How to live on $432 a month in America

Some of the claims here are pretty intense, but I do think his closing statement is true enough:

> there’s never been a better time to try to “make it” in America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we can’t see that now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten bad — it might mean that our perception has become grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality TV, and social media comparison syndrome.

With an extremely strong emphasis on "older version." This vision of life is not the life that most "black pilled" people were raised to expect or plan for. It is very accessible and is extremely discoverable thanks to the internet (with electricity costs like that I'm surprised crypto miners haven't moved in) - but it's a level of self-dependence and isolation that most people do not want. However it's absolutely true that it's never been easier to live a "frontier" lifestyle, only now with 3d printing and amazon and other bountiful resources to fill in traditional gaps.

What I don’t understand is the authors antagonistic framing. The complaints about moving backward because of boomer greed aren’t any less valid just because caves exist, fire remains “discovered”, and we can clone wooly mammoths.

the complaints aren't less valid, but having a constant axe to grind that you blame for all UN-success isn't a good strategy.

I think it's absurd. I work full time in the richest country on Earth and I can't afford an apartment and healthcare. The problem is clearly not advertising.

Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their expectations" type of energy

We're all being asked to sacrifice the living standards our parents grew up with because the utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare, something most of the Western world manages to pull off without issue.

We have never been more productive in this country's history and yet we cannot even meet a bar set in the 1950s.

It's frankly ridiculous as is this piece.

I don’t think it’s similar to the billionaire thing, this guy is apparently living the way he describes full-time.

And he does sort of have a point. You could probably afford an apartment _somewhere_, just not in any of the places you consider desirable.

I think the problem that most millenials have is that their parents could afford a house, for a pittance, in those desireable areas.

  > utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare

i guess the expectation in the (for lack of a better word) neoliberal era was these would be provided by the private sector?

Median disposable household income is higher in the US than anywhere else in the world [0]. Real median personal income has increased 50% since the 1970s [1].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...

1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/globalization-did-not-hollow-o...

Good news - his plan also includes not being able to afford healthcare and housing while working full time! Are you interested in doing what you do now but different? It just cuts corners in different places than other people do to achieve a result that doesn't seem that interesting to most people but is also bad in interesting ways.

I don't think that this approach is "scalable" and I don't think it's a good idea for most people (perhaps not for anyone). I do think it usefully focuses attention on how so much of cost of living is not exactly one line item, but the massive interconnection of modern life. Living in a place where you can have access to the networks (literal, social, medical, etc) you need for the rest of your plan.

I wouldn't want to live like this! But the fact that one could until one got sick (a common limitation on many creative ways of living the modern US I find) is interesting. I think the fact that there are similarities to traditional frontier living (wood stove heating included!) makes it a particularly interesting.

Edit: Arguably, I think the problem is that the USA achieved the original "American Dream" and simply stopped thinking about how the world was changing and what a modern re-envisioning of that dream should be. Pointing out that you can be an impossibly good frontier pioneer in 2025 could be a way of pointing out to people that we need to move on and stop imagining a thing we can active as the pinnacle. We need to imagine living in a world where everyone who works full time can afford housing and healthcare, where performance is rewarded but isn't required to simply live and where we can let living in the woods safely fade into history as a thing we can certainly do if we prefer but should stop idealizing.

What’s your point? All of the things I listed have far outpaced income and disposable income.

"disposable" income means "subtracting necessities like housing" so if disposable income is going up, by definition your claim cannot be correct

That's not correct.

From the article:

> Note that this includes taxes and transfers, including in-kind transfers like government-provided health care.

So excluding housing, health insurance and student loan repayments etc.

Officially, disposable income means income minus taxes. Lots of people assume it means minus necessities like housing and food, but that is discretionary income.

Of course you could afford an apartment, or even a house! You just don't want to move there.

I don't judge you - I also live in a VHCOL area and my wife wouldn't even want to move 30km where the housing prices are half of where we are now. Such is live.

But saying you couldn't afford it is false - you can't afford it where you'd want to live, is more accurate.

My parents bought our house when I was in 3rd grade in 1993 for $80k. A new similar house in their area would probably cost $250k now. But they don’t make 1200 square foot houses anymore so you’d probably need to spend $350k for a 2200 square foot house.

So new houses have more than doubled the pace of inflation in my hometown.

But when we moved in there was no mall, no Best Buy, few jobs. It was much more rural. This happened all over. Things got more developed. Areas that are desirable now weren’t necessarily desirable 30 years ago.

Plus the houses now are so much more insulated and air tight that heating and and cooling costs a fraction of what it did 30 years ago. And the houses are much bigger.