Cost Of Thriving

While many economists argue that America’s working families are more prosperous than ever before, families themselves feel that they have come under increasing economic pressure (precarity). The families are right.
Economists rely on inflation-based adjustments to compare costs of living over time, but this method measures the cost of buying the same set of things in different eras. Perhaps a family could more easily afford a 1985 quality of life in 2015 than in 1985, but being in the middle class in 2015 means affording a 2015 quality of life.
The Cost-of-Thriving Index (COTI) offers a better way to understand the challenge for working families. It avoids reliance on inflation adjustments by instead focusing on the ratio of nominal costs to nominal wages in each year. https://americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index/

Jun'2023, Zvi Mowshowtiz: On the Cost of Thriving Index: Scott Winship argued recently that the ‘cost of thriving’ has fallen, pushing back once again against Oren Cass and his rather arbitrarily calculated ‘Cost of Thriving Index (COTI).’ Alex Tabarrok posted today on Marginal Revolution that Winship and coauthor Horpedahl were right, but that they face an uphill battle because people feel they are wrong, and suggested that our newly high time-value warps our perceptions. He points to Linder’s Theorem, which I hadn’t seen before, which states (correctly): “rising productivity decreases the demand for commodities whose consumption is expensive in time.”

Feb'2023, Michael J Hicks: This Silliness of the "Cost of Thriving Index": In 2020, the Manhattan Institute published the Cost of Thriving Index (COTI). What followed was broad and substantive criticism from folks like Matt Yglesias at Vox, Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Strain at AEI, Robert Verbruggen at National Review, Oliver Sherouse on his blog, and on lengthy twitter threads by Scott Winship. Normally, this enormity of detailed, technically rigorous, and and conceptually clear criticism would cause an endeavor of this sort to quietly disappear. That would’ve been the most productive outcome for the COTI. But, the 2023 version of the Cost of Thriving Index has migrated to the growing library of bad ideas known as The American Compass.