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Notes -
“Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise” link
This is trending on Twitter so might as well discuss it here anonymously.
I know more than a few people say it’s just vibes and the data is good but I think this article makes a strong point that a real loss of social capital has actually made younger people poorer. And I believe this links into the fertility debate because the goods that you could buy before with social capital are especially needed with children. Having kids has gotten very expensive. I think everyone knows education, housing, and health care have boomed in costs. Being single means you don’t need to take on these costs. You can have kids if you are poor and live off government resources or you can have kids if you are rich but it’s a financial disaster for the upper middle class.
I largely come down to diversity (mass migration) and the Great Migration killing American social capital that the boomers had. Before these things occurred we had cheap urban housing because people weren’t afraid of their neighbors and cheap public schools. And homogenous urban environments have a lot of social capital for their residents. Also you had cheap babysitters because your neighbors were like you and you trusted them. Your kids could just go to the park alone. So childcare was free. I feel comfortable blaming diversity on rising housing costs (zoning the poor away from good communities) and for rising educational costs (falling public school quality).
So yes I think today’s generation is poorer in a lot of ways that really matter due to less social capital (but richer in other ways). And I do think the ways we are poorer today are especially bad for fertility where you now need to buy those goods in the market but they were free before.
I will say this as a man, it really sucks ass having to compete with other men for stuff like good jobs, girls, etc. I'm in the gym 4 days out of the week, calorie deficit, I just got out of another 2nd round job interview, gonna do another tomorrow, hoping to get something high paying with the degree i got (in my lucky case, for free) and the certs. I've done damn near 4 -5 internships and a part time job. Thankfully i live in a city that actually builds housing so its not horribly bad, but I'm not anywhere near where I'd like to be in my life. I got lucky with a girl Im seeing by complete accident. Its just better to date as a man when you have your own place and a decent paying job, and those things are insane amounts of work to get your hands on. Im glad someone's validating my (and others) experience, instead being told about how "good" we have it now compared to the past.
Part of its technology. When your social pool of people expands from your local neighborhood to the entire country, people aren’t going to think their backyard community of individuals will ever be good enough because they can find an inage of their ideal man or woman only a few clicks away. People say assortative mating is still the way of the world and it both is and it isn’t. It’s always the case that you have to date or shack up with someone physically proximal to you (that’s kind of inherent in the relationship process…), but what the rest of the world inundates you with completely warps your perception of what people used to commonly think a relationship entails.
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Boomers didn't have to do any of this. You probably have to to the extent you live around strivers and immigrants from India and China. I didn't have to do much of this because I don't live very close to those places, and neither have my similar aged family. But the consequence is no flashy Silicon valley wage or job. I have come and gone from striver dominated places and every time I felt I was pushed to behave like this. They had dry dating pools, I ended up feeling pushed to lose tons of weight just to get matches that I could have easily gotten at home, the jobs were cutthroat but not very important, just like you experience.
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Conflating Great Migration and mass migration makes me think you’re reasoning backwards.
As I understand it, immigration slumped during the Depression and didn’t recover until Reagan. Wiki shows a different trend but still suggests the bulk of migration happened before WWI. So I find it unlikely that immigration could explain the effects you want.
Actually, when are those effects, exactly? Because I think it makes a huge difference if you point at the 60s vs 70s vs 80s. Depending on the specific point, I can think of a dozen technologies which have changed how people handle their kids, even without talking about demographics or gang violence.
I think you’re skimming over economics in your rush to blame black people. Automation and the World Wars pulled more and more women out of the home. That alone should have had a bigger effect on childcare.
Do you disagree that a commons of free public schools has declined recently? Or were the schools NEVER good? I follow Moses Kagan on Twitter who I just affluent liberal in LA and I remember one of his tweets were that he would have just paid up for a house in a suburb because of how much it would have saved him on private school tuition. This seems like a common thought to people today that you can’t send your kids to public schools outside of the right suburbs.
What caused this?
I point to migration both internally and externally.
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Women were not pulled out of the home by economics. It was culture- male wages were steadily rising and the US did not experience prolonged unemployment during the period when it shifted from unusual to the default. That cultural shift had knock on economic effects.
The world was and is naturally very cruel. People died (or at least suffered from) starvation, disease, the elements, etc quite often. Most of history was not a place where even the surviving young children could get away without helping out with the crops or other chores, yet alone the able bodied adult women. The world was not kind enough for freeloaders.
Women worked. They did not work a traditional job, but they worked. In the peasant times, women milked cattle, tilled fields, managed crops, kept chickens, cleaned, made clothing (especially necessary at the time where minor scratches and infections could kill and no A/C or heating), hauled water, picked fruits and vegetables and various other tasks.
Many of those tasks are no longer relevant thanks to economic and technological innovations. We've gone from a time of vast malnutrition to vast overnutrition in the western world, having everyone grow their own crops and milk their own cattle is ridiculous now. Even the tasks that do remain like cleaning or cooking are made significantly easier now thanks to technology. Laundry is no longer a chore that one sets most of their day aside for. Things not only make less dirt (imagine the difference between a sooty fire and the modern oven for instance) but cleaning chemicals are also more efficient and don't take as much to make since they're also done by technology now.
Traditional women's work has just been largely automated away. For a short period of time some of the middle class women were in a social situation where working a job wasn't expected but the housework they would have traditionally been doing was also largely gone, so they got to spend more of their days doing stuff like watching soap operas or whatever. But the time of the lazy do nothing housewife was short lived, and it was always going to be short lived. The economic incentives and advantages to having two productive earners instead of one + parasite is clear and obvious. People with nothing to do will be given something to do, they will be productive as well. The world wars accelerated this, but it was always going to happen as long as people and families value money. It can not be reversed unless you change this fundamental desire for wealth part of humanity, good luck.
I always roll my eyes when I see someone object to the argument I’ve never seen anyone make when someone says “women haven’t worked,” as if it’s a stand in statement to claim the prevailing paradigm isn’t radically different from the way of the past.
No. Women haven’t always worked. Women have always labored, in some capacity. Women haven’t always had a traditional, 9am-5pm professional vocation, post May Day Demonstrations and Henry Ford. And it’s why the arguments that denigrate that the value and labor of the housewife and SAHM never made sense, because when you come home after a hard day’s work, dinner still has to get made and laundry still had to get done; regardless.
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They were pulled from the home by economic incentives, not economic need. As wages rose, employment became an increasingly attractive alternative to staying home.
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Me ex left me about 5 years ago.
Previously we were splitting mortgage and utilities that came out to (for ease of calculation) $2000/month.
When she left, she got an apartment that cost (again, ease of calculation) $1500/month. I kept the house/mortgage/utilities and pay those fully out of pocket.
So I'm spending $1000/month more than I would be in the counterfactual where she stayed (was paying $1000 for housing, now $2000). She'd spending an extra $500/month (and I didn't even count utilities and such for her). We'd cumulatively have $1500/month 'extra' if we stayed together. Over a year that's $18,000. Over 5 years, that's $90,000. So I would, individually, be $45,000 richer (probably more! I could invest more!) in that counterfactual. That's several vacations, a new car, that's a new roof on the house or other major renovations.
I am doing well for myself. Salary is fine, debt is manageable.
I would be doing much better if I could find a reliable partner to shoulder either part of the bills or the housework or, ANYTHING really. Financially the 'hole' I'm in compared to the one where I'm happily married is getting deeper by the month.
And there are millions of people in similar situation, could be partnered but are not. Those folks don't, strictly speaking, show up in the economic stats as 'struggling.'
And that's before we talk covid-induced inflation and the attendant increase in prices of housing, vehicles (and insurance, and repairs), and medical care.
So yeah, there are some feedback loops out there that can make someone doing fine 'economically' still be struggling. Big one: difficulty finding affordable housing means more living with parents which means harder to find a partner, which makes it harder to afford housing, AND means there's more housing demand (if people start moving in together, that reduces demand on housing and lowers prices!).
And being clear, I'm not angry at her about it. I've processed and moved on. But I'm acutely aware of the price of being single, if for no other reason than to help me calibrate how much I should 'compromise' to bring a new woman into my life.
Having a partner can also be very very expensive. I'm easily $500k+ in the hole from paying all my ex-girlfriend's costs, who refused to get a job for 15+ years. (I'm extremely low-status in the dating market. I finally got out of the relationship, so at least I'm alone and miserable rather than paying through the nose and miserable.)
What's funny is that I wouldn't even have minded a trophy-wife situation where I at least got decent sex out of the deal. I know suggesting that makes me the worst kind of misogynist. We're supposed to pretend that relationships aren't transactional. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/communication-2
500 k$ ÷ (15 a × 365 d/a) = 91 $/d
That's comparable to the cost of legal prostitution in Australia. But, unfortunately, prostitution remains illegal in the Land of the Free™.
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I'm almost afraid to jinx myself, because I have such a good thing going, but I'm eternally grateful my wife and I made it through so many trials and tribulations. We survived losing jobs, lockdowns, health issues, values drift, relocating. Then the usual things like having kids, buying a house, etc. I truly don't know what I'd be doing with my life without her and the life we've built together.
All that said, somehow, I'm making 50% more in take home pay than my last job, and yet with a stay at home mom and two kids, my budget is stretched thinner than it's ever been stretched before. I heard some random anecdote/joke on a woodworking channel. Dude knew some guy who had 6 kids, and he asks how he can afford so many. Guy says "Well 6 kids costs the same as 3 kids". Dude just goes "WTF?!" and guy responds "No matter how many kids you have, they cost everything". And that's about right. No matter how much money you make, there always seems to be something the kids "need", or in many cases need. Like being kept out of public schools run by fucking machines.
It’s because there’s a lot of talk about the devaluation of the dollar, and everything’s more expensive, etc., which is all true to some degree. I’ve continued noticed the cost of food prices steadily creeping up in ways that have caught me by surprise; because they haven’t plateaued yet; and likely won’t come down in the future. Input prices are becoming more expensive. What’s almost never acknowledged thought is lifestyle inflation. Just consider the way people live today and what they expect from the world.
When I reflect on my life growing up, my sibling and I were spoiled pretty rotten early on by our extended family and especially grandparents. My father did quite well and made enough money for my mother to stay at home. She never had a job in her entire life. Taken care of by dad and then by husband. But my father was pretty tight with money and what he considered a “necessity.” Not really when it came to his own personal habits the way I saw it, but definitely where it concerned my sibling and I. Car needs to be fixed? Did it himself. Including changing the head gasket by himself. Home cooked meals every night. No eating out. I went to public school (hated it). We can get by without a fancy private school. Networking to move us into a place leased by a family friend. Rent was lower than the market rate. Across the board. How many people would you say on average operate with that kind of mentality today?
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There's some factors about additional kids that are merely additive vs. multiplicative, I've heard.
Obviously you can hand down clothes, toys, etc. Once the older ones are old enough to be responsible, they can supervise the younger to some extent. Once you have a minivan you just need proper seating.
I've got a buddy who has two kids... and a buddy who has FIVE. I hang out with both of them at the same time, and last time all the kids were there. It was wonderful controlled chaos, 4 kids playing Mario kart whilst 2 others cheered them on and a third was playing with the family dog. They keep each other entertained and they're all mostly toilet trained and know how to eat properly. In a certain sense, I could absolutely see myself raising 7 of the buggers simultaneous (no, not really, but aspirationally sure).
And they both live fairly comfortable lives, its just all free time is consumed by the kids' needs.
So yeah, I expect every spare red cent will go into the family, and I'll have to give up most of my bachelor ways, but I do not fear financial apocalypse.
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You are talking about it’s cheaper to have essentially a roommate - a childless relationship.
I was highlighting how it’s much more expensive today to NOT be single but have a child bearing relationship. Costs sky rocket in that situation because you need to live in areas safe for families with good schools or pay for private school. Family health care is expensive.
A childless relationship is really just being single with a roommate. And yes that’s cheaper.
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I have to work to remain silent when some of my longtime married friends complain about money. Several couples I know have been married since law school (so 20 years now, sigh), they have been sharing rent/mortgage/expenses since then, they bought houses during the 2015-2020 3% interest/lower prices sweet spot, the ones working for governments got some loan forgiveness during the Biden jubilee, etc. They are $300k plus ahead of people who married later and bought houses later (to say nothing of being way ahead of chumps who were foolish enough to pay off student loans). The world's tiniest violin is still too large when they complain about money.
My ex is the one who convinced me to buy a house, which turned out to be EXCELLENT timing. Closed in November 2019, right before Covid arrived and locked us all indoors and shot housing prices through the roof. Miraculous timing. That's a silver lining in the whole situation. Without her I'd probably even now be stuck without a house! Drastically different life course.
She also left right as interest rates were at their lowest, so I refied into an even lower interest rate (with the help of a good friend).
I am exceedingly lucky in this regard. My youngest brother just bought a house with his wife (and kid!) and his payment is twice what mine is. Its a good spot, though.
There's like six times in those previous 5 years where I might have ended up having to sell the property if things had gone differently, due to sudden expenses or dips in income. The immediate aftermath of a hurricane was a rough one for me. But I pulled it out each time.
It is only recently, like the last six or so months that I've felt like I'm not constantly 1 bad month away from a serious lifestyle downgrade.
It really sucked at the time.
DINKs get no sympathy from me.
I bought my first house in July 2008, so basically the top of the market before the housing bubble burst. Sold it 5 years later for basically the same amount, which considering the overall housing appreciation trends of the past 30 years is REALLY sad.
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Part of why people are single is that women expect a provider in a marriage. If they are asked to pay half the rent they will naturally leave much more. Dual income marriages are not really an option under normal human nature and so being dual income is not the solution to the problem. It's more like a huge part of the problem itself, that people think it should even be needed.
I absolutely love to take on the provider role, but there's some additional authority that I expect to come with that that a lot of women ALSO don't want to grant. I.e. I will make final decisions on any big spending, I will dictate how the house is used, I will get a final say in how she dresses and maintains herself.
I have had a life insurance policy in place for the past two years on the off-chance I met someone worth keeping, because its just the responsible thing to do while I'm healthy. I embrace the job of ensuring she is never left destitute.
In 'exchange' I abjectly refuse to have a 'man cave.' The whole house is indeed my castle, she can have a "woman cove" and do whatever she wants with it.
I see this arrangement as utterly fair and equitable for any woman willing to help raise my kids.
At the time we split, ex and I were making probably about the same amount of money. She went on to a pretty high-paying job so I know she's doing fine in the abstract, but I've managed to build things up to the point I'm certain I make more than her now. Or, more to the point, I can easily afford to keep a SAHM if she's got "realistic" expectations as to how often and where we vacation and the level of luxury we can maintain.
The real problem is that many, many women are fully inculcating the expectations for wealth that they received either from their parents/upbringing or social media.
I generally agree that the two-income expectation has created a lot of the exact problem we're seeing.
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I feel obligated to point out that a person can share a house with someone who is not his romantic partner.
There was a period I was renting out one room to a friend who was thankfully a good roommate.
Just understand that living with roommates is undeniably a reduction in living standards, which still appears as 'struggling' (relative to the previously-expected norms).
I enjoy having my living space to myself, I enjoy a big yard, garage, etc. So I'm just not inclined to share the space with someone I'm not banging and raising kids with. I am willing to pay for this solitude, and thus far can afford it.
I'm also the ONLY one of my local friend group in my age range who owns a house at all.
In my experience once you age out of college/grad school finding new roommates is hard. It's like dating but with a harder cutoff. After 30 they either can't pay or are intolerably insane.
I live by myself in a big two bedroom apartment and wouldn't mind a roommate but my luck with the last few has been bad and rent has gone up so much in the last 5 years (I'm grandfathered in with an old lady landlord.) that I wouldn't save any money downsizing to a smaller place (plus I'd have to spend time and money moving), so I have a spare bed and bath that collects dust.
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I like how being poor is referred to as house hacking.
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The Funko Pop economy is booming.
Actually, Funko Inc. is doing quite poorly. According to its annual SEC filings for years 2025 and 2022, it hasn't turned a profit since year 2021.
I guess it really has been a hard time. Now that I think about it It's been a while since I saw subscription box videos on YouTube. But looking at the data, the market has been growing...
Edit, looks like it's the general geeky and more frivolous 'loot box' side of the equation that has crashed. But people still sub for makeup and razors at a growing rate.
I feel like the loot box thing is going strong, but Funko's gone from having a first-mover advantage to like every form of consumer good now tries to bring in as much lootboxification as possible. Every time I walk through a toy store with my daughter, like half of the products are in some form of blind box packaging.
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They rattled off some stats on the radio about young people's spending habits. Spending over half their food costs on eating out, etc. Don't have money to save for a mortgage but instead spend profligately in ways gen x and boomers did not.
Source
For consumer units of one person in 2023–2024:
income before taxes (%)
food (%)
There is nothing more pathetic or soul crushing than cooking for one. For two is better but not by much. With childlessness and loneliness epidemic it is no wonder that people order so much food.
As a person that knows what is it to put a big Christmas dinner because this is our tradition and sit on it alone - at some point you really want to go full Kurt Kobain.
I miss cooking for one. I could make something nutritious but not amazing, like lentil and onion stew, and I would eat it for two meals, and it would be fine. Now I get to say things like "you can't have a snack because you didn't eat your mashed potatoes and fried chicken strips!"
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It's hard to get much out of one snapshot like this compared to, say, comparing this against the stats from 2013-2014 and shifting the age groups by 1. 0-24 is one I'd like to see broken up further, since that includes every child but also people up to 6 years into adulthood.
It's certainly interesting that eating out as a proportion of eating in general keeps going down almost monotonically as the age group goes up. I can see the point that older people tend to spend less time socializing at bars and restaurants and more time at their homes which also tend to be more comfortable. But also, older people tend to be more wealthy, and restaurant food is much more expensive than home-cooked ones, and so it's not a priori obvious that this is the force that would have won out.
It's also almost shocking to me that a whopping 50% of 25-34 and pretty close to it of 35-44 food-eating is done away from home. That's likely around 10 meals a week, which is 2x per weekday. Lunch at work accounting for 5 of those makes sense, and then perhaps another 2-3 for an occasional dinner, but the median or mean person in these age groups hitting 5+ extra dinners/breakfasts/brunches (on top of assuming eating lunch at work all 5 days) when, among adults, these are likely the lowest-paid, least-wealthy groups (discounting the child-including 0-24 for now) is somewhat surprising to me. It indicates to me that there's a lot of fat to be cut (no pun intended) in a median/mean 25-44 year-old's food budget.
For consumer units of one person in 2013–2014:
income before taxes (%)
food (%)
These statistics look at consumer units, which are basically the same as households. The definition of "consumer unit" doesn't have an explicit minimum age, which is why I didn't put one here—but you probably can assume that a consumer unit is unlikely to be led by a person younger than 18.
Thanks, the shift from 2013-2014 to 2023-2024 does indicate that young adults are being more disciplined in terms of eating out compared to to 10 years ago. To be fair, the whole "Avocado toast" argument is like 10 years old as well, so the same sort of phenomenon could have been happening 10 years ago. But it certainly seems that gen Zs do have grounds to complain to millennials that their relative financial struggles aren't due to relative food irresponsibility.
And if we presume 0-24 is mostly reflective of 18-24, that's actually a really striking outlier. Perhaps the youngest adults have trouble adapting to being responsible for their own food and make large mistakes in their first 6 years which they learn from fairly quickly.
Speaking as a millennial who was out and about in the mid 2010s I ate out more then because I had a lot more free cash. I was kind of a loser and kind of broke but my base expenses were low.
Gen Zs today have a right to complain because in my experience a lot of base cost of living stuff is more expensive. I make more money than I did back then but I shop for groceries at Walmart now and mostly only eat out if the boss is paying for it because I'm somehow still broke.
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Between 18-20 a large portion of my meals came from a dining plan that was a mandatory part of my mandatory dorm housing.
Between 20-23 I ate "out" but it wasn't expensive stuff. I'd pick up a slice of pizza for 2 dollars or a pastry from a coffee shop for around the same. Costco hot dogs were great.
I don't know how much college and graduate studies is impacting this.
Also, dating. When people go on dates it means they eat out usually, especially at first. After you're married and settled down maybe you make a nice dinner at home.
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It's been a while, but when I was single it was far more common for me to work an extra hour or two on a hard project then pick up dinner on the way home. Also, when cooking for 1 there tends to be more wasted food unless you're very vigilant about meal prepping or freezing ingredients. So eating out is relatively less costly than the alternative.
Eating out is egregiously more expensive than cooking at home.
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Doesn't look like the youths are spending so much more on eating out that it is a big factor, the way I read this.
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Ah, the ol' "Avocado Toast" argument again?
If they are spending over half their their total food costs, then it could well be valid. Many times per week splurging, yet somehow too poor to save money.
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Now the "Doordash" argument. You can disparage it, but the math still maths.
I liked the "Sex in the City" version; it turns out Carrie Bradshaw had spent enough on shoes that if she hadn't, she would have had a down payment for her apartment. Doordash is cheaper than designer shoes, but bought more often so it's the same order of magnitude.
In all fairness who shoes based on her writing career were from semi-escorting….the milder version of gifts from guys. But of course NY TV shows always have unrealistic spending by there characters. In real life her background would be rich girl from midwest or boyfriends are paying for it. Boyfriends don’t normally give down payment money.
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The underclass is gonna underclass. As if they didn't blow all their money on gambling, alcohol, and clothes back in the 1980s. The fact remains that at the mean, young people are poorer for BS reasons.
It's not the underclass using Doordash.
Using doordash is strongly anti-correlated with income, actually.
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Who do you think is taking out Klarna loans to get Taco Bell delivered? Upper middle class people?
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And that's why the entire planet and every major religion has imposed strict social conditions on our sovereignty everywhere people have lived. Plenty of people ruined their lives via drugs, gambling and so on, but there was enough friction and existing social structures to save the rest. If it was only that you had to go somewhere and do something, that saved a lot of lazy, scared people.
People are actively destroying those speedbumps in the name of an absurd, bankrupt idea that's basically "well, they'd do it anyway"
I have low impulse control. But I watch TV and see the gambling ads and just thank my lucky stars my addictive personality is seemingly too busy gorging on other things to care. It's obscene that someone with a problem is incapable of following major sports without immediately being told how much they could be winning or losing if they just jumped off the wagon.
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You also have to consider that boomers were insane.
I was listening to some older female comedian talk about her experiences going to a school that underwent busing during integration. And the raw facts of it were a wave of violence was imported into her otherwise peaceful school, and she and many of the other white kids spent the next few years getting the shit kicked out of them. But her parents, teachers, and most of the other adults turned a blind eye towards it for "the cause". And she ends on a positive note about becoming more ghetto herself and getting along with her abusers by her senior year. The story is supposed to be some feelgood bit of "See, we can all get along" that, in my eyes, did not remotely tell the story she was trying to tell.
Most boomers fed their kids to the jungle, outcomes be damned. A brave few protested, and they've gone down as history's villains. So now the rest of us have to pay thousands per child on private education that has no obligation to accept antisocial behavior, "desperate impact" be damned.
Boomers were the kids being bussed, (and those being bussed to) not the parents. Who was, like, 8-17 years old in the early-mid 1970s? Boomers, obviously.
Whatever your views on integration and the civil rights movement, it was clearly a product of the ‘Greatest Generation’ and to a lesser extent the older members of the ‘Silent Generation’ that came after them (I think MLK himself, who was younger than a lot of the politicians, was on the border between the two).
1968 and the sexual / cultural revolution was more organically boomer - it still had much older proponents like Hefner, but a lot of student activists and Woodstock types were the very oldest boomers born 1945-1948. The anti-Vietnam movement was more boomer. Certainly the anti-nuclear movements were boomer. You really have to go through to the WTO stuff to find the first Gen X heavy protest movements (and those still had a LOT of boomers).
By current Z and Alpha standards, yes. By standard nomenclature, no, those were mostly X.
Boomers were born 1945-1964, Gen X from 1965-1981, millennials 1982-1997, zoomers from 1998-2009, alpha from 2010-present ish. The main bussing crises / conflicts were in the early-mid 70s so mainly affected boomers as kids. Bussing nominally existed through the early 80s but it was largely intra district and voluntary, white flight was mostly complete by then beyond a few holdout communities.
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Only richer in ways that are shared by the old, namely tech. Housing, food, and culture are all much more expensive / worse than 40 years ago for sure. If you buy into simple supply and demand, it must be immigration to blame. When the population drops, housing demand falls while demand stays fixed. Therefore housing becomes cheaper. Farm land stays fixed while food demand falls. Food becomes cheaper. Culture stays very similar if the gene pool is not being radically flooded with new genotypes. The old people voted for this though so I don't blame the immigrants themselves. They need immigrants so their house appreciates, so getting it reroofed is cheap, etc. They preferred to destroy their homelands than give their children their fair share.
Food is soooo much better than 40 years ago, in general. Here is an example. Soft Batch Chips Ahoy are kind of gross, though less gross than other Chips Ahoy. In the 90s, there were a revelation. Restaurants are also drastically better than the 80s and 90s. Maybe there are some arguments that some produce could be worse, but a) don't forget the rise of bioengineered tasty brussel sprputs and b) lord knows few people were not just garbage cooks back then.
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IIRC we have quite a bit less farmland than a couple generations ago, but produce quite a bit more total with it because of efficiency scaling. There is a lot of no-longer-under-plow land out there, although much of it wasn't very good for farming anyway.
Food is still cheaper, although I don't think your point is completely wrong.
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IMO land isn’t a limiting factor in America. Segregated by price housing is rare in America but we have a silly amount of land to build on in America. Farming in America is not limited by available land but more like fertilizer prices for the international commodity market clearing price.
Chicago might be the easiest way to visualize Americas land abundance especially since it has water. The city could easily 10x its side. The reason some neighborhoods are expensive and some are cheap basically comes down to how easy is it for gun violence to come to you.
My gut would also guess food is cheaper today than decades ago. Far too much food tech improvement.
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