The cost of living
Nick Cohen in last week's Evening Standard (not online, I think) returns to one of his favourite themes, the rising cost of living in London. He quotes Martin Amis[1]:"In the 1960s you could live on 10 shillings a week: you slept on people's floors and sponged off your friends and sang for your supper," Amis remembered. " Then , abruptly, breakfast[2] alone cost 10 shillings. The oil hike, inflation and stagflation revealed literary criticism as one of those leisureclass fripperies we would have to get along without."
and adds himself:
Class is once again dominating London's culture because the extraordinary house price inflation is pricing graduates from ordinary backgrounds out of intellectual life.
There is clearly something in this, with many salaries in these types of jobs failing to keep pace with the general rise in income, and house prices in any case have exceeded the rise in income [3]. And yet the example chosen is not a good one (and it's worth recalling that Cohen means couples on £100,000 a year when he talks about these things)
Ten shillings in 1969 is equivalent to about six pounds today. That doesn't sound very realistic, even for the 1960s. But of course Amis is remembering those days as sleeping on people's floors, sponging off friends, and singing for your supper. Obviously this means a low cost of living as everything there is free. The cost of doing that today is identical. Zilch. Furthermore, Nick Cohen's interpretation makes no sense at all, because house price inflation is essentially irrelevant to Amis's story.
You could argue that higher house prices mean people have smaller houses, and thus less room for people to crash on their floors. But really the lesson of this is what we were discussing the other week, which is what Cohen and Amis mean is no-one (and particularly one assumes not people of their age) would put up with the deprivation that they did then. This is essentially at the heart of middle-class whinging - they want foreign travel (vastly cheaper) and new TVs, etc, when their parents probably holidayed in Devon, and made do with a single black and white set until it stopped working.
[1] The choice of Amis as an example of better days in piece about how nowadays people can't work in the arts unless they have rich parents is amusing.
[2] Cohen's genius for misquotation continues, unless there are two version of War Against Cliche. It's a bus fare that now costs 10 shillings in my version (but his italics).
[3] Although houses are investment goods, and so the cost of buying a house contains implicitly a positive amount of saving. People should really look at the cost of purchase using an interest-only mortgage.
posted by Matthew @ 2/24/2007 03:18:00 PM
Comments: 7
