> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price

This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.

There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.

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probably_wrong 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.

But so many things did become cheaper and better: computers, availability and quality [1] of the music I can physically buy, the energy efficiency of modern fridges, the speed and safety of modern cars. Even my milk lasts impossibly long without spoiling.

If the replacement laptop battery I can buy today for ~$50 is leagues ahead of anything available in the 70s, then why aren't jeans and backpacks also miles ahead of what was available back then? No wonder the younger crowd is confused.

[1] Yes, CDs are objectively better than vinyl. Whether the audio mastering has kept up is a different topic.

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bluGill 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I bought some $100 jeans a few months ago, hoping they would be better than the $25 I used to buy 30 years ago. They are not better than the $25 jean I can buy elsewhere today.

	▲	square_usual 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not every $100 pair is made the same, and price is not a proxy for quality. You can definitely get a $100 pair that is meaningfully better than a $25 pair today.

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parliament32 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.

But don't we see this everywhere, all the time? Pull up any of the recent Claude Code threads about the product's declining quality and you'll see at least a handful of well-upvoted comments about how text generators are definitely going to get cheaper while simultaneously getting "better" over time.

	▲	eudamoniac 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		New things, like computers, get better and cheaper because they are new, so there is a lot of room for improvement. We have had a very long time to optimize making cotton into clothing, or growing and transporting wheat. There is a limit to how cheap those things can get for a given quality point and a given level of technology, and we've pretty much reached it.

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eesmith 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).

That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28

To double check, in 1983 a hamburger and fries was $1.82 - https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/m... .

That corresponds to $6.03 now.

What sort of hamburger places were you thinking of that charged 3x the price of McDonald's, and do they only charge $17 now?

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eudamoniac 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Like at a diner, not at the cheapest possible place that existed.

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eesmith 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You'll need to give more details.

Diners like the one portrayed in The Olympia Restaurant sketches on SNL were cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puJePACBoIo

Others now are far more than $18.

My first >$20 burger dinner was in 1997. That's >$41.15 now.

EDIT: Ahh, here - price for a hamburger in the staffed dining car of a passenger train from Houston to Chicago, 1972, was $2, from https://archive.org/details/spacecity03spac_44/mode/2up?q=%2... while $3 gets you "grey sole with soup, salad, rolls, vegetables, and dessert." The author suggests the hamburger price is high, as an inducement "to observe formalities."

$2 then is $15.80 now. Fries not included.

At https://archive.org/details/neworleansunderg0000coll/mode/2u... we read that an excellent hamburger at Ruby Red's in New Orleans cost $1.25 in 1970, which is $10.64 now. While at Bud's Broiler hamburgers run from $0.40 to $0.60. https://archive.org/details/neworleansunderg0000coll/page/22...

So I find it hard to believe most people back in 1970 were paying the equivalent of $17 for a burger and fries.

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eudamoniac 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I could go back through my history to find the specific source I used, but it has absolutely no bearing on the point of the post, since even your McDonald's prices are higher than the current app+value menu prices, so I'm not going to and I struggle to understand why you wrote all that to not refute the central point.

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eesmith 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?

Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".

My original comment was to mention that one of your numbers seemed rather high. To keep from it being a you-said-I-said thing, I gave supporting evidence. You didn't like the research I did, so I gave more supporting evidence that you are likely off by a factor of 2-3 for the hamburger prices.

Perhaps that means things weren't as expensive back then as you thought they were?

Like, while I can certainly find dresses in the $47 or higher range (you wrote "typical dress was $350") in this 1974 catalog https://archive.org/details/tog-shop-clothing-1974/page/n105... , that's from the Tog Shop, founded by fashion designer Paula Stafford, and with brands like Lacoste and the more expensive clothes list the designer or design house by name, which hardly seems typical at a time when Sears was selling dresses for less than half those prices and people made their own clothes to save money.

There's some great looking clothes in there, by the way.

And there were some expensive shitty things back then, like American cars which were soon to be trounced by Japanese imports that were both cheaper and better.

	▲	eudamoniac an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970? Probably? I'm not going to assert it but I would be unsurprised. > Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be". Again, what is your point? I'm sure there exists more than a few examples of things getting cheaper and better, maybe even most things? That doesn't mean it is a universal phenomenon that should be expected and cause anger when it doesn't happen. Your multi-paragraphs about the dress... also doesn't refute the point that things were more expensive back then. There are many Temu dresses for <$10 which was $1.50 in 1970. The 1970 Sears catalog has most dresses around $10. Okay, great, the dress you prefer to compare is "only" 6.7x more expensive. You got me! Great work choosing cheaper examples than I did, for sheer pedantry! Muting you now as I don't find your post history otherwise valuable.

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dfxm12 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.

It's less an implicit feeling, and more explicitly what's being marketed to us. Think about AI. It's being marketed that it will make everything better and cheaper. Computers before that. Machines before that. All kinds of things in between.

I don't doubt this is possible, especially if these technologies are properly democratized, but greed gets in the way, of course. No one wants to sell you just one fridge at a respectable mark up. These tools don't really go into making a better fridge, per se, but finding what you're willing to and how frequently you're willing to replace it and design planned obsolescence around that. They add subscription features. They want you to log into your fridge to track and sell your behavior, etc.

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thaumasiotes 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350.

The Internet Archive claims to have Sears Catalogues from many years including 1970. If we check out Spring/Summer 1970, we can see that they actually have the first 33 pages of a catalogue that prominently advertises "index begins on page 391".

Disappointing.

That said, a women's dress from those first 33 pages costs $11, or about $100 in today's money.

	▲	eudamoniac 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My source was https://thewarwhoop.com/9677/news/average-cost-of-dresses-th... but either source supports the point; you can get Temu dresses for a lot less than $100 now.

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_DeadFred_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because this is the promise made to us by capitalism/capitalists. Efficient markets will drive down prices/improve quality. A rising tide lifts all boats.

It's kind of like China after Tiananmen where the promise is quality of life will go up in exchange for nobody talks/questions.

If capitalism can't deliver on it's promise (more and more people don't feel that it is) then we need to have a talk.

	▲	IAmBroom 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> If capitalism can't deliver on it's promise (more and more people don't feel that it is) then we need to have a talk. Perhaps even a strongly worded letter?