A Look at Our Material Progress
In 2024, Americans elected an entrepreneur who promised to cut taxes, shrink the federal bureaucracy, and unleash market forces to make life more “affordable.” A year later, the residents of New York City elected a Marxist who claims that capitalism is crushing our American Dream. His solution? More rules and redistribution to solve the “affordability crisis.”
Year after year, we are told by whoever is in opposition and seeks to get elected to a public office that life is getting harder. Young people can’t afford anything. That America was somehow better “back then.” “Back then” usually means 50 or 100 years ago, times often romanticized by Hollywood, but when life was actually much harder and less enjoyable.
The truth is that, in material terms, we live in the best of times, and it will get better even when we hit a few bumps by electing the occasional socialist. Life now is much more affordable, safer, healthier, and full of opportunity than it was a century ago. Profit-seeking undertakers, the ones politicians love to demonize, are making everything more abundant, convenient, and reliable.
I am an economist. I work with data. I have been teaching those facts every single day for over a quarter of a century. Both my kids learned their first economics lessons from me when they were in preschool. But with all the incessant negative coverage of economic news in the mass media today, even they have bought the unaffordability myth. So, let’s look at two areas: food and fun.
Work Less, Eat Better
Imagine having to sweat on an assembly line or in a dangerous mine for three or four hours every day just to cover your grocery bills. Not excited about this prospect? Sorry, but that’s probably what you’d be doing if you were born a century ago. Today? The typical jobs are not only better, but you can earn the same amount of calories in just 30 minutes. Affordability, baby!
For most of humanity, the historical pattern was daily malnourishment interrupted by periods of starvation. Today, we have an epidemic of obesity. A hundred years ago, Americans fared better than most. Yet, compared to you, they were appallingly poor. In 1925, meat was expensive. The produce was seasonal. There was no refrigeration, no global supply chain, no high-yield farming.
Despite our government’s “food pyramid” propaganda, diets are now much healthier. Despite our government’s theft of 99% of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar (through unconstitutional Fed policies that cause inflation), I can now grab a pint of fresh blueberries from Chile at our Michigan Kroger store for just $1.99, even though my backyard is already frozen. Unaffordable?
Capitalist competition, free enterprise, profit maximization. These pursuits led to the age of plenty that you enjoy. CATO’s scholar M. Tupy and BYUH professor G. Pooley have estimated (read their 2022 book Superabundance) that even the unskilled American workers can afford dozens of common food items by working 10 times less today than a century ago. Some crisis!
Travel: Farther, Faster, Safer, Cheaper
Millions of Americans post on social media during their vacations. Next to pictures of palm trees, they leave complaints about crappy plane snacks and inadequate legroom, exorbitant resort fees, or the lack of air conditioning in their hotel rooms. But compared to their great-grandparents, Gen Z travels like millionaires. It is faster, safer, and much, much cheaper.
My son loves Universal Orlando’s parks. As a student, he works as a lifeguard, a minimum wage job. Even that pays enough to cover his round-trip to Florida by working just 8 hours. A hundred years ago, that travel would have taken three days and cost a weekly salary. Today, he leaves home after breakfast and eats dinner at the Islands of Adventure after swimming at Volcano Bay.
Our cars are faster, safer, more comfortable, last longer, pollute less, need less maintenance, and cost less in real terms. An unskilled employee needs to work only half as much today as 50 years ago to buy a pickup truck. Most vehicles on the road today come with safety features, entertainment options, and navigation controls that were science fiction to drivers in the 1920s.
Average Americans take vacations that their grandparents couldn’t have dreamed of. Alternatives to hotels have multiplied. Competition has lowered travel costs for everyone. Climate control, clean water, countless restaurants serving exotic foods from around the world, and limitless recreational options. These are no longer luxuries. I still marvel while my kids take those things for granted.
Gen Z: Celebrate, Don’t Despair
I can look back on the past fondly because I was young then. OK, music was better in the 1980s, too. Gen Z, however, should stop listening to people who claim that the past was more affordable. It wasn’t. Today, chances are that you will live longer, eat better, work less, travel more, learn fascinating things, and have more opportunities than any human who ever lived.
Debt? When your parents were your age during the fall of the Berlin Wall, the average, inflation-adjusted net wealth (assets minus liabilities) per household in the bottom 50% was $33,000. Today, it’s almost double: $60,000. Homes too expensive? Today—perhaps. Blame government restrictions on the supply. Price per square foot between 1975 and 2015? Almost no change.
College tuition rising faster than inflation? Blame the government for messing with that market. When taxpayer money is channeled to consumers of goods or services, higher demand means higher prices. Econ 101. Do you need two salaries to raise two children? We saved enough on one modest salary in 7 years to buy a house in Midland, MI. We paid it all with cold, hard cash.
The world isn’t getting worse. Your spending habits might be. In every measurable way, life is getting better. No previous generation has had more physical comfort and such amazing chances to develop productively and prosper. Study some history. If you stop moaning about decline and start noticing the progress, you might even enjoy your lives as Gen X is enjoying ours.
This piece originally was published by the Independent Institute.