Comment by WarmWash
7 days ago
You might call me crazy, but at least in 2024, consumers spent ~1% less of their income on expenses than 2019[2], which suggests that 2024 is more affordable than 2019.
This is from the BLS consumer survey report released in dec[1]
[1]https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
[2]https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/consumer-expenditures/2019/
Prices are never going back to 2019 numbers though
That's an improper analysis.
First off, it's dollar-averaging every category, so it's not "% of income", which varies based on unit income.
Second, I could commit to spending my entire life with constant spending (optionally inflation adjusted, optionally as a % of income), by adusting quality of goods and service I purchase. So the total spending % is not a measure of affordability.
Almost everyone lifestyle ratchets, so the handful that actually downgrade their living rather than increase spending would be tiny.
This part of a wider trend too, where economic stats don't align with what people are saying. Which is most likley explained by the economic anomaly of the pandemic skewing peoples perceptions.
We have centuries of historical evidence that people really, really don’t like high inflation, and it takes a while & a lot of turmoil for those shocks to work their way through society.