Disagree. Presenting partial information like this distorts and confuses people's understanding.

Some things yes and some things no. It is not and cut-and-dry as you think.

Look up the inflation adjust prices for a computer or a "big-screen" TV and realize almost no one pays anything near those prices for any consumer good. On the other hand there are a lot more people in the US and it is not like land is sprouting up from nowhere, so the price of land is a lot more.

Most things though fall into what people's personal preferences are. Cars have more luxury, house are bigger and have better finishes, movies are huge spectacles, one person can't watch 8 infants, you get more than an aspirin from formerly untreatable diseases; roll all this back and prices will drop.

I 100% disagree with this and don't think it is particularly close? Sure there are some specific locations that are much more expensive, and there are some locations that are much cheaper. Overall if you want the same things it is way more affordable today than the 80s and 90s. But our standards have risen a lot and things that used to be considered middle class are now considered poor.

Americans just won't buy these "cheap" cars. Almost every American car-maker, and most foreign car importers too, have dropped passengers cars from their lineup year-after-year leaving only SUVs and trucks. Look at what Ford and GM offer in Latin America; small, affordable cars. Every now-and-then they try to bring something similar to the US and it's sales numbers are always dismal. The US is mostly rich (by world standards) and has premium preferences. The huge gulf is between what people say they want and what they actually end up buying.

>Focusing though on the cost (you know, no one is going to prevent you from wearing a seatbelt) where is the equivalent today? A used Ford Focus off of Craigslist? A double-wide in a trailer park?

A brand new Nissan Versa for $17,300.

Work for an entire year after high school while living with your parents and saving money so you can attend a state school for <$10,000/year. Don't take out student loans so you can buy a premium laptop, luxury clothes, and travel. Don't get a new phone every one or two years. Don't sign up for 5+ streaming services. Don't buy coffee and toast from cafes.

https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/versa-sedan.html

You're right, a 4 year loan in the 80's basically didn't exist.

Well anything can sound dumb, when you simplify it to something dumb. We have multiple airbags, anti-lock braking, seatbelt pretensioner, collision avoidance, crumple zones, fuel pump automatic shut off, backup cameras, rollover testing, ... Vehicles do an amazing amount of things to keep their occupants alive in a crash.

> And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain.

I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.

My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.

Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.

I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.