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Are we burning it down by proxy?
Is anyone else in a part of the US where there are a ton more fireworks this summer than ever before? It can't be just my neighborhood. Literally every night since the beginning of June, someone is setting fire to their (presumably inversely proportional, that is to say, increasingly diminishing) disposable income. The prices of everything are higher than ever—gas, food, housing, everything—and yet. What is going on out there??
I've noticed a distinctly smaller amount of fireworks going off this year, for what it's worth.
Same, for once. I only heard fireworks a few days before the Fourth. And then it basically ended the night of the Fourth.
The neighboring town did a large display yesterday (Sat night) for their town's 277th birthday/US 250yrs. But aside from that, haven't heard anything else.
Anywhere I've lived, whether in the suburbs or in the city, like a week or two before the Fourth, the fireworks and firecrackers are nightly. Then goes for like another week, maybe two, after the holiday. Though not necessarily nightly.
Now fireworks in the neighborhood this year did go pretty late and pretty hard on the Fourth in my area. Even through the rain that evening! I wonder if people "blew their wad" for the 250th. Because it's been real quiet this past week!
That is my experience too. Heard a couple of fireworks on the 3rd, a few hours on the 4th, and then randomly one firework last night. In most years, I am hearing them every single night intermittently for hours in the week before and after the 4th.
According to FRED, real income in the last year has gone down by 0.9%, that is, less than a single percentage point. Which leaves plenty of room for fireworks.
It's the 250th year, people are going to go ham.
I mean, everything you spend on recreation is "on fire". Parking for a hike? Money gone. Eating nice-er food? If it's more than rice and beans, on fire. Movie tickets? Netflix?
People normally spend a lot of their income on things that aren't tangible assets. Life is to be enjoyed in the end.
+1 to 250th. Definitely a factor.
And I think the 'on fire' is simply because it is quite literal in this case. Often with a side of property damage and personal injury. It's hard to pass up a good opportunity for double-meaning.
A tiny firework that'll sparkle for about 1 minute costs on the order of a movie ticket. An hour of fireworks will easily run $500. In the terms of value per minute, it's roughly on par with a $0.50 slot machine.
I'd say it's a pretty valid question on the whole. Right now feeding and housing my family alone is costing me on the order of 50% of our household income. And we're right in that median in a fairly low CoL area. And I even downsized my housing costs.
And I say this all as someone who loves fireworks. It saddens me to see the current state of affairs. I live in an area that is pretty enthusiastic about them, to the point it would seem a constant barrage from about July 3rd till July 6th. But this year it was mostly over and done after a few hours on the 4th.
But the income level trends below national average here. And it shows.
I doubt it's the people who are barely making ends meet that are going ham on fireworks. I could swear I remember someone sourcing info before, I think on this site, but can't find it from a search, that showed there's a bigger income disparity where there's less of a 'middle' in the middle class, and people who are above average income are well above and people below are falling much lower. In this scenario, I wouldn't find it strange that there's a lot of people struggling, and also a lot of people with a great amount of disposable income to blow on whatever.
This matches my anecdotal experience. Recently on this site I saw someone saying that $800 a year is a rounding error for working class adults, and that really left an impression on me about how broad of a label "working class" is.
The traditional Marx definition of working class includes everyone from McDonalds dishwashers to neurosurgeons making >$2million/yr.
Yeah. If you can live in comfort forever on the extracted value of other people's labor, you're the leisure class. If you have to keep working for a living or retired on your savings from your life of labor you're in the working class. It's literally in the name.
K-shaped recovery. People with assets are doing more or less fine. People paycheck to paycheck hurting evermore.
It so happens I made a chart that shows that there are a lot more high-income households in the US. But also, the population grew in general so there are more poor and middle income households too.
(Made by asking an AI to write code to redo a chart I saw online, by downloading the spreadsheets from the Census Bureau.)
Is it inflation adjusted? Would be nice to see the progress of relative spilt over the time too.
Yes, inflation-adjusted. I added a second chart below the first one that has percentages, much like the original chart I saw.
Off hand, it doesn't paint a complete picture because it's not normalized for inflation or cost of living or multigenerational households.
It is inflation adjusted. Since a single person making $100k is quite different from a large family earning $100k total, I’d like to make a better graph that uses income per capita in a household, or just lets you filter by household size. But that would require more digging rather than plotting data in a table that the Census Bureau already made.
The overall trend is that household size decreased and therefore, counting households exaggerates population growth in the early years.
It’s a bit tricky to decide how to account for cost of living when it can also be an amenity you choose. For example, let’s say a new college grad moves to a high cost-of-living city and gets a high-paying job. Moving to the city is a choice they made to live in a more desirable place, and the job is how they pay for it. Just like you could have expensive tastes in food or clothing, you can have expensive tastes in choosing a place to live.
Other people are closer to being trapped where they live than choosing it, though, so they’re essentially forced to buy higher-priced housing.
Anyway, there’s only so much you can get out of one graph. National statistics will only tell you so much and it might be better to look at whichever city you’re interested in.
I agree, and I'm actually struggling with how I'd like to process/present the data in order to better engage with it.
Per capita income is important, as a single person making 100,000 is very different than a parent supporting a household of 4, or multiple people working and living in the same household.
I think cost of living is important, as it directly drives what is low, medium, high income - making 100,000+ with a high cost of living isn't the same as 60000 with low costs of living. I do recognize there's different modalities here, some people can move and have choice, while others cannot. However, I don't think that's really a problem. Surely grads won't move to high paying jobs in high cost of living areas if it didn't (in aggregate, as individual situations are more complex) maximize their disposable income. People that are stuck, are largely stuck because they're starved of time and money needed to break out of their cycle. I think plotting per capita income - cost of living would indirectly reflect this mobility; put another way I don't think mobility is a confounding variable, but rather a manifestation of what we want to measure.
Graphically, I'd probably go with box plots per year to get an idea of any given year's distribution and how it has changed over the years.
I'm just thinking out loud, I'm not asking/suggesting you do this.
Edit: rearranged some bits for flow
I don't think the right way to think about it is maximizing disposable income. People will give up some income (including taking a different job) in order to pay for other advantages that result from living in a nice location. For all sorts of reasons, but one example would be living closer to work to minimize commute or not have to drive.
We had less fireworks this year - but it rained pretty hard on the 4th and the 5th. Also, the neighbor that used to set off a shit ton moved away. I got more sleep than normal this year and I can't complain.
I don't usually mind them, but we live in a pretty dense neighborhood with most people having only a small or no yard. So I've become a hater over the years because of the fire risk and that they're so loud in such a confined area.
July 4 around here was a bit of a rain-out, but we had locals doing their thing an early as two weekends prior to the fourth, and they're still out there doing their thing. As soon as the tents start popping up in the grocery store parking lots, and at roughly 3am last night in the baseball field of the nearby park, folks are blowing shit up.
Interestingly, the 250th doesn't seem to have influenced anything around here, at least as far as fireworks go. The 250th pretty instantly became just another fence to sit on one side or the other of and nothing to nothing more.
What has had a significant impact on all things fireworks where I live, is that the state only just recently made it legal to buy... seemingly anything. Prior to a couple of years ago we were a "sparklers" state, and now we seem to be prepping for Operation Overlord. On and around the fourth you'd always hear a few *fweeeee... POP* types, but now we're treated to endless loud explosions at entirely random times through the entire month of July and even into August if that's how long it takes to run out of ammunition.
I hate when things make me feel like a curmudgeon, but the truth is that it's annoying as hell, and I feel terrible for those who have real issues with the noise. But... it's cheap entertainment, and around here some folks live to be confrontational, so it's just another one of those new normals.