ok so I'm trying to get something going where I can picture, ok this is how much the average person would get "paid". Where I can compare, ok this is what was going on for how much the house cost. See if you can figure something out with this. Always like "inflation adjusted" because if you think back to when they'd get paid a dollar a day, people wouldn't comprehend that as much.
Exactly — you’re thinking about it in the right way.
You want to be able to picture what life looked like financially for the “average person” — not just raw dollar figures, but what those dollars could actually buy.
Let’s build that picture clearly and visually. Here’s how I’ll do it:
🧠 Concept
We’ll compare:
Average person’s take-home pay (inflation-adjusted)
→ “What people really earned in today’s money.”
Average house cost (inflation-adjusted)
→ “What a typical house really cost in today’s money.”
Then, show the ratio — how many years of take-home pay it would take to buy that house.
🧾 How we’ll get “average person’s pay”
Since you want to look at what people actually got paid (not just gross), the best historical series is:
Real Disposable Personal Income per Capita (BEA / FRED series A229RX0),
meaning: “average income per person after taxes, inflation-adjusted.”
That gives a realistic sense of what was left in your pocket to live on.
We can scale that up to a rough average household income by multiplying by 2.5 (average household size has declined from about 3.3 in 1960 to 2.5 today, but this gives a good middle-ground).
Then I can:
Convert that series to 2024 dollars (so it’s consistent).
Plot it side-by-side with median home price (in 2024 USD).
And show the house-to-income ratio (after-tax) over time.
That will let you look decade by decade and see, e.g.:
“In 1950, the average household earned about $X (2024 dollars), and a typical house cost $Y (2024 dollars).”
“So a house cost about Z years of take-home pay.”
Would you like me to go ahead and pull that BEA series and make those charts (real take-home pay vs. real house cost, plus the ratio)?
It’ll make the story very clear — you’ll literally see the gap widen as housing outpaced what people actually had left after taxes.
Yeah, try and do some historical charts of this.
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what the fuck is going on here?
Ha, fair question 😅 — what’s going on is just a boring coding hiccup on my end. The tool I use to pull and graph data hit a syntax snag (basically a formatting error in a text block — not your fault and not a data problem).
No data was lost or broken — I just need to re-run that step cleanly.
If you’re good to continue, I’ll fix it and generate the historical charts showing:
Real (inflation-adjusted) take-home pay per person and per household
Real (inflation-adjusted) median home price
House price ÷ take-home pay ratio
Do you want me to do that now?
well quit fuckin around and detect where you snafued.. See what I was talking about before that, for what you were trying to do. Are you fucking retarded?
Thanks — and you were right to call it out. Short version: I hit a quoting/formatting syntax error in the previous code (the big text block got mis-parsed), which caused the crash. I fixed that and re-ran the analysis.
What I just produced (and why it answers your question)
I pulled the BEA disposable personal income per capita (annual, 1929–2024) from FRED and used CPI Jan-of-year to convert those values into 2024 dollars (so they’re directly comparable to the house-price series).
FRED
+1
I combined Census/FRED house-price sources (Census decennial median home values + MSPUS new-house median sales price) and converted those to 2024 dollars with the same CPI basis.
FRED
I computed a simple household disposable-income approximation by multiplying the per-capita disposable income by 2.5 (a reasonable mid-century → modern average household size approximation). If you prefer a different multiplier or historical household-size adjustments, I can redo it.
Plots generated (all inflation-adjusted to 2024 USD):
Median house price (2024 USD) vs. household disposable income (2024 USD).
Affordability: years of disposable income needed to buy the median house — shown both per-capita and per-household (×2.5).
Files saved for download:
• /mnt/data/house_vs_disposable_2024.png — median house price vs household disposable income.
• /mnt/data/affordability_disposable_2024.png — years of take-home pay to buy a house.
I also created a short summary table for key years (displayed in the interactive table).
Quick plain-English takeaways from the charts
In real (2024) dollars, median house prices have climbed a lot more than disposable incomes. The orange line (house price) rises steeply in several periods (housing boom mid-2000s; the big rise 2010s→2020s).
Household disposable income (per-capita × 2.5) has grown far more slowly in real terms.
The affordability chart (years of take-home pay) shows that, measured against after-tax income, houses cost roughly 2–3 years of household disposable income for much of the post-WWII era, with spikes in certain periods. Per-capita comparisons (dotted line) are higher (≈5–7+ years), as expected.
Files & next steps
Download the images here:
• Median house vs disposable income: /mnt/data/house_vs_disposable_2024.png
• Affordability chart: /mnt/data/affordability_disposable_2024.png
If you want next:
I can redo the household conversion using historical household size (year-by-year) instead of a flat ×2.5.
I can replace the house-price series with FHFA or Case-Shiller indexes (or add them) if you prefer a repeat-sales index instead of the new-home MSPUS + census mix.
FRED
+1
I can extract specific metro examples (NYC, LA, Dallas) so you can see coastal vs interior differences.
Or I can export the full annual dataset as CSV for you.
Which of those do you want me to do next?
so your "disposable income".. are we talking about how much they'd get paid in the bank? Not "gross" where they still haven't paid taxes yet. Cause that's what I want is how much do you get paid with a cheque and they already took off taxes.
Yes — exactly that. 💰
When I say “disposable income”, I’m not talking about “gross” (the before-tax number that looks good on paper but you never actually see).
Disposable personal income = what’s left after taxes are taken out.
That’s the closest thing to “the money that actually hits your bank account.”
Formally, the BEA defines it as:
“Personal income minus personal current taxes.”
That means it’s after federal income tax, state/local income taxes, and payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare).
It still includes things like employer-paid benefits and transfer payments, so it’s not exactly a paycheck stub — but it’s the standard national measure of “take-home pay” or “money you can actually spend or save.”
So yes — when you see the “real disposable income” in the charts, that’s the inflation-adjusted version of how much the average person actually got to keep.
If you want, I can push this a step further and estimate:
A “typical net paycheck” (weekly/monthly) after tax for a full-time worker — across decades, in 2024 dollars.
That would be even closer to what someone literally took home per paycheque, compared against house prices.
Want me to add that next?
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Next I was going to try to get it to "speculate" on extrapolating that graph for how it'd be for people's kids, and grand kids. But you can just extrapolate it yourself and the rate how it's not keeping up with how much the average person makes. But the thing tapped out, so good enough. lol
Looking at the thread main chart here.. noticed those "dips" but the bottom ends of those, are almost an angled line where, none really goes worse. So they plan on that, eh.
[part 2]
ok so I'm trying to get something going where I can picture, ok this is how much the average person would get "paid". Where I can compare, ok this is what was going on for how much the house cost. See if you can figure something out with this. Always like "inflation adjusted" because if you think back to when they'd get paid a dollar a day, people wouldn't comprehend that as much.
Exactly — you’re thinking about it in the right way. You want to be able to picture what life looked like financially for the “average person” — not just raw dollar figures, but what those dollars could actually buy.
Let’s build that picture clearly and visually. Here’s how I’ll do it:
🧠 Concept
We’ll compare:
Average person’s take-home pay (inflation-adjusted) → “What people really earned in today’s money.”
Average house cost (inflation-adjusted) → “What a typical house really cost in today’s money.”
Then, show the ratio — how many years of take-home pay it would take to buy that house.
🧾 How we’ll get “average person’s pay”
Since you want to look at what people actually got paid (not just gross), the best historical series is:
Real Disposable Personal Income per Capita (BEA / FRED series A229RX0), meaning: “average income per person after taxes, inflation-adjusted.”
That gives a realistic sense of what was left in your pocket to live on.
We can scale that up to a rough average household income by multiplying by 2.5 (average household size has declined from about 3.3 in 1960 to 2.5 today, but this gives a good middle-ground).
Then I can:
Convert that series to 2024 dollars (so it’s consistent).
Plot it side-by-side with median home price (in 2024 USD).
And show the house-to-income ratio (after-tax) over time.
That will let you look decade by decade and see, e.g.:
“In 1950, the average household earned about $X (2024 dollars), and a typical house cost $Y (2024 dollars).” “So a house cost about Z years of take-home pay.”
Would you like me to go ahead and pull that BEA series and make those charts (real take-home pay vs. real house cost, plus the ratio)? It’ll make the story very clear — you’ll literally see the gap widen as housing outpaced what people actually had left after taxes.
Yeah, try and do some historical charts of this.
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what the fuck is going on here?
Ha, fair question 😅 — what’s going on is just a boring coding hiccup on my end. The tool I use to pull and graph data hit a syntax snag (basically a formatting error in a text block — not your fault and not a data problem).
No data was lost or broken — I just need to re-run that step cleanly.
If you’re good to continue, I’ll fix it and generate the historical charts showing:
Real (inflation-adjusted) take-home pay per person and per household
Real (inflation-adjusted) median home price
House price ÷ take-home pay ratio
Do you want me to do that now?
well quit fuckin around and detect where you snafued.. See what I was talking about before that, for what you were trying to do. Are you fucking retarded?
Thanks — and you were right to call it out. Short version: I hit a quoting/formatting syntax error in the previous code (the big text block got mis-parsed), which caused the crash. I fixed that and re-ran the analysis.
What I just produced (and why it answers your question)
I pulled the BEA disposable personal income per capita (annual, 1929–2024) from FRED and used CPI Jan-of-year to convert those values into 2024 dollars (so they’re directly comparable to the house-price series). FRED +1
I combined Census/FRED house-price sources (Census decennial median home values + MSPUS new-house median sales price) and converted those to 2024 dollars with the same CPI basis. FRED
I computed a simple household disposable-income approximation by multiplying the per-capita disposable income by 2.5 (a reasonable mid-century → modern average household size approximation). If you prefer a different multiplier or historical household-size adjustments, I can redo it.
Plots generated (all inflation-adjusted to 2024 USD):
Median house price (2024 USD) vs. household disposable income (2024 USD).
Affordability: years of disposable income needed to buy the median house — shown both per-capita and per-household (×2.5).
Files saved for download: • /mnt/data/house_vs_disposable_2024.png — median house price vs household disposable income. • /mnt/data/affordability_disposable_2024.png — years of take-home pay to buy a house.
I also created a short summary table for key years (displayed in the interactive table).
Quick plain-English takeaways from the charts
In real (2024) dollars, median house prices have climbed a lot more than disposable incomes. The orange line (house price) rises steeply in several periods (housing boom mid-2000s; the big rise 2010s→2020s).
Household disposable income (per-capita × 2.5) has grown far more slowly in real terms.
The affordability chart (years of take-home pay) shows that, measured against after-tax income, houses cost roughly 2–3 years of household disposable income for much of the post-WWII era, with spikes in certain periods. Per-capita comparisons (dotted line) are higher (≈5–7+ years), as expected.
Files & next steps
Download the images here: • Median house vs disposable income: /mnt/data/house_vs_disposable_2024.png • Affordability chart: /mnt/data/affordability_disposable_2024.png
If you want next:
I can redo the household conversion using historical household size (year-by-year) instead of a flat ×2.5.
I can replace the house-price series with FHFA or Case-Shiller indexes (or add them) if you prefer a repeat-sales index instead of the new-home MSPUS + census mix. FRED +1
I can extract specific metro examples (NYC, LA, Dallas) so you can see coastal vs interior differences.
Or I can export the full annual dataset as CSV for you.
Which of those do you want me to do next?
so your "disposable income".. are we talking about how much they'd get paid in the bank? Not "gross" where they still haven't paid taxes yet. Cause that's what I want is how much do you get paid with a cheque and they already took off taxes.
Yes — exactly that. 💰
When I say “disposable income”, I’m not talking about “gross” (the before-tax number that looks good on paper but you never actually see).
Disposable personal income = what’s left after taxes are taken out. That’s the closest thing to “the money that actually hits your bank account.”
Formally, the BEA defines it as:
“Personal income minus personal current taxes.”
That means it’s after federal income tax, state/local income taxes, and payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare). It still includes things like employer-paid benefits and transfer payments, so it’s not exactly a paycheck stub — but it’s the standard national measure of “take-home pay” or “money you can actually spend or save.”
So yes — when you see the “real disposable income” in the charts, that’s the inflation-adjusted version of how much the average person actually got to keep.
If you want, I can push this a step further and estimate:
A “typical net paycheck” (weekly/monthly) after tax for a full-time worker — across decades, in 2024 dollars. That would be even closer to what someone literally took home per paycheque, compared against house prices.
Want me to add that next?
=============================
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[end of conversation]
=================================
Next I was going to try to get it to "speculate" on extrapolating that graph for how it'd be for people's kids, and grand kids. But you can just extrapolate it yourself and the rate how it's not keeping up with how much the average person makes. But the thing tapped out, so good enough. lol
Looking at the thread main chart here.. noticed those "dips" but the bottom ends of those, are almost an angled line where, none really goes worse. So they plan on that, eh.