Matthew Yglesias published this in his substack today:

Running the numbers

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest-earning people in America continue to be middle-aged men.

They report that “usual weekly earnings were highest for men ages 35 to 54: median weekly earnings were $1,502 for men ages 35 to 44 and $1,520 for men ages 45 to 54.”

So we’re talking $78,000 to $80,000 a year.

About half of Americans live in places larger than Jacksonville, Fla., and about half live in places that are smaller. So let’s say our $80,000-a-year man is living in the Jacksonville area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates what are called Fair Market Rents for each American metro — this means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics. They say F.M.R. for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163. That comes out to about 30 percent of Mr. Median’s annual income.

Can you really get a place to live for that little?

Here’s a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it’s zoned for an elementary school with a 10-out-of-10 ranking from GreatSchools.
[I could not link the photo]

It’s true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States. But the average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970. Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that’s how people lived back in the day.

There’s more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that’s the largest item in a household budget. Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s. That’s partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, child care, and health care. But in the 1960s, most young people didn’t go to college. The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan. And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don’t need to worry about child care expenses.

The big thing is that, with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed. But the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food.

Doing lots of grocery shopping, meal planning, and home cooking — not just dinner almost every night, but packing a lunch at work, and cooking for efficiency and not just for fun — is kind of a pain in the butt. But as with the child care, you have a full-time homemaker on hand to do this. To go to the store and scrutinize prices and make sure to substitute away from expensive items and cook things from scratch. There’s a reason people used to eat all this meatloaf and tuna casserole and potatoes and canned vegetables: They were poorer and trying to stretch their food budgets. But you and your spouse could definitely live like this today, if you wanted to.

The data series for inflation-adjusted personal income (i.e., one person rather than household income that might include two earners) only goes back to 1974, but it’s gone way up since then and economic growth was very robust in the ‘60s. A sole male earner makes more money in 2025 than in 1965 when accounting for inflation.

It’s true that relative prices have shifted, but those shifts have not made it harder to afford a 1960s lifestyle on a single income. The issue is that living that lifestyle — never taking plane trips for vacation, rarely dining out, having a small house — would mean living like a poor person by today’s standards and people don’t want to do that. But that’s because we’ve gotten richer, not poorer.