Yascha on California

 Journalist Yascha Levine has written some great essays (and he has a movie too, Pistachio Wars) about oligarchs in California.

This one starts with legendary California land baron Henry Miller.

This one exposes how unnatural Southern California is.

This one shows how the Resnick's built their pistachio business on the sanctioning of Iran (the previous major producer of pistachios) and therefore has a shared interest with Israel.

Why we feel poorer

In my first 4 years of life, my mother moved 4 times.  She had traveled to Southern California, and with a high school diploma and no particular experience (other than an attempt at Opera singing) she got secretarial jobs that paid the rent in some pretty cool apartments in places like Manhattan Beach.

No one could do that now.

My father retired from Sears Roebuck in Minneapolis, where he had been a buyer (a mid level management job), at 62 and bought a new home in Woodland Hills and sent his two kids to college on his Sears pension.

No one could do that now.

Now even back in those glorious (hah) days, I might point out that (1) we were the last on the block to have any kind of TV, and then, (2) we were the last on the block to have a color TV, and then (3) we were the last on the block to have a TV with remote control, etc.

What's happened in the last 60 years is that the "essentials" of life like rent and education and health care have gone up in price dramatically, and finding new jobs has become orders of magnitude more difficult.  The precariat has been created.

On the other hand, "discretionary" items like TV and computers have become dramatically cheaper for the amount of capabilities they have.

This all gets boiled down into official "inflation" numbers which disguise how much poorer many people are, if you look at how many hours they have, after paying for essentials, to pay for discretionary items.

Because these "inflation" numbers themselves are averages, even (given their way of downplaying essentials) they also paint a very incomplete picture.  Back in the 1960's-1980's there were huge price differentials in things like rents.  If you couldn't afford the rent in a pricey area, and were willing to drive a way (using cheap gas), there were much cheaper rents elsewhere.  Now, the rent is high everywhere.  There are no "cheap" options.  Just like there are no jobs that are easy for an inexperienced person lacking higher education to get, etc.

One other way that official inflation numbers (which are based on hedonic calculus...which of these two options would you prefer, etc) hide the way things have changed is that the definition of what is "acceptable" has changed.

Cars, homes, and many other things are generally much nicer right now than they were in the mid 20th century.  Cars are more powerful, comfortable, safer, etc., and last longer.  Houses are much bigger, have better insulation, and more efficient appliances.  (OTOH, the quality of wood seems to be going down.)

This means you "get" more so of course you have to "pay" more.  But generally speaking, you don't have a choice.  All homes are bigger, so the part of the market with small cheap homes doesn't give you very many choices.  The only small cheap homes are in poor neighborhoods with poor schools.  Etc.

There's simply no way to go back to nice middle class neighborhoods of 1,100 sq ft homes, $1000 new cars, etc.  They don't make 'em like that anymore.

It seems that everything has been rigged to keep ordinary people nailed to their grindstones in fear.  No one can just take off on a lark, like my mother, and establish a new home elsewhere on a dime.

Here's an essay on this topic by someone else.