Because total inflation calculations take MANY categories into consideration (including housing, healthcare, and education, weird how it’s all the things that government tightly regulates that have gone up so much) and weights them according to the percentage of total purchases. Some categories will be higher than the avg and some will be lower. But at the end of the day, it’s how much stuff you can buy that matters. If the other categories have plummeted compared to median income, you’ll have more money to invest in housing, and are wealthier than the people who lived in the 70s.

Let me ask you this, if it’s so much harder for people to afford housing these days compared to the past, why have homes gotten so much bigger? Are builders idiots, building giant homes that no one can afford and so they sit empty?

Or could it possibly be that we are on average so much wealthier today compared to 50 years ago that we not only can afford big houses, we demand it. We don’t want to buy cheap tiny houses, we want McMansions, where each person has 1,000 sq feet to themselves, with a home office, theatre room, and she shed. We aren’t interested in small houses, because we’re so dang rich we don’t even know we are demanding a level of opulence unimaginable to people from the past.

Are some people struggling, sure, but far less people than were struggling in the 70s. I’m happy to discuss how to help those struggling, but I’m fearful that we’ll abandon the systems that have brought our society members more wealth than kings enjoyed years ago, in an attempt to rectify problems that are contrived using cherry picked data.