You see this pattern across the American economy. The boomers locked in their house values by passing all the zoning regulations to artificially restrict the supply of housing. AMA artificially restricts the supply of doctors to increase their wages. Accreditation pushed ever higher costs on universities which increased costs, and the availability of loans basically cut off the brake cable. And who do you think is really benefitting from all the companies enshittifying everything and pushing up costs? The billionaires and retirees of course. And the young/working people are paying for it.

The solution for individuals is arbitrage. Remote work, get healthcare abroad, and avoid college tuitions. The fact that these things make sense at all shows how broken the markets are.

If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted.

Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples.

College and healthcare was much cheaper, and they got a lot less of it.

We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.

This is a debatable goalpost. It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself. The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further, and is that at all necessary? Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times. Yet this whole time, GDP continues to rise. It seems that our society can easily support much higher minimum wages (and this would likely have only a positive effect of stimulating the economy), but simply chooses not to.

That highly depends on your definition of "need" and where you live. If you're in a city with ludicrous cost of living, like San Fransisco, then sure. But, that's also why people commute, or just choose to go somewhere cheaper. It's somewhat shocking seeing how much higher the standard of living is, with much less income, outside the big cities.

The average person is not-quite healthy, at best.

If you look at US BLS and Federal Reserve studies on such things, they make a distinctions between what people actually spend on ordinary expenses and when people can no longer afford those categories of expenses.

An interesting artifact is that incomes across the 15-40th percentile range in the same city don't save much money but still have enough money to pay for all ordinary expenses. That is a wide range of incomes for people nominally spending their entire income on the same things. What actually seems to happen is that average people spend excess income on upgrading their lifestyle until they hit the 40th percentile, at which point the average person starts saving some of their additional excess income.

According to Wikipedia[1] median household income in the US and Norway is only about a quarter of your 160 kUSD.

I'm pretty sure that most of the people living near me in Norway are not high earners but I don't see any signs of starvation either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

Not to mention you need to be able to save money for unemployment and rainy days..

The calculator suggests $5,021 for food, but for me I’d only shop at high-end grocery like Whole Foods and buy organics whenever possible. That’s clearly not enough. On the other hand it suggests $1,792 for internet and mobile which is about double what I actually pay and I have both unlimited mobile data and unlimited home data. Then it claims medical costs of $2,890. For a fit individual with good employer-provided health insurance, that figure should be almost zero.

Ultimately the amount one spends for living depends very much on one’s preferences and these calculators are approximates. I believe you when you say many young people can live for much less, but that doesn’t invalidate the calculator.

Even on the smaller things. "Internet & Mobile" for where I am jumped out to me. Based on the difference between 1 adult and 2 adults, it's $582 per person-year for mobile (which I guess isn't far off if you get a good new phone every 2 years, it's reasonable enough) and with that subtracted, internet is $100 per month. The methodology page says "County-level data on the cost of internet comes from research on lowest-cost monthly plans from BroadbandNow", but even that page shows much cheaper options available (including the $70 per month Google Fiber I have).

If you need roommates because you can't afford an apartment on your own, you are poor by definition. That's probably the most universal definition of poverty that has ever existed. As long as there have been houses, the baseline household has had a housing unit of their own. Households that have to share housing with others have always been characterized as unusually poor, no matter the continent and the millennium.

That feels pretty close to accurate.

Having roommates is extremely common.

There are also a lot of room-for-rent situations that don’t show up on the websites listing apartments. If you’re tapped into local networks of younger people there’s always someone with a room for rent or a group of friends looking for someone to take over a room in a house they’re renting together. Not helpful for someone in their 50s moving to a new city, but for young people living on a budget this is just how it works and has for a long time.

But at least they could afford a house, right? I think a lot of people would accept living in a house without AC and more likely to catch fire. Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.

>If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted.

Car technology in the past was worse, we know that. Cars were more affordable though.

>Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples.

Like today then.

>We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.

Young people are rotting at home unable to go ahead with their lives because wages nowadays are not enough to pay for a house and a family. Why do people try to deny this obvious reality? Productivity didn't benefit everyone equally and people in the past had more opportunities to build a life inside a standard that was socially acceptable.

Why would that be reasonable? College students and young adults usually have roommates. I don't feel it's inhumane.

> The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further

Another reason to argue otherwise is because you care about the truth. Even if you and I agree on the ends, if you use the means of exaggerating or stretching the truth to get there, you are never on my side. Saying that you need to not have roommates to live is an exaggeration.

> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago

You will never find any data to support that because it isn't true. 50 years ago, flophouses were common. You would share a bedroom room with others, with shared kitchen and bathroom between multiple bedrooms. In college, I lived in a housing-coop network where we slept two to a room. 50 years ago, they slept 4 or 6 to a room in my exact house.

> and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times

This is true. But there is a very natural reason why. Look at nearly any US city, and see how many more jobs there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. Then look at how many more homes there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. You will see that the number of new jobs far exceeds the number of new homes. The result is that wealthier people bid up the housing, while poor people are forced to live outside the city and commute. So why have no new houses been built? It can't be helped by the fact that building new homes is illegal. (e.g. buildings with 3 or more apartments are illegal in 70% of san francisco.)

Please direct your anger in the right direction! It's not generally the case that billionaires own thousands of homes, hoarding them while the poor live on the street. It's more often the case that the population has increased while the number of homes in places people want to live has stayed the same. The *only* solution is to increase the number of homes in places people want to live. Raising the minimum wage, taxing the rich, fighting corporations, adding rent control laws, none of that will help solve the root of the problem, the growth rate of homes in cities is far slower than the rate of people wanting to live there!

I think others pointed this out but I don't think you can find any data to prove this because its not true.

I'm not a historian but I have seen a number of old movies and in those movies it was very common for the characters to be some poor schlub with a full time job at the factory living in some sort of group home/flophouse situation. Movies tend to reflect stories that resonate with the public at the time so I suspect that is because this was a common situation. I'd much prefer a single roommate in an apartment to a flophouse.

No, it won't be almost zero because they're including health insurance premiums in that figure. Few jobs in the US cover 100% of the premiums for their employees.

>> The cost of health care is composed of two subcategories: (1) premiums associated with employer-sponsored health insurance plans and (2) out-of-pocket expenses for medical services, drugs, and medical supplies.

I was surprised (at least for Birmingham/AL/Jefferson County) how accurately it pegged _most_ of the costs -- childcare here is closer to $12k/annum/child so that one was the only one I pegged as 'off' - they show 2 children as $16k and that's a ~$8k underestimate

The minimum wage is far below what it takes to actually 'live', like have a place to live and a car.

I spend $20/month for mobile and buy a new $500 phone every 3 years.

I make way more than a livable wage, but spend much less than their projected costs.

Historically speaking this is incredibly wrong.

Nearly every culture evolved from some sort of shared communal longhouse to individual clan homes, to extended family homes. The idea of individual private rooms actually comes about explicitly from Manors in the late medieval ages. We really didn't see widespread individual homes until the industrial revolution. In places like the East, individual rooms were an import from the West.

Even in rare places where there were individual family homes (Ancient Egypt, for one). Privacy and individuality were just not concepts. Through the 1800s, you might have literally been sharing a bed with a stranger in a hotel.

There has also never, ever been a point in human history where living without some sort of roommate was common. Even in situations where you had lots of single workers, they almost always lived in bunkhouses or SROs.

50 years ago, in high cost of living areas, you could rent an SRO, but now they're either banned or practically banned because they're strongly disincentivized against. Combine this with not building enough new housing and you get a recipe for rent increases. Even if a minimum wage works as intended, it can only subsidize demand, which would do nothing when the bottleneck is the supply.

$9000/year is a ton more than just having a car.

I think it's reasonable for young people to have flatmates and share an apartment, for example.

"The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism."

--Theodore Roosevelt

Norwegian workers do 1,418 hours per year, one of the lowest in the world

Edit: also the housing cost is probably factoring in a studio or maybe a 1bd for a single person. That may seem luxurious to you, but for many that is the only real option they have (roommates are hard to come by and can hurt you physically and fiscally).

You're ignoring the gorilla in the room. Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference? Because those things aren't available? Why aren't those things available?

Thus my point. I don’t know what “livable wage” means with these numbers so it’s not very useful for discussion or planning or measurement.

9000/yr for a car alone isn't crazy at all, just look at average car prices. I just had to do my vehicle renewal today and it was $500 for a 5 year old car that's not particularly expensive! If I look at insurance and car payments, I easily spend over 700 a month. This is on a 30k car, so it's not like I went and bought the biggest luxury vehicle possible.

A living wage is for living indefinitely, not just surviving. That should afford more comforts like a reasonable amount of space, a car if needed, and saving for retirement or emergencies.

These are all real situations that make me think that pinning "living wage" to a level where you have to have roommates is not a good goal. You're basically asking people to survive by accepting unstable living conditions and potentially taking strangers into their homes, which isn't exactly "having your needs met."

Historically housing was much smaller. And people lived with their families for a lot longer commonly. A lot less was also spent on domestic appliances (not just washer & dryers) and at-home entertainment (a lot less was spent on entertainment in general).

Well, except that it's illegal to build houses like that today, so we can't really say. But if we were permitted to build them, they'd likely be much cheaper than the housing stock we have today. Both because of increased supply and because of lower building costs.

> Cars were more affordable though.

Eehhhh... I really don't think that's true.

First, adjusted for inflation, new car prices really aren't that different than they were 10-30-50-70 years ago. You have to compare like for like, no cheating comparing a modern luxury car to Ford Pinto. For example the cheapest car in 1970 cost about $2000, with no frills like a radio, passenger wing mirror or floor matts. That's equivalent to about $17000 today. A base Nissan Versa today starts at $18000, yet includes power windows and an A/C.

Second, the maintenance requirements today are much, much lower than in the past. There's a whole list of expensive stuff you just don't have to think about with modern cars until long after those old cars would be at the junk yard (chassis lube, spark plugs, spark plug wires, carb and distributor, wheel bearings etc). That's a lot of labor you don't pay for, to say nothing of the parts!

Third, despite being heavier, more convenient and safer, modern cars have lower fuel consumption. Coming back to our Pinto vs Versa example, the Versa gets at least 50% better fuel economy.

Fourth, cars today just last longer. It used to be a minor miracle when a wasn't rusted out after 10 years or the engine still ran after 100k miles. Today, your car might be still under warranty at that point.

> Why do people try to deny this obvious reality?

Because it is not at all obvious that that is, in fact, reality. It doesn't help to complain about easily-disprovable things like the affordability of cars.

>Is a house like that cheap today? No, right? It's crazy expensive as well.

I assume by catch fire GP means electrical wiring? Many houses on market today are literally not remodeled since the 1940s so retain that original wiring.

If it is reasonable for a young person to have flatmates, then that should be because they are a student or an artist and are working only part-time while devoting the rest of their time to their studies or their art.

But a person working full-time? Who may be a single mother or father with a child to support? They should be able to afford a place to live, without roommates.

It's not "student wage". It's not "struggling young person" wage. It's "living" wage. It's for living - at any age.

For reference, that's 10:15 per day, 365 days a year. Or 996 without vacations, if you intend to have one day off.

996 has never been a standard work duration for urban workers in China, aside from some tech companies that promoted performative work ethics. And even there, people do take vacations.

You can do this. Just move to a sparsely populated area and work remote. Rural and semi-rural areas are basically the "poor", lower productivity areas within any given country, if you can arbitrage the incomes difference via remote work you stand to gain quite a bit.

For two reasons.

1. They're illegal. You're not allowed to build a house to 1936 climate, safety, and fire codes with un-licensed labor. And boarding houses were effectively banned.

2. Market. Most people would rather live in a smaller apartment than 1936 style un-climate controlled death trap.

And the reasons are the same for cars. You legally can't see a new version of a 1936 car, and even if you could most people would rather drive an old civic.

Just going off basic numbers:

- 3744/52/5 = 14.4 hour day if they work 5 days a week

- 3744/52/6 = 12 hrs if they work 6 days a week

- 3744/52/7 = 10.3 hrs if they work 7 days a week.

You don't actually need a car unless you have a child or a tradesmen with tools or something like that, a small displacement motorcycle will still take you to 99.9% of the jobs in the lower 48.

Theres also lots more people, and as more people consume more resources it does not follow that better technology in some field will translate to increased every aspect of life.

Because preferences for food, housing, and healthcare are essentially unbounded, I think you will always have unmet preferences.

It must be more nuanced than you say, as millions of people reach old age without sharing your concern.

In my 20s everyone I knew had roommates. And it was a good life.

Saying a studio or 1 bedroom is required makes this metric pretty ambiguous.

Thus my point, that this isn’t what’s required to just live. But to live comfortably.

For example, the average new-vehicle price in December 2025 was about $50,000. But people earning the living wage mostly aren't buying that kind of car. They could buy a new car for less than half that, or buy a used car. Or they may choose to take public transit.

Eg does that quants internship get a lower pay because they are expected to graduate beyond it? If so, how do we define what jobs are stepping stones and which are long-term careers?

Pick IL for example. Min wage $15, so $30k a year income fulltime. Most every adult that’s worked even a little should be able to earn decently more than min, which is for completely unskilled, new workers. Median il wage is 66k.

Even at $30k, the rough 30% rule on housing is $750/mo. At 66k it’s over $1500/mo.

Dig through smaller cities, and you’ll find apartments to rent in either end of this range. This works in any state.

Edit: Also, the US is a damn oil nation. It has nothing to do with oil, and everything to do with politics.

Edit: And looking into it a little, I'm pretty sure two of those islands actually do have mandatory paid leave after a minimum period of employment.

Those outcomes depend much more on labor policy, bargaining power, and what governments choose to protect. In many places, business pressure and media framing make long hours seem unavoidable, even though they’re ultimately the result of policy choices.

Rent is always going to go up there even if they build more. Same in other places. As long as rent setting tools exist to collude - we will see the rent not go down. You're not gonna dump $100m in new buildings and not maximize your return.

(don't worry about how to pay the ambulance bill when you hit some black ice..)

Where do you think the term "Dutch disease" came from?

There are many ways to accomplish this beyond simply raising wages. Better government programs, lower the cost of housing/medical/transportation/food/etc. (these are surprisingly simple but many vested interests don't want this to happen), better retirement programs, etc. etc. etc. You see more of this in more socially democratic countries.

Similarly, there is no US law against most crimes. It doesn't mean those laws don't exist in every State.

That said, there is no State with mandatory paid vacation either AFAIK.

Given the political diversity of the States, this suggests that mandatory paid vacation is either not considered an important issue by people across the political spectrum or there are existing regulations that would create real problems if there paid vacation was mandated without changing those regulations first.

Office workers will eat lunch, take a 1-2hr nap in the afternoon, and also eat dinner with their coworkers within the common 9-9-6 rhythm. It still takes a significant chunk of time, but the actual working time butt-in-chair is closer to 54 hours

1. Further exploit desperate people since those that don't need to work at any cost would steer clear of jobs that have 0 holidays. 2. You would further penalize people with families where both parents work. It is well understood that if your kid is sick you can't really use your sick days and so must use your PTO days. Having 0 available days doesn't play well with having kids (personal experience).

And finally, having mandated PTO allow you to actually take holidays. I heard too many times of companies that offer unlimited PTO and when the employer tries to take some they sabotage him/her or plainly threaten his/her job security.

Another way to think about it: why do we have building codes? We don't want to incentivize builders to cut corners that would risk an electrical fire or falling down in an earthquake or something in order to offer a cheaper price, so we make it illegal. If unsafe buildings are allowed, it makes it difficult for safe builders to stay in the market. Similarly, we don't want to incentivize workers to sell their labor with zero leave in order to offer a cheaper price, because that risks unhealthy and insular communities (literally unhealthy if people can't take sick leave), poor mental health, unhealthy childcare practices, an unhealthy civic environment if people can't take time off to vote or volunteer, etc. The labor market is competitive and people will sacrifice paid leave if they have to, because they need money to live, so we should make it illegal to remove the incentive.

If you would rather trade your paid vacation for an extra week of pay, I am sure you and your boss can work it out. Companies pay out unused vacation all the time. Just don't ruin it for the rest of us!

(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)

No, you do not want that.

The market value of most people's labour is very close to zero.

Left to the market most of the population would live just below starvation, a very small group of owners would live very well, and a small group of artisans would do OK supporting the tiny group.

That is where many countries are heading

(Lowering the cost of essential goods and services is also something that can be done by leveraging the open market. It doesn't take yet another wasteful government program, which is the typical approach in socialist and social-democrat countries.)

With a lot of these discussions, we need to be careful about the seductively simple solutions.

Partly because they're paying for drug innovation and defense for other countries.