Photo by COARSE + FINE on Unsplash

---

Intro

If there is one term that could describe the sentiment of this decade, it may perhaps be "affordability".

Afford is a peculiar word.

To be able to do or accomplish something does not mean you can afford to do something.

To afford something is to be able to spare the time, resources, or whatever are needed to make that thing happen.

This of course is a very loose, subjective notion.

For some, it is hardly a problem to shell out for auto repairs. Or home renovations. Or yachts and bayside mansions. And we will keep this essay constrained to material affordability.

Depending on one's gradation of wealth, they may even be able to afford such things by stretching their assets, but it not very affordable. And here is the key suffix, that one can do afford it again and again sustainably, if they so choose.

When we apply the term "affordability" to society and commodities at large, the working assumption is that the proverbial individual would be able to purchase or acquire said object without great or perhaps crippling inconvenience.

When furthermore affordability becomes a political problem, there is the presumption that someone needs to do something about it. We simply can't just let this happen.

Such rhetoric often cloaks a variety of covert assumptions that I will attempt to expose here for the reader's judgment. Focusing on the American context, but any other readers may critically extrapolate for their own.

A common complaint of my generational cohort is that many commodities are exorbitantly more expensive now than they were for those our age living in the ideal of the Fifties, Sixties, etc.

Personal property and housing are a typical example.

The fallacy behind such thinking is the assumption that there is a one to one comparison between the homes and properties now and then.

What if American homes have becoming increasingly larger, have more bedrooms, more stringent safety and construction codes, more intricate electrical and HVAC systems?

I will not enter into empirical analysis or statistical data here myself but leave it for the reader to consider themselves.

But what if the cultural expectation of a median home has materially inflated since the mid-century? Would this not introduce a mass spectrum shift in housing prices, as homes are increasingly upsized or brought up to code?

That is all else being equal, with respect to demand and supply, which we know is not true. But the inflation of expectation seems far too often forgotten in such rhetoric. It is a cost factor, even if not the only one.

This is one example of broader trends in lifestyle inflation, both in terms of supply and demand.

Demand

On the side of demand, let us start by asserting that people's expectations both in an individual and collective sense are shaped by the impressions they receive.

What do these impressions consist of? What visual images?

For most of history lived day-to-day life. Perhaps you would see artwork in a church or museum, and then if you were fortunate, a book.

But then we have the television which could provide if at least in a limited black-and-white, small box sense a window to other worlds. The Boomers were inaugurated by their parents as the first children to be indoctrinated several hours a day in this manner.

Network television programming provided an array of stories and settings, real and unreal. The shows built on realism focused on the middle-class everyman. While a few shows ventured into the lives of the wealthy, one can think of Dallas in this regard, it was from a sense of fictional melodrama.

Speaking again in broad strokes, one could posit the advent of reality television as the shift from the middle-class subject to an aspirational wealthy if dysfunctional elite. Displays of extravagant wealth existing in the "real world" that people from a variety of everyday backgrounds could participate in if albeit briefly.

Perhaps one could argue the Age of Trump begins with The Apprentice in 2004 where the aspiring knowledge worker middle class competed to join the ranks of the upper echelons of wealth, manifest through glitzy display and pomp in the manner of Achaemenid Persia.

The confluence of marketing teams and the advent of social media wrought a new form of desire factory, the dissemination of an appetite for exorbitant material comforts.

The television no longer lay contained in the grayscale miniature box of our parents but on enlargening, slick flat-screens that mount themselves like patron saints on our wall or as pocket guides in the smartphones of our hands.

Today's youth face unprecedented bombardment of images of "real-life" wealth and material comforts through the illusion of the influencer genre. All things should be in reach and yet they are not. A message they subconsciously imbibe the longer they consume such lifestyle content.

Perhaps there is a demand for total affordability because the individual is presented with a demand for total spending.

The dissonance of one's material circumstances whether impoverished, comfortable, or modestly lavish pale in comparison to the seeming universalism of limitless wealth mediated to us by our screens through psychological hooks and barbs designed to linger in our imagination and inexorably press us on to buy more things.

Is this why consumer credit card debt is reaching unprecedented thresholds? Overspending is indoctrinated as a social necessity to imitate fictious peers or keep up with neighbors who equally overspend themselves in Veblen's game of competitive conspicuous consumption.

How often do consumers commit themselves to unaffordable luxuries out of societally mandated envy?

This is a private question that the overstretched consumer must ask themselves when they complain about the "affordability" of things.

Do they feel entitled to luxuries because they have succumbed to intense media pressures to stretch themselves to put such things just in reach?

This is an end game of Western materialism.

Before we move on to the question of supply-side lifestyle inflation, we should still consider the affordability of essentials.

Many who cry out on the question of affordability may pass the test so far. They are not drowning themselves in Amazon paraphernalia or home extensions.

Their concern is food and utility. The baseline commodities of our society, or to live as a human being.

There remains something to be said here even still.

The anti-chemical turn in American consumer habits may have environmental and physiological advantages. Our point is not to dispute that. But when there are sharp cries for healthier ingredients and goods, it is worth considering one key benefit of introducing chemicals and plastics into our consumer supply chain.

The Industrial Revolution and its descendants enabled the production of food and many other commodities at mass scale. Preservatives expanded the shelf life and durability of food stuffs. It became immensely more inexpensive to produce food on a geometric scale.

Thomas Malthus had famously predicted two hundred years ago we would quickly face global, mass starvation because the growth in food supply was arithmetic while the growth in human population was geometric. (Worth noting that Marx took keen notes from Malthus.)

Yet Malthus was proven wrong and in fact improvements to the food production and supply chain logistics quickly outstripped what remained exponential population growth. Of course Faustian compromises were made here, and the chemical revolution played no small part in the ability of regional and global supply chains to not only supply massive gluts of food but to do so affordably.

So now we have a multi billion person global population existentially dependent upon scaled food-based supply chains, but we also see advocates for healthy eating and living who want to strip back the industrialist advances for environmental or physiological reasons.

These concerns may certainly be both valid and overriding considerations to revisit foundational elements of global food production, but it is rather juvenile thinking to assume the food supply chain can be radically reformed to remove cost-saving measures without the cost itself increasing, if all else were equal.

It is the similar hypocrisy of those who demand higher wages for all workers but refuse to countenance an increase in the prices they themselves pay for goods and services. Would it not be more noble to bear the burden of advancing the cause of equity?

Ingredient production and supply chain aside, one specific example worth noting is that even though the price of beef in the United States has sharply risen year over year since the pandemic, yet even in spite of this beef consumption continues to rise.

Beef which had for millennia been an occasional luxury is now demanded as not just everday but affordable food stuffs.

How many of those who preach of the need for affordability do so with the expectation of daily luxury at low cost?

If we are to examine this commodity specifically, the debate would center on the supply and demand side factors driving such price increases, and the question is worth asking if the continued price expectation of cheap beef were truly sustainable given these factors.

The same would go for all the commodities we could examine on a case-by-case basis. Whether that be clothing, electricity, furniture, or anything else that is available for purchase for the mass consumer.

If such things were historically, comparatively cheaper in a one-to-one comparison (and not modified by lifestyle inflation), one must ask if the way in which such things were produced could sustainably be said to do so as population and lifestyle inflation demands continue to press upon it?

This is not to say that other duplicitous or illict factors are not involved to manipulate or corrupt prices for the everyday consumer, for those certainly are at play as well, but we must ask ourselves if American postwar prosperity is exceptional in an unsustainable way, given our current strategies and commitments.

If we truly want to continue to wage the conflict of affordability and sustainability, we must get creative in thinking through the presence of these factors as well.

Even in all this, the cheapskates who have responsibly bought the same ham and cheese sandwich and unleaded gasoline everyday since the Seventies may still feel the squeeze and be shaking their head in dismay.

These minimal consumers are the ones most justified in agitation for pushing for affordability, but we must ask ourselves if we truly resemble the ideal everyman of simple times or if we concede our purchases to harbored ambitions of luxury.

One final remark here.

The reasoning or observations I have presented here have unfortunately garnished the rhetoric of the wealthy and elite as weapons against those for whom not everything is so affordable.

In the name of sustainability or forbearance with corporations, there has been a great deal of finger wagging and policy making with the surreptitious or overt object of exacerbating the costs of food or energy for the everday populace, pushed by wealthy or elite figures without particular sensitivity to those price changes.

It constitutes even if indirectly the robbing of the poor by the wealthy, and such things will meet justice in their own way and time, yet we must continue to condemn and work against such connivance to exploit the poor.

Let us name a specific episode (whose veracity I cannot independently confirm but sounds possible enough). In the first winter of the Russo-Ukrainian War, it was no longer affordable for a good number of families to heat their homes given the European energy crisis.

One such family living not far from the Alps decided to go their local forest to collect kindling they could use to heat their home instead. Instead the family were arrested on charges of environmental damage to the forest preserve and led to a jail facility which was at least sufficiently funded to stay warm while the charges were processed.

I remember watching an adaptation of Dickens' Christmas Carol where the Ghost of Christmas Present leads Scrooge through the streets of London's destitute and homeless. A number are living out of a sewer and gathered around a fire this Christmas night as Scrooge looks on mortified by their condition.

One of the homeless men comes up with some more kindling to add to the fire.

He jokes that even if they cannot afford food or shelter, at least the rich can't take their free firewood away from them.

Supply

When it comes to questions of supply price shocks one could go into historical and material circumstances. Reported or unreported events, incidents, subterfuge, shocks, price manipulation, acquisitions, etc. There is a veritable array of rabbit holes, conspiracy theories, and other opportunities for misinformation here. But we will not go there today.

Let us keep a safe distance from reality here and merely entertain two thought experiments.

Consider any common household good of your choosing whether detergent, lawn mower, ground beef, power tool, or bathroom cleaning product.

It is probably safe to assume that if you buy this item through a retailer of some kind, there are between two to five brands which sell this item. It is up to you to choose which brand or version to buy from. Oligopoly.

If you are a supplier, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to maximize profits. Increasing sales volume is a natural path to create higher revenue. When there is fixed market size, this means presenting something compellingly superior about your product to make it outcompete rivals.

This results in iterative feedback loops where products are engineered with ever finer precision, efficacy, or additional bells and whistles, ever in competition with other suppliers.

For the vast majority of consumers, they simply do not care about the vast array of features or specifications which are marketed on the box, if they were simply presented with the opportunity to buy one type of garden rake.

The supplier however must examine themselves under the gaze of this ideal of the nitpicky consumer savant who will pick the highest "quality" tool, assuming there is no cost differentation between the options. Even if there were simply no mass demand for this kind of quality, the demand is self-induced from the side of the supplier.

If we may be a bit tongue in cheek, it seems that Say's Law that "supply creates its own demand" may still have something to say even if Keynes dismissed it.

The idea here is a self-induced quality standards race among the oligopoly of suppliers for mass goods.

This in itself leads to an inflation. Choose any household good and if possible research how it was designed and marketed in twenty years increments starting from today and going back to when that item was first introduced in retail stores.

They follow the demands of Darwinian evolution. Survival of the fittest. Be the best there is, even if much of it is an optics game.

Now whether or not this leads to a price increase on its own is again something that must be considered against other factors.

But we must ask ourselves whether this imposition of higher quality goods by manufacturers may not be a partial culprit in the increasing unaffordability of our age? More experts and engineers and expensive equipment is needed to make material goods that could easily have been made in the home a century ago.

Yet the difference in quality is too much for many to pass up.

A second thought experiment.

House fires are generally considered bad.

We are fortunate to live in an age where death by house fire is incredibly low compared to historical precedents. When cities like Rome, Chicago, and London were eviscerated by the power of the flame. Killing so many in the process.

If you are a government official, you generally want to prevent house fires.

It is not so easy controlling what people do in their homes, but it is possible to regulate how those homes are built.

In America fire ordinance began in 1631 when John Winthrop outlawed the construction of wooden chimneys and thatched roofs as a fire hazard.

Like our oligopoly example, such requirements have only grown stricter since 1631. Fire codes along all manner of regulation continue to proliferate and grow increasingly stringent and detailed.

If you are a bureaucrat responsible for administering safety authority or what have you, it is in your best interest to promote new, better standards either to promote your own personal career or something along funding. Bureaucratic agencies are thus incentivized to increasingly revise and improve their regulatory standards, often couched in the language of safety and security.

So fire codes continue to require increasing safety requirements, which results in more construction costs, which the builder will then pass on to the customer.

This is not to say that fire code libertarianism is an answer of any sort, as safety codes I believe can empirically demonstrate increased safety and fewer fatalities. But it does make things more expensive.

Apply this principle to anything around safety and standards either from a governmental authority around construction or corporate quality management around automobile engineering. The push is always toward more. And this has costs.

Look at the history of car design or even the safety codes around where electrical outlets can be placed in rooms, and this "lifestyle inflation" will be clear as any professional history generally indicates the sequences and series of improvements that have been made either to requirements or guidelines.

And most of the time these are in fact material, effective improvements. But it comes at a cost.

Consumers are not commonly the ones driving these changes, even if there are so-called consumer boards who represent the consumer's interests. As before, they manifest an extremely opinionated savant minority, not the average consumer's voiced preference. These are generally supply-side initiated changes often through governmental, compliance, or other quality management interest groups or professional who themselves are actively seeking to keep themselves perpetually relevant.

Sometimes it can be easy across generations to lament housing costs today and look back nostalgically to the prairie days of the nineteenth century when families generally built their own homes. But if anyone were to try to live in those today, they would notice the severe deficiencies of said construction whether that be insulation, running water, or appearance.

Not to mention that many such buildings would be illegal today due to regulation. And if we were to explore that further, we could also see how the demands of litigation culture also press in greater expense upon us, rendering things generally less affordable. But we will content ourselves with only a fleeting reference to that phenomenon here.

The evolution of standards mandates higher quality, indeed often luxury for the mass consumer.

It is not as much our choice as it used to be. And it will probably continue to be less our choice as time goes on. What we can build or do on our own.

The insertion of so many voices and requirments and competitive edge will always pressure prices upward, insofar as production cost optimizations become outpaced by these demands. Something that must be explored on an empirical basis.

For it is fairly possible to maintain relatively flat prices or even see them decrease even as product evolution continues to push new features and goods into our lap. Computing technologies up until fairly recently have been a good example of this.

But it is not self-evident if the inner necessity of optimization can be contained by such mitigating forces.

The world grows in complexity, even as we grow increasingly accustomed to luxuries introduced only in the past century or even few decades. The infrastructure needed to operationally maintain both what we have acquired and what we will continue to demand may not be able to keep up.

This is not to say that affordability as a political objective is undesirable or unfeasible. There are far more factors at play here, and this was never intended to be such an exhaustive analysis.

But we must be prudent and thorough in examining ourselves and what we presume to demand of our world, both on a personal and a societal level.

What the end-game of these accumulated luxuries are.

That we should continue to crave more as our desires are satiated past bursting.

And cry out that we in our air conditioned homes with three screens apiece and tacos tuesdays galore, that we are impecunious wretches deprived of basic necessities, and that we deserve better.

This lack of affordability.

That we deserve this and more as our parents had it, our neighbors have it, our influencer whisperers have it.

But what in fact do we deserve at all?