Someone's overlooking the low low cost of buying a house back then. Essentially 2 years of salary. Housing where I live is now 20 years of median salary and about 19 years of average salary, and far more once you consider a loan.

There’s places in the US where average rent is close to that, and I bet if we removed NYC and the Bay area the national average wouldn’t be super far off.

Sorry but I think you're mistaken or several years out of date. I live in a midwestern city that overall has pretty reasonable cost of living. I also used to be a Property Manager for one of the bigger national companies. Our class B properties here were ~$800 for a 1 bedroom up until Covid, $1050 for a 2 bedroom. Now they're 1300 for a 1 bedroom and 1600 for a 2 bedroom. House prices around here have done the same thing. I think it's 800+ to be in a trailer park.

I avoid the official income averager for just that reason. It skews to make things look like they aren't as bad as they really are.

If you just look at the prices of houses and labor, you get a much different story.

Back in 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the average house was $11,000.00. A high school grad could buy a house.

Or, think of it this way. The 'offical' rate tells us that $1 million in 1960 would be $10 million today.

In 1960, $1 million meant a Beverly Hills mansion, a half dozen luxury cars, and enough left over to buy a block of businesses.

Today, $10 million will get you a condo in Manhattan.

The average income, according to a quick search, was $975. Comparing this to the current US median wage of $32k (and keep in mind the 1937 figure is arithmetic mean, the median was likely lower), incomes went up at a rate far beyond inflation as well. Not everything is affected equally. Though without living in the US and mostly guessing from prices here I'd guess many things on the list went up even more, like movie tickets.

The same search also suggested that the 1937 average wage was 25% lower than the 1932 one, so it seems 1937 was actually a pretty shit year.

To add to this, a new car in 1938 was $860 according to this, but essential information was left out. What that actually converted to in today's money $18,709.33 which is a lot less than what I'm paying today but only by about half. I don't disagree with wanting to get back to this point or better. But the picture seems to assume the reader already knows this?

Well..it's heavily subsidized, so you pay for it in taxes and then pay for it at the store.

Yes but a house would only cost $84,240 in todays dollars. It's all relative.

I wonder what median wage is like. Average, which I assume is mean, would be greatly skewed by high wage earners since the lowest you can go is zero (if that even counts as a wage), but the highest you can go is much higher and far more people are closer to the lowest wage than the top.

The median was about $1200, or about $26,000 today.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-families/41272167ch7.pdf

Revolutions are a response to material conditions. Typically it was already a shit show, then the revolution happens and it gets even shitter very briefly, before working itself out over time.

It would be kinda funny if, in like two hundred years, historians refered to this time period as "The Total Shit Show."

Poundful of sugar helps the medicine go down

Kurt Vonnegut's book 'Mother Night' takes place around 1965. There's a line where a shut in almost swoons when strawberries come back in season. Today you can get fresh fruit any month.

You can tell by the average income (2nd line), it being almost 50% of the price of a new house says pleeenty

It says average salary