Data is Beautiful

shoutout to the pear

My apologies, as my original upload I had fucked up copying the column of states, and accidentally copied the wrong list. The corrected map is now up. I didnt want to repost the entire thing over my stupidity

I love this idea, I may have to try and take a crack at it tonight

Shit good eye, thank you. So $16k give or take in todays money, about half the price of modern cheap cars.

The sources I was looking at for the price of random stuff back then were not of the highest quality. It definitely said $14k for a Ford, but I didnt verify the number whatsoever.

Thank you again!

Yeah it can’t be. Even an expensive car like a Corvette was only around $6k and most of the examples on this list are in the $2-3k range.

Thank you!

Yes, the shading is based on how affordable each state would be, assuming that one works a second job for 10 hours a week, which would also be at the same wage. Equating to another $18k or so a year.

So in the green, a person working a second job 10 hours a week would make enough or more than enough money to afford COL.

In the white, its about neutral.

In the red, the redder it gets the more extra work an individual would have to do to afford COL. By the time you reach Hawai’i, an individual would have to work almost two full time jobs at $35/hr to afford COL in 2025

I used 50 hours as a defining point of “reasonable” because Ive worked everything from 40 per week up to literally 100 doing two jobs ($12/hr each). No one should have to work over 50 per week IMO without massively benefiting from it. And its hard to get overtime at their first job for most people

Another point being that usually that one earner was producing 95% of the income or whatever for their household in most cases and able to care for an entire family. These days most households are split income between two people and still cant afford just childcare in and of itself. So in some senses one could actually say it would be more accurate to compare against today’s cost of living for an entire family of four, which would obviously make the numbers ludicrously abysmal

The richer are certainly richer, but the richer dont tend to earn most of their money through salaries or wages these days. Its mostly money borrowed against capital that then sits in accounts generating more interest than they can spend.

Back in the late 50s things were relatively democratized, so that average is pretty good I would say. It wasnt 6 people who owned half of all the money. Even the richest 10% back then probably did not control more than half the money. The census for 1958 identified households with over 10k in income as being extremely well off.

Contrary to high school economics that should, in reality, increase effective pay.

(At least until you simply run out of raw resources, which is coming but not yet)

Workers produce more value than they consume. No economy in the world would work otherwise.

To put it another way:

The average American worker will produce goods and services worth seven times more than what they consume over their lifetime (measured as GDP/average income which is problematic but close enough for a forum post)

And now you know why the oligarchs want you to breed, because a significant portion of that loss of value goes right into their pockets.

72,800 is $35 an hr for 40 hours work 52 weeks out of the year.

I definitely agree with your general points about averages. The best I can find is that the median family income in 1958 was $5,100, so not super far off (and above the comparable average). And that is for waged and salaried work, not exclusively salaried work.

My gas is particularly expensive where I live, and I do suppose $3 a gallon average is perfectly on par with $0.25 a gallon back then, so thats very fair

The numbers in my post perhaps are haphazard, but that is just random shit I was thinking about in finding a reasonable point to set the hypothetical wage at for the map. Eventually I found the official reports of different wages from back then, which is better than randomly speculating on differences in prices of goods (especially considering market factors as you pointed out), but is also far better than saying “the minimum wage should be equivalent to what it was in 1956/8” because back then the minimum wage was mostly being paid to literal children, and adults who were underpaid for racial or gendered reasons that shouldnt apply today. Few people were actually working for the minimum wage back then that were not dependents of someone else. Children, and women who were socially forced to be basically. The average wage paid hourly was over $2 IIRC

Houses we're also much smaller. Like 1000 sq ft. Now I can't live in a house smaller than 2500 or it feels too small to me