Shifting baselines: every generation has a different starting line
Updated: Oct 27
"We managed, so why can't they?"
It's a common line when older generations talk about younger people and housing. The person saying it usually did find buying their first home hard. They likely had to go without things to get on the property ladder.
But the world 40 years ago is not the same world today. Each generation faces its own kind of hardship, and each only ever knows its own.
This blind spot is called shifting baseline syndrome.
Shifting baselines
The term comes from ecology. In 1995, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly argued that each generation of fisheries scientists accepted the fish stocks at the start of their careers as the baseline. The next generation started from an already depleted ocean and took that as normal. Over decades, huge losses went unnoticed because nobody's baseline reached back far enough to see them. Psychologists call this environmental generational amnesia.
The idea has since spread well beyond fisheries. At its core, it's a data problem. You might expect scientists to have simply checked the historical record, but the records they trusted started late. Systematic global catch statistics only began in 1950, decades after overfishing had been recognised as a serious threat. Older evidence, such as fishers' accounts of past abundance, was dismissed as anecdote.
Same line, different starting points
Housing data in Aotearoa New Zealand shows how this plays out.
House prices pull away from incomes in the early 1990s.
Ratio of house prices to household incomes, 1950–2021
The graph shows how many years of household income it took to buy an average house. Each point on the line is someone's baseline.
A person who bought their first home in the 1980s did so when the average house cost about three years of household income. That's their "normal". Buying was still hard, and mortgage interest rates were high. Inflation was high too, which increased the cost of everything else. Pay rose quickly, although not always as fast as prices. This helped shrink mortgage repayments as a share of income.
A person buying their first home today starts from a different point on the same line. The ratio hasn't been back at three since the early 1990s. When this analysis was published in 2022, average house prices would have needed to fall by about two-thirds to get back there. Inflation has risen again, but this time pay isn't keeping up. In the year to June 2026, prices rose about twice as fast as wages. Today's buyers get the cost-of-living squeeze without the pay rises that once shrank a mortgage.
Both of these people are describing real experiences from different points on the line. When someone says "we managed, so why can't they?", they're judging today's buyers against their own starting point on a line that has kept climbing.
Who benefited from the shift?
The rise in house prices that pushed the price-to-income line up also made earlier buyers wealthier. Between 1981 and 2019, median house prices rose almost 18-fold while median household incomes rose 5-fold. In New Zealand, any rise in the value of the family home is also tax-free.
By 2024, households that owned their home without a mortgage had a median net worth of about $1.3 million. For renting households, it was $57,000. The rise that built wealth for earlier buyers is the same rise that makes it harder for the next generation to get in.
Who's missing from "we managed"?
"We managed" is said by the people who bought into the housing market. But what about the people who aren’t part of the collective "we"?
Even at the 1991 peak in home ownership, about one in four New Zealand households didn't own their home. By 2023, it was about one in three.
In my post on survivor bias, I wrote about how we often only hear from the people who succeeded at something. "We managed, so why can't they?" can show both survivor bias and a shifting baseline. A shifting baseline doesn't account for changed conditions. Survivor bias doesn't account for the people who never became part of the "we".
What to do about it
When someone compares their experience with yours, or when you compare data across time points:
Check the starting point. Ask what the surrounding context looked like when each person started.
Compare at the same life stage. Put 25-year-olds then beside 25-year-olds now. Keeping age the same shows how much the conditions have changed.
Ask who gained from the shift. The conditions that made life hard for one group may be the source of another group's security.
Look for who's missing. Ask who didn't make it into the story, and why.
I write about data and power, so if you'd like to follow along, the best place to do that is my newsletter. This article is part of the Things We Tell Ourselves series. Each article looks at an everyday saying, what the data shows, and what it means if you tell stories with data.
Kat Greenbrook is a data storytelling consultant, author, and workshop facilitator based in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the founder of Rogue Penguin and the author of The Data Storyteller's Handbook.
