park, 1 Block South" could be valid address.

> There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.

This is definitely the case in India and I used to look for a postman when lost.

Was it the Costa Rica story?

Yes! That is the story.