Avram's journal

So, still thinking about this, and specifically cost of living aspects, and I wanted to elaborate:

https://bsky.app/profile/czedwards.bsky.social/post/3m57vpmd6ks2r

So we know that rent in 1925 was significantly closer to the 1/3 of income ratio, and most people did rent, because the 30 year mortgage didn’t yet exist and didn’t have federal backing. (Secondary note here: I did a lot of this research already, for the Steve Rogers section of my thread/article on Generational Theory in the MCU, so thanks to Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee for creating and maintaining a character with such depth that I could plausibly fit him into the economics of his world. https://czedwards.net/generational-theory-as-exemplified-by-the-avengers-mcu/ )

Median rent was $20-70 month, median house price was $6,000-11,000. At the time, the rent-to-price ratio (the median home price divided by the the annual cost of rent) was around 9.7, and fell into the 7s after the introduction of the federally backed, 30 year fixed rate mortgage, because the cost of buying a house fell. Today, we say that any rent to price ratio under 15 makes buying a house the more prudent financial strategy, but that’s dependent on the 30 year, fixed mortgage. In a financial environment where a long mortgage was in the 5-10 year range with high interest rates, the rent to price ratio of 9 or above made renting financially prudent.

Transportation was still mostly public. Cars were becoming common, but they were still upper middle class and business investments. The idea of a cheap used beater didn’t even exist yet because cars hadn’t been around long enough and weren’t reliable enough to become beaters. But buses, street cars, trolleys & trains were everywhere.

And I do mean EVERYWHERE. My town was a little coal mining town, and we had a 25 minute train to Denver at least 12 times a day. We don’t have BUS service now that good (22 trips, but 45-85 minute). My paternal grandmother’s home town was all trolley all the time to serve more than 100 factories (auto industry, mostly).

Food:
In most of the early-mid 20th century, food consumed a third of a household’s budget, and all public welfare calculations assumed this. As the 20th century ended and the 21st began, we thought we had broken this as the price of groceries as a percentage of income had dropped significantly through the 2010s, but now it is creeping back up, and rent has more than overtaken any gains we made by the diminishing price of food. The variety of available produce has definitely improved, but most places in 1925 also had local farms growing regional produce for local consumption. We had only, as a nation, flipped from being majority rural to majority urban in the last decade, so there was still a lot of farmland very close to urban cores.

Yes, it’s nice to have Argentinian blueberries in January, but it’s also nice to have your local blueberries that your aunt canned back in August (and canning does make for consistent food in a way that raw can’t. Which did make the world a little less fraught for the people who had the then unidentified forms of food aversion). There are significant advantages to eating seasonally and locally, for health and environmental reasons. Food miles are real, and our food now has a lot of miles on it when it hits our plate.

One big thing: 1925 didn’t have many artificial fertilizers yet. While the Haber Process existed and made some really nasty chemical weapons in World War I, most bagged nitrogen in the 20s was still guano, or mined from ancient deposits, or local manure spread on fields.

(Haber started out VERY expensive, and didn’t get cheap enough for bagged anhydrous until the latter 40s, when the war machine needed to do something in between making bomb materials so they could plausibly deny why they were keeping explosives production high.)

But as we know now, organic agriculture is labor intensive. Very true in the 1920s, and continued right up to today.

By 1925, we were up to about 25 calories of food per calorie of input (in the 14th century is was 2-3 calories in a bad year, 8 calories in a good year, and started rising in the 17th century). Which was good, but also meant farmers were often in a boom-bust cycle because a bumper crop almost certainly meant a low price per bushel. And 1925 is the Dust Bowl’s prologue-first chapter.

(An overlooked benefit of the New Deal was the Ever Normal granary concept, embodied in the price supports of the two Agricultural Adjustment Acts in the 1930s, which stabilized prices for commodity crops, hedged against famine, prevented overproduction, and prevent foreclosures and displacement. It worked until Earl Butz broke it under Nixon.)

(We are currently at an average of 3 calories of inputs per calorie of produced food now, thanks to the amount of fossil fuel we use for machinery and fertilizer, and with beef, it gets much higher. This is very bad.)

So we’ve got food, shelter, transport. We did clothes yesterday (shoes are an example, but the only real exception to “1925 was better made, the workers were better paid, and the consumer both paid less and could maintain their possession longer” is winter clothing — if we’re willing to accept down alternative and technical fleece as valid alternatives to furs — then winter clothing now is both significantly better for the mid range, and cheaper. For deep cold, fur and real down still beat polyester hands down).

Mass entertainment in 1925 was movies and radio; movies were usually 5 to 10 cents, with a nickel for a Coke and another nickel for popcorn. It’s about $3.75 in 2025 money, per person. Radios were just getting hitting mass penetration — enough stations to make it worth buying a receiver.

If you remember building your own computer? Radio in the mid 20s was like that. You could spend $65 or more to buy a complete system, ready to go (so a high month’s rent or more), or you could buy components, starting with a $2.50 crystal set and building it slowly up from bare bones.

Telephony was still not fully engaged. Basic telephone service then was like basic DSL internet service a few years ago — you rented your handset each month (it was part of your monthly service charge) as renting modems/routers was then common. It ran around $2.50-4.50 a month for strictly local service (equivalent to $45 to 80).

And mostly, it was party line service, up until the 1950s. It would be like sharing your WiFi with your five closest neighbors and the talkative social butterfly in that pod equals the house that plays WoW and sucks up a LOT of bandwidth in the evening. BUT: having a phone was not necessary for getting and keeping a job. Your schedule was fixed, you didn’t work at home (or you were a contractor who specifically had a piecework contract and no boss breathing down your neck), so hiring was a face to face meeting at the facility.

If your employer wanted you on call, they paid for your phone. And if you lived in an apartment building, there was a good chance the communal phone in the lobby was just one or several payphones, each call costs 5 cents and anyone who answered would take a message and leave it by the phone. Which is reasonable! If you’re not making 50-100 calls a month… paying by the call was cheaper!

Telegrams were cheaper than long distance calls. There’s a story of a man stationed far away who called his wife after receiving a letter saying she wanted a divorce. They ended up talking for 1 hour and 45 minutes. The call cost $163, around a $3000 phone call in 2025 money. Long distance was enormously expensive..

If it wasn’t urgent, the message could be a letter (2 cents postage). Into the 1950s, long distance calls and telegrams were a combined line item on many phone bills, which says how AT&T saw them.
Could we do that now? No. Should we think about it? YES.

At least we should think hard about the separation of work & personal life, and why fixed schedules are better, and who benefits when an employer demands 24/7 availability and 1 hour notice on schedule changes. That is something we’ve lost, and it’s not to anyone’s general benefit. This only benefits rentiers at the expense of everyone else, and we need to make it stop.

Then for other entertainment, it was mostly home and locally made. Local sports teams, local games clubs, bridge nights, local fraternal societies, church socials. Many places held weekly dances as a part of their business and/or as fundraisers for local beneficiaries. If you can think of something fun to do in a group, people did so, for modest fees, and a newspaper would both publicize it before hand and report on it after. And the newspaper was the local social media. My grandparents kept hundreds of clippings from their local paper of awards and goings-on for decades.

So food, clothes, rent, transportation, communication, entertainment.

Furniture:
Okay, furniture (and by extension, most durable chattel property) is where it gets weird.

So today, as a portion of income, it’s possible to newly furnish a house for about 1.5 median take home paychecks, as long as you realize it’s not going to last very long. You can walk out of IKEA or similar with a midrange couch, a TV bench, a bookcase, 2 chairs, a dining table and four chairs, a desk and chair, a nightstand, and a bed for about $3000. And much cheaper if you take every cheapest option (just shy of $1000).

But the best expectation for longevity are the bookcases and the arm chairs — Billy bookcases and Poang chairs have good design and longevity and can easily last 10-20 years. The rest of it? Maybe you’ve got 5-7 years. And it’s mostly quite ugly and looks cheap.

For 1925, Sears had full sets of furniture. For equivalents — exchanging the TV bench for a dining room buffet — the midrange would cost around $280, or $5200 in 2025, but everything except the mattress would probably last 25 years, easily, and many people today are using some Sears furniture sold in 1925. And even the 1925 mattress was probably a 20 year purchase.

$280 was not 1.5 median paychecks, it’s more like 4 total, but it’s well made. Using only the cheapest option, $161 ($3000) would furnish a house, not necessarily at the highest attractiveness, but nothing of that was disposable. It would all last for years, and it wasn’t obviously ugly.

And that was buying new, which wasn’t nearly as common. When the median lifespan was 65 years, it meant that Granddaughter Judy was getting married about the same time that Grandmother Mary was moving in with Mother Ella after Grandpa Jake died, so much of what Mary and Jake accumulated should and could go to Judy. Remember, there was no Social Security, pensions were sketchy, and there was no elder care beyond living with your children or entering an institution. The secondary market beyond family sharing was also strong — if someone needed to move a significant distance, it was often impossible to take much of their goods (expensive to load on a train, moving trucks for rental mostly didn’t exist yet), so those chattels would be sold and other, used goods purchased on the far end.

And selling the household furniture was a way of dealing with debt or raising rent when job loss or illness broke the income. And it was worth doing. Today, most of us can’t give away our furniture, or we get a pittance for it, and what we might recoup could not cover even a major bill. Because most of our furniture isn’t built to last a lifetime, and most people don’t want other people’s used particle board.

It’s also worth remembering that house mites almost didn’t exist in North America until fairly recently. Mites were first speculated upon before World War II in the Netherlands, but they weren’t identified in the Netherlands and Europe until the mid 1950s, weren’t found in most East Coast cities until the 60s and 70s, and they require a humid environment, meaning they’re incredibly rare west of the North American 100th meridian. They can’t reproduce in a dry climate (and they don’t have a long lifespan, so it takes air travel to get them across oceans). And before the energy crisis in the 1970s, when houses were leakier, draftier, colder in winter and not air conditioned, mites were rarer in even humid environments. Which means a major reason we now discard furniture more frequently — because they become a dust generator — didn’t exist a century ago.

Funny enough, this also goes for bed bugs and fleas. Fleas and bedbugs don’t reproduce well in dry climates, nor in very cold ones, so having drafty, cold houses and cold weather where we can take the bedding outside and freeze it overnight meant a functional, if not complete, form of insect control. Carpets weren’t fixed, mostly, so they, too could be taken out and beaten in the cold. And most upholstered furniture could also freeze overnight.

The hardware, the moveable property, of a century ago was meant to last a lifetime, meant to be cleanable, meant to be user-repaired, and to be resold on the secondary market. Today? Private equity can’t make money if a customer only buys any single thing once.

Balance sheets require our consumption. Is this good? It’s definitely not good for the planet, and not good for an egalitarian society. We also know that unrestricted, exponential growth has one name: cancer. This planet needs homeostasis, not metastasis. We have a capitalism problem. It’s killing us.

Now, were there downsides to living in 1925? Yes, a billion. Or actually, trillions. Bacteria. Antibiotics didn’t exist yet. A few sulfas kinda worked a little. We’d just figured out bottled oxygen at the end of World War I. We still didn’t understand Rh factor, so if you were a mismatch with your spouse, good luck having more than one kid.

Incubators existed, but they were mostly in sideshows, where people could pay a coin to gawk at the preemies. (And you know, it worked, the doctor only charged gawkers so it didn’t impoverish the parents, the nurses were top-notch at their jobs, and many of the preemies made it thanks to the infantoriums. This is not an endorsement!)

Insulin for public consumption had only existed for a year. Tuberculosis was still extremely common and difficult to treat, and TB and diabetes are viciously cooperative at killing humans. We only had a handful of vaccines, and we still had regular smallpox outbreaks. Head injuries and heart attacks were mostly fatal.

We had xray, but no other imaging yet. We could reliably remove organs if we absolutely had to, but surgery almost always meant a post-surgical infection of some sort — usually a fairly mild one, not sepsis — and meant a long recovery. Even childbirth had excellent reasons for keeping people for two weeks in the hospital.

The nursing emphasis on hygiene and ventilation started by Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Blackwell was entirely practical and absolutely worked, but unfortunately it did also contribute to eugenics and whacked out ideas about moral and racial hygiene, so not an unalloyed good.

Our best bet for cancer then was surgery, and mostly, we didn’t detect it until it was far too late.
We had alcohol — both ethanol when it wasn’t Prohibition and isopropyl — and iodine solution, for antiseptics. We also had Carbolic Acid (aka Phenol) which was poisonous but an antiseptic.

We had condoms and diaphragms, but mostly, in most of the United States, even asking for them was sometimes a crime and definitely mailing them or information about them was illegal. We hadn’t invented the rhythm method yet. We didn’t know when women ovulated. (That’s 1931).

We had aspirin and opium derivatives, for pain, cough suppression, and diarrhea. We had cocaine and derivatives for both topical pain control and some recreational uses; we had amphetamine, methamphetamine, and ephedrine for breathing issues, increasing worker productivity, and some heart issues (and dieting, and motivation, and groping our way towards understanding sleep and neurological issues).

We were feeling our way towards understanding estrogen and testosterone, but a good deal was still experimental, and would be destroyed in a decade. Our sedatives — chloral hydrate, barbiturates, ether, and chloroform — were highly addictive and had high fatality indexes. We didn’t have antihistamines yet at all.

The world had JUST started adding lead to gasoline, so we had less environmental lead, but we did have lead service pipes (which mostly were not a source of lead in the water as long as the water wasn’t stagnant or didn’t change sources), bullets and shotgun pellets, and leaded paint. Asbestos was a miracle substance! Kids played with mercury when a thermometer broke, and we painted wounds with a mercury-disodium solution.

In the Southeastern United States, hookworm was still endemic, and still infected most people. Eradication took decades, and required massive public works to build sewer systems and real septic systems in states where public works that benefited Black people were highly resisted and often sabotaged. (I include some northern states in this — Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky were in the edge of the endemic zone and in the sabotage some projects zone.) Shoes were a critical part of hookworm eradication, because hookworm is transmitted through the soles of the feet when someone walks through the feces of someone infected with hookworm.

If you want to know why Americans have a long history of wearing shoes in the house? Hookworm. If you lived in a place where it was endemic, if everyone could afford shoes, the best way to prevent it was to keep your floors scrupulously clean and leave shoes outside. But if a significant part of your population couldn’t afford shoes and/or running water, you had to wear shoes from the moment you got out of bed until you went back to bed, because the people around you who couldn’t afford shoes couldn’t take off their feet at the door to keep dirt out of the house/school/church. (And it wasn’t an entirely racial divide. A hell of a lot of poor whites couldn’t afford shoes in the feudal post-reconstruction south.)

And if you lived somewhere where it wasn’t yet endemic but might become endemic, you had to prevent it, and the way you prevented it was wearing shoes, because if you didn’t wear shoes and encountered a mud puddle with some fecal hookworm, you were going to spread it by getting infected.

“All god’s chillun got shoes” was a hymn with many, layered, deep meanings, but shoes mattered. Mattered a lot.

Hookworm made people lethargic, anemic, it caused diarrhea, malnutrition, abdominal pain, and cognitive and developmental damage to children. Eating dirt was (and is) not something safe for babies in places where hookworm is endemic — and it’s not totally eradicated in the Southeast anymore.

But that was another thing we couldn’t treat— we hadn’t yet invented the anthelmintics! (1970s for really effective ones vs hookworm.) And part of the reason hookworm is re-emerging in the US South is because of the scam medicine assholes.

They have a theory that allergies are because we don’t have hookworms, so having a little hookworm is good, and should be spread! Which means it’s going to end up in more places than just the US Southeast, anywhere humid enough without major freezes. At least the scam med crowd still shits in toilets. So far.

Speaking of… toilets WERE coming into greater use, but outhouses were still common, and even having the out*house* was a status marker. (Because if you couldn’t even afford to dig the pit and build an outhouse, or were too sick or tired or debilitated because of things like hookworm infections… well…)

Plus, cars hadn’t entirely replaced horses, and dedicated dairies were not the only sources of milk, so seeing piles of shit on the side of the road wasn’t uncommon, even in cities, and some of that shit would be human.

Running water was common in urban areas, and more often than not in exurban and developing suburbs, new purpose-built houses that weren’t hooked into municipal water were built over their well, with the well in the basement or under the foundation so even if there wasn’t yet electricity to run a pump, you can manually pump water, and it was less likely the pump and pipes would freeze. But older houses and makeshift shelters couldn’t afford that.

This is the point where I refer you to the magisterial Robert Caro multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the long excerpt from the Sad Irons chapter at Windward (and now at archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20230522011539/https://www.windward.org/notes/notes69/walt6901.htm) I know Windward’s intro is long, but it is worth the read.

Which is how we come to the next major 1925-2025 difference: our machines. And the most important one is the washing machine. There is no other technological device that has contributed more to women’s equality and suffrage than a washing machine. 1925’s laundry was just starting to include in-home electric washing machines. Clothes dryers were still of the outdoor line and indoor rack variety. Many 1925 washers still required manual filling, and with luck, the lady (it was always a lady, often not a white one) had running water and a hose she could attach to a faucet or even luckier, to a boiler, and it had a hose and valve for drainage.

But even a manual fill or a nearby pump and a manual wringer was so much easier than carrying 8 buckets of water a day, every day, for 100 feet to half a mile. A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds, most buckets held at least three gallons, and often five. Making a trip with two 5 gallon buckets uphill (you always sited your house uphill from the running water, because floods happen and there was no NOAA to warn you of flooding upstream) meant carrying 80 pounds, every single trip. Easily 4 trips on a normal day, and up to 10 on a washing day.

You could carry your laundry and all of its equipment downhill to where the water was, but that meant making sure the fire up in the house was completely out, and you couldn’t take a minute to check on the beans on the back of the stove, so no supper after a long day of very hard work for everyone. And if you had to do the wash in winter? You didn’t have any warm shelter.

An electric or gasoline powered double-basin washing machine was an investment — they started around $75 and went up to around $125 ($1300-2300). They didn’t automatically drain yet, and the spin cycle had not been invented. That’s what wringers were for.

There were manual washing machines that ran $10-16, where the washing woman filled the basin, then spun a crank to wash the clothes, but unless you had running water, they didn’t save a lot of suffering. (When I say Amishization is bad, I’m mostly talking laundry and stoves, because men who think Amishization is a good idea have never washed their own skidmarks by hand or cooked anything more complex than ramen or a freeze-dried pouch over wood.)

If you were VERY lucky, you lived in a city with an immigrant population willing to invest in washing machines and set up laundries in storefronts, and they didn’t charge you more than you could afford. But you also didn’t wash most clothes frequently (undergarments would be hand-washed at home).

Wools got powdered with clay or talc (to capture any oils) and brushed; silks might be dampened with alcohol to freshen them. Cottons would be washed eventually, but often not on the first wear or even second wear. Bedsheets often went longer than the week we consider normal now. Baby diapers were a never ending brutality (and toilet training happened EARLY) for their mothers, and for the elderly hitting pelvic floor dysfunction, prostate dysfunction, and incontinence? A profound shame and embarrassment.

But the key here: medicines and sanitation and washing machines and pest eradication? Those are all social goods, and best accomplished as a large scale community effort, not private industry. Wells and septic tanks are incredibly expensive individual options for private water, and in the modern world, wells are increasingly polluted. (Ask Iowa’s growing cancer and extant Blue Baby Syndrome populations.) At the per capita rate, water treatment and municipal sewers are an incredible bargain. So is public health and pest control, and as most of the rest of the world proves, communal approaches to providing medicine is a better bang for the buck than the US system.

Even washing machines! As much as most of us like our in-house washing machines, it really is more efficient to either have community laundries OR community laundry services because our in-house machines are more un-used than in-use (even if you’re doing 6 loads a day, that’s 42 hours a week, and there’s 126 hours a week where that machine is not in use.) Putting community cleanliness and medicine in the private sector has made them exponentially more expensive and wasteful than they need to be, and most of that money goes to a handful of people at the top, not the workers. It concentrates wealth, it doesn’t spread it around.

And while we should be using as much of the free, simple solar power (clothes lines) as we can, instead of being forced to not by municipalities and HOAs, it’s not always ideal — dusty places, places with obscene pollen levels, places with high industrial and/or road pollution? Those all need clothes dryers, but even then, we have other options than the forced air clothes dryer that is the global standard. (Airing closets, based on an enclosed space fitted with a dehumidifier and a low temp warmer, can dry clothing hung on hangers overnight, for approximately 1/8th of the energy a high voltage clothes dryer takes.)

Which is the other, invisible difference between 1925 and 2025. Due to the tax structure of the pre-Nixon and Ronald Reagan world, we had higher marginal tax rates for income over a high dollar amount. In 1925, For the first $4000 of income, you paid 1.5%, then 3% from $4001 to $8000, then an increasing 1% per $1000 of annual income. Earn $100,000 ($1.85 million in 2025), you got taxed at a 25% rate for every dollar over $100K. And that applied to corporations, too. (AT&T, in 1950, paid almost $1 billion in taxes on about $4 billion in annual income. We were serious about companies paying their share.) And that was in the run up to the collapse, when taxes were considered extravagantly low.

In 1932, that 25% tax rate dropped to anything over $38K ($900K), and added a percent of taxation for every $2000 of added income, to top out at a 63% tax rate for every dollar over $1 million ($23 million). In 1936, the Roosevelt administration and Congress added more tax brackets for incomes over $1 million, topping at a 79% rate over $5 million of income. It grew through the war years, until in 1944, the tax rate for the highest earners topped out at 94% of everything over $200,000 (two hundred thousand) ($3.9 million) in annual income. We really committed to distributing wealth downwards in the mid-century, and it worked. We even gave the highest earners options in the redistribution — either you do it by these rules, or we’ll do it for you. We gave the ultra-wealthy tools to manage their money in the fairest and most egalitarian ways we could (at the time).

The way individuals and corporations reduced their tax burden? They paid labor more, they invested in capital improvements, gave benefits, paid annual and quarterly dividends to their investors. They did their best to move money from the “profit” category into the “expense” category, because they’d reap the benefits of paying their stockholders and employees and buying better equipment. Plus, better to pay the face you see regularly than some unknown IRS office, right? And that kept money moving around and spread out over the whole population, and the IRS got it back from those folks. If you pay your employees enough to buy what you sell (and everyone else in town), you (and everyone else) have a bigger market! And the tax burden is shared so everyone pays a fair share. That is SMART growth, not metastasis.

Money’s like manure, in a big pile it can’t do anything but rot. But spread it around, and watch what grows. Reagan (and Nixon) couldn’t wrap his tiny mind around that, and Bush pere was on a holy quest for the Capital Gains Tax Cut. All of them found the idea of taxing wealth to be horrific, a sin against Capital and a personal insult against the only thing they thought made them worthy. Instead of the necessary homeostasis that keeps the pressure of the market in the healthy range.

We have lessons we can learn from 1925 and the years that followed. It’s our choice how we put them to work.