Is it harder to buy a home today than in the past? Many seem to think so. Lately, some people have used the example of the fictional Simpsons family to make this claim. A recent Tweet with around 100,000 likes expressed the sentiment:
The unspoken implication is that today a “single salary from a husband who didn’t go to college” couldn’t buy a typical home in the US. Or at least, it would stretch your budget so thin that you would have to give up something else or need two incomes to support that lifestyle (famously dubbed “the two-income trap” by Elizabeth Warren).
And it’s not just a Tweet that caught fire. A December 2020 article in the Atlantic claimed “The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable” and used housing as a prime example. And while a 2016 Vox article on Homer’s many jobs doesn’t mention the cost of housing, they draw a similar conclusion and implication: “Homer Simpson has gone nowhere in the past 27 years — and the same could be said of actual middle-class Americans.”
But is this an accurate picture of the Simpsons family over time? And does that picture accurately represent a typical family in the US? Let’s investigate. And let’s start by pointing out that as measured by the availability of consumption goods, the Simpsons do see rising prosperity over time. They have flat screen TVs now, instead of consoles with rabbit ears, as the late Steve Horwitz and Stewart Dompe point out in their contribution to the edited volume Homer Economicus. But with all due respect to my friends Steve and Stewart, I don’t think many would deny that TVs, cell phones, and computers are cheaper today than in the 1990s. The familiar refrain is “but what about housing, education, and health care?”
In this post I want to take on the question of housing, partially by using the Simpsons as an example. My main result is this chart, which I will present first and then explain.
Economist Writing Every Day 