The Price Of Bread

There is a whole lot wrong here. First and foremost there is no indication of any of the sources of any of this information, so let’s track that down first. The Census Bureau tells us that the first number isn’t far off – the median family income in 1971 was $10,290. We also find with a bit of quick google-fu that the median price of a new car was $3890, and a new home was a nice even $25,000. Of course none of those numbers are normalized – those are 1971 dollars being compared to 2024 dollars, which is sort of the whole point of the exercise.

The “reader added context” in this case isn’t particularly helpful and leans toward its own agenda.

First and foremost the reader feedback ignores that the entire point of the framing is to compare price increases of specific items to baseline inflation. I believe the intent of the writer was to imply that life is much more economically challenging for most of us than a simple broad average inflation rate tells us, so noting that the numbers haven’t been normalized doesn’t really address any of the problems with the tweet and in fact mostly serves to point out that the people offering that particular criticism didn’t understand what they read very well. The fact that the numbers aren’t normalized is the whole point of the tweet.

Second, there aren’t many people alive right now who were around in the 70s who really feel like they have nearly twice as much purchasing power today as they did fifty years ago, and there are some very good reasons for that.

While the implication that quality of life is significantly improved across the board for most people is ostensibly supported by adding up the cash value of various goods and services, it also overlooks the necessity of far greater levels of spending than were necessary fifty years ago, even accounting properly for inflation. This is propaganda in the other direction; suggesting that people are basically doing just fine right now and any struggle you’re experiencing must be down to something other than a steadily decreasing quality of life. In short: gaslighting.

But I digress, let’s get back to the tweet at hand and check some numbers. I’ve included a few direct citations links, those numbers not directly linked come from the same or similar sources.

The median family income “today,” i.e. 2023, the most recent year for which statistics have been properly documented, is $80,610 – a difference from the quoted post of about $32K, and an increase of 8x, rather than 5.5.

Already this is going to make the comparisons less striking, and we haven’t even checked them yet, but let’s finish the job for posterity and we’ll move on to understanding why we can’t keep doing this, nor allow it to continue being done.

A new car in 2024 is averaging about 48,400.

A new home is about $420,400 – a greater increase than the tweet by about 18% (and an increase of about 17x rather than the 14x cited).

The rest of the numbers are similarly garbled; an ivy league education in 1971 was 2600 rather than 3K – a difference of about 13%. Today’s cost is 64,690 – $25K less than cited. The Social Security Administration tells us that per-capita health care expenditures in 1971 were $358 – less than 90% of the number given here. The most recent available information is for 2022, which the WHO tells us is 12,473 – about a sixth less than this tweet reports.

So we’ve established that, at the very least, there are significant errors in basic information here, which of course throws all the calculations off.

We’re not off to a good start; if someone wanted to argue against the core thesis of the tweet (that the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971), this writer has certainly given them plenty of ammunition to call their basic reliability into question, which delegitimizes the thesis in the reader’s mind before it even happens.

It all forces us to consider: why are we listening to this person or taking this message seriously in the first place?