It’s near impossible for people to ignore their personal experience from their opinion on a topic like this. There is too much data to get an accurate read, because more than just one data point is needed to describe the big picture. AN tried to balance a few different angles but people don’t want to hear what doesn’t fit into their personal perception. It’s all about what is important to you. For example, let’s use fuel/energy. I think the percentage of your income you spend on something matters more than the actual inflation adjusted price because of advances in efficiency. My car from 20 years ago got almost half the MPG’s as the one I drive today, yet they are about the same size. There were slow upticks in MPG’s along the way and it’s likely to continue. But on the flipside, healthcare has increased and there hasn’t been sufficient advances reducing my need for it. Then again I spend less nominally on utilites than I did 10 years ago, since my income has risen in that span, it has become a smaller portion of my budget. There have been trends, but it still feels balanced. But that is because technology and education has taught me way around using as much water, gas and electricity. I haven’t saved any real money because I spent the savings on cable, internet, cell phones, and other things that either didn’t exist or I didn’t want them ten or twenty years ago.

So how do you really measure if people are better off or not. Do you use free time, television size, disposable income, happiness, divorce rates, family size or property owned. It’s too hard to measure. If you get caught up in real estate you are ignoring the natural shifts and trends that will always exist. True, La Jolla real estate is exponentially more expensive than it was in past decades, but so is google, apple or yahoo stock, in fact more so. Right now there is a neighborhood that will appreciate more in the next decade that perhaps not everyone realizes, and there will be one that doesn’t, same can be said for stocks. But it is an absolute fact that everything will not be the same 10 years from now, at least not in relation to similar things, trends will happen, they always have.

It’s all bout what “well off” means to you. As a kid I grew up in a middle class town, borderline upper middle class suburb. I based wealth on the presence of real milk or powdered milk, real butter or margarine, real juice or punch. Real people, many with degrees, lived on my street. Wehn eating over at a friends house, I looked at those things, the doctor’s kids had real milk, the teacher’s kids had powdered. Today, in a similar socio economic neighborhood, having been in many people’s homes, I never see powdered milk. To me, everyone is doing better.