All of those facts are meaningless without context.

Higher education is far more necessary for even a middle class existence than it was in 1922, and the middle class is getting less and less affordable. One of my grandfathers worked a family farm. My dad was able to grind his way out of the lower classes by working at Friendly's and other odd jobs to pay for college (up to and including his PhD). My father in law's uncle was a high school dropout who started showing people around at the local hardware store and was such a good salesperson the owner hired him after a few weeks. None of those are possible for most Americans these days (good luck pulling the leave-it-to-beaver "prove my value to the local store owner" at Home Depot or Walmart).

US citizens are now regularly advised to take Uber to the hospital if they can survive the trip, as it avoids the cost of an ambulance, which is often over a thousand dollars in a country where most can't afford a $500 emergency. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "affordable", and certainly not affordable to 90%+. Granted this is primarily an American issue.

More important to me than the quality of the house is the quality of the school district that it's in (see previous remarks about the modern necessity of education). I can fix/improve a house, I can't fix/improve schooling short of private school, which would probably be more expensive than fixing a house over the long term. Good look finding an affordable house in a good school district near any major metropolitan area with jobs.

A 1922s “middle class” experience is affordable for a most Americans today. As in shelter with heat, phone service, and electric lights but no appliances, no car, minimal access to effective healthcare etc.

Upward mobility is still available and just as rare. The health, intelligence, and drive that allowed someone in 1922 to better themselves are the same things that still allow someone to better themselves in 2022. It’s not easy, but it was never easy. Just look at how many people in 1922 where held back by the color of their skin.

As to getting a job at Walmart, have you ever actually applied? Their standards are incredibly lax.

So? A middle class experience from 1622 is also affordable for most Americans today, and now we don't have to worry about raids from the natives! Clearly we have no right to complain /s

I'm not arguing things are equivalent to 1922 on an absolute scale, but on a relative scale they're closer than they were in the recent past. The prosperity of the previous century has shifted the goal posts for what defines upper, middle and lower class. But after a long period of shifting the goal posts in a positive direction, we've had three or four decades of things shifting in the opposite direction, and that trend appears to be accelerating for the moment.

As for upward mobility, that largely only exists for people with college degrees these days. And even then only a few select degrees are really worth anything. And college costs are insanely inflated compared to where they were in 1980, let alone 1922. Is it possible to better oneself in 2022? Sure, but I'd argue there were much more opportunities for middle class people just 40 years ago. A Unionized coal miner with experience could make an upper middle class salary without the burden of higher education that costs as much as a house. Ditto for many factory jobs.

A job at Walmart making minimum wage that hasn't been adjusted for inflation for decades does not have anything resembling the same purchasing power as a minimum wage job 60 years ago. Walmart jobs are notorious for requiring food stamps despite working full time hours.

A higher percentage of Americans are going to collage in 2020. They are also graduating with more debt, so is it more or less affordable? That’s a more complex question than it might appear as students are in many cases choosing a very expensive education when more economical options are available.

It’s similar to how new cars in 2020 are both substantially more expensive on average but also of vastly higher quality. In both cases the cheapest options represent a tiny slice of the overall market suggesting cost is generally less an imposition by outside forces than a choice.

Ex: Great Bastion Collage in state tuition is under 11k not per semester but to get a 4 year degree. Out of state is twice that, but you probably have some equivalent in your state. They even have minimum additional requirements for students without a high school diploma or GED to get a collage degree.

I'm explicitly not replying to the meat of your comment, because I don't feel like I have anything to add to the productive discussion in this thread - which, by the way, I'm really enjoying reading :)

That said, this stood out to me:

> A job at Walmart making minimum wage [...]

According to Glassdoor[1], a retail cashier at Walmart with no experience earns an average of $22,049 / year. Assuming 50 weeks @ 40 hours per week, that's $11.05 / hour.

That does not include cash bonuses or profit sharing, which Glassdoor says adds another ~$1k.

Indeed.com[2] shows the average wage for a Walmart cashier is $10.56 - so we're at least in the right ballpark above.

My own experience at Walmart was unloading trucks from 4pm-1am the summer after I graduated high school (2002). I made $7.25 / hour then, when the minimum wage was $5.15.

Trying to build a life on that kind of money isn't easy, and I'm not trying to say that it is; I do want to point out that even Walmart doesn't pay minimum wage as a rule.

That's not to say there aren't other "tricks" that employers use, like limiting hours to prevent employees from qualifying from full-time benefits and such. There are.

The minimum wage in 1982 was $3.25. Today it's $7.25. The purchasing power of the minimum wage has certainly decreased, but I strongly suspect that many more businesses paid minimum wage in 1982 than 2022.

McDonald's in my town of <15k people pays $13/hr with no experience, with a $500 signing bonus and a guaranteed $1/hr raise at six and twelve months. The largest manufacturing employer here produce stamped sheet metal parts, and they have a large sign and banners lining the road claiming $18/hr, a $1,500 signing bonus, and fully paid family benefits. My California-based "healthtech" company employer doesn't even have health insurance as good as theirs.

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walmart-Guest-Service-Team-...

2: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Walmart/salaries

USA is pretty dystopian. I'm an immigrant from the EU, and like most of us here I work in tech where the wages and benefits are very good (wages quite a bit better than even the richer EU countries and benefits on par I would say). But for the lower middle class and below it absolutely sucks in the US compared to most other countries with similar levels of development...

Further, healthcare costs are only “affordable” insofar as we are adding them to our country’s growing debt via medicare.

All of these improvements, numerically speaking, and yet my wife regularly has classes of 40 where none of the students have parents that went to college, a quarter of them need glasses that they can't afford, and an eighth is homeless.

The size of the group that benefits from modernization is indeed growing, as your numbers point out, but if you're not in that group you're just as stuck as you've ever been.

I would argue, as many would, that a high-school graduate now is much worse off now than a high-school dropout a century ago. Jobs are much more specialized, you can't rely on working on "the family farm", and the prestige of a high-school diploma has tanked to "You don't have this, what's wrong with you??"