The Real Reason Americans Think Everything Is Getting Worse

The headline is troubling: “More Americans say they are living paycheck-to-paycheck,” CNBC reported on Tuesday. The report featured one of the most commonly cited statistics by economic pessimists: that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But this statistic is hugely misleading. 

For one, the survey was taken by LendingClub (an institution that offers personal financial loans), and the question was framed as “Do you need your next paycheck to cover monthly spending?” There’s a little bit of a sampling issue there.

The Federal Reserve, which used a much broader sampling, reported that 37% would struggle to meet an unexpected expense (i.e. don’t have substantial savings), and Bank of America found that fewer than a quarter of the Americans reported “living paycheck to paycheck” when it was defined as spending 95% of their income on necessities. 

These numbers offer a far more realistic measure than the figures often cited. Even among this group, living paycheck to paycheck does not necessarily imply poverty or even financial hardship. It just means that you’re spending all the money you’re bringing in. It doesn’t mean that you’re spending it wisely or living within your means.

We’ve heard a great deal about prices on the rise. Also on the rise has been our expectation for quality. Let’s take a look at what those paychecks are actually buying. 

On average, houses have more than doubled in square footage since the 1950s (an often romanticized decade for economic stability). Cars now have airbags, collision avoidance, and cameras, and they last over 200,000 miles.

Fewer than 2% of American homes had air conditioning of any kind in the year 1950. Now it’s up to 90%. To have ever been on a commercial flight in the 1950s was a sign of immeasurable status and wealth. Now nearly half of Americans fly at least once per year.

Healthcare is vastly superior to what it was. Everyone has a lot to say about ballooning costs, and while they are legitimate concerns, there is no denying that you are better off with the healthcare system of today than that of the 1950s. Vaccines have eradicated smallpox and nearly eradicated polio and measles, some of the most sweeping and deadly diseases in history. Cancer treatment has taken massive leaps such that certain types of cancer can be mitigated entirely. 

Most of all, there’s the internet. More than 95% of Americans regularly use the internet. This includes 83% of all Americans below the official poverty line. What’s on the internet? Google and all its services are entirely free to use. This means that any one of those people with regular access can tap into an incomprehensibly large database of information.

Lectures and papers from the top academics in the world are available for free. Typical “how-to” videos on YouTube save Americans the time and frustration of figuring out endless niche chores. Consider how much time (and opportunity cost) you’ve saved by outsourcing to the internet that which once required professionals.

There is virtually no topic you can’t master. Virtually no person on the planet that you can’t communicate with instantaneously. Entertainment is no longer limited to a few timed channels and the magazines you happen to own; you have the option to stream millions of movies, songs, videos, or whatever else you please from the comfort of your home.

And now, at the cusp of the AI Age, a free Google account entitles one to full access to Google Gemini and a free X account gives you Grok (some of the top AI models in the world). It is casually becoming an expectation of even poorer Americans to have access to the research capabilities and generative manpower that once required dozens of employees at the very least. Education and innovation have quite literally never been easier.

A lot of these progressions seem obvious when you say them out loud, but this is precisely the point. The newfound advantages of the 21st century are so ubiquitous that they’re taken for granted. A fish doesn’t know it swims in water.

These statistics offer a much-needed reminder that things are, in fact, getting better. Excepting a few truly impoverished individuals, everyone in the contemporary United States is enjoying access to luxuries that would dwarf even the wealthiest standards of living several decades ago. 

This is not to suggest that everything about our society is perfect. But to pretend like our material conditions have not improved over the past decades is just blatantly incorrect. 

While there do exist areas in which public life has shown signs of decline, they have nothing to do with this romanticized view of the past economy. The declining birth rates, rise in single-parent homes, and intensifying political polarization are all very serious issues. But contrary to what lots of people would have you believe, these are the products of culture — not economics. 

And cultural problems require cultural solutions. Reducing everything that is negative in society to economic anxiety is lazy and dishonest. It’s easy for Senator Bernie Sanders to tell you that if only you support his subsidies, life will get better. It won’t. Writing checks is not going to make people more likely to get married and have families. Going to church might.

Statistics like the one reported on CNBC are not entirely meaningless, but they are desperately lacking in proper context. Material conditions today are vastly better than they were in the 1950s. The state of the past was not some romantic ideal lost to history.

Chin up, America. Our best days lie ahead.

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This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.