The Economics of “Affordability”: Why the Word Works and Why It Worries Me

Notes from my conversation with Kai Ryssdal from Marketplace

This week, I sat down with Kai Ryssdal and Andie Corban on Marketplace to talk about a word that has suddenly become the centerpiece of political campaigns and national conversations: affordability.

New York’s mayoral race leaned on it. President Trump is using it more often. Candidates across the political spectrum are building messages around it.

And there’s a reason for that.

When you say “affordability,” people immediately feel like you’re talking to them, about their actual lives. It meets voters where they are, at the grocery store, in child-care centers, on Zillow at midnight. It’s relatable in a way that GDP, CPI, or interest rates aren’t.

But there’s a major problem: affordability is almost impossible to define.

And promising to “fix” it is a promise no politician can truly keep.

What I Told Kai

Listen to the interview here.

In the interview, I explained that when people say “affordability,” they’re usually talking about the prices hitting them hardest: groceries, rent, child care, and medical bills.

As Marketplace quoted:

“The reality is real wages have not kept up,” I said. “I think that’s what the average American is complaining about when they bring up the term affordability.”

And that’s key.

Affordability isn’t really about prices. It’s about the relationship between prices and income. If your wages aren’t rising as fast as your bills, life feels less affordable, no matter what the official inflation rate says. But this is where things get complicated.

Affordability is inherently subjective. As I told Kai:

“We spend money on different things and we have different priorities, and that’s where it gets a little complicated.”

For a parent, affordability might mean child care.
For a young adult, it might mean rent.
For a retiree, it might mean health care or property taxes.

There’s no single metric. No clean policy target.

This is exactly why UCLA linguist Jessica Rett described affordability as “a much weirder noun than economy”—because the word carries personal meaning. As she put it:

“Everyone’s an expert in affordability… it’s relative to their own experience.”

And that relativity is a double-edged sword.

Marketplace also highlighted a point from economist Mihaela Pintea that I think many Americans will recognize:

People look at the economy and think, “Maybe everyone else is doing OK, but why is it that I have a hard time just living my life?”

That’s the feeling driving the word’s surge.

Why Politicians Love the Word (And Economists Don’t)

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The vagueness is the feature, not the bug.

Because affordability can mean almost anything, policymakers can claim success using whichever metric makes them look best. They can pick income growth, consumer sentiment, gas prices, rent stabilization, you name it; any metric they choose can become a placeholder for affordability.

But for the rest of us, that lack of clarity makes it harder to hold leaders accountable and harder to design policy that actually improves economic well-being.

In economics, precision matters. Ambiguity feels good politically, but it delivers weak policy. If we want to make progress on affordability, we need to stop treating it as a slogan and start breaking it down:

• Affordability of housing

• Affordability of child care

• Affordability of health care

• Affordability of transportation

• Affordability as income not keeping up

Each of these requires a different policy tool.

Lumping them together under one umbrella term might win elections, but it won’t fix people’s lives. Someone is bound to be disappointed by the outcome.

The Bottom Line

Affordability resonates because it captures how people feel in this economy.

But unless we get more precise about what we mean, and what we’re measuring, we risk talking past each other and creating policy that doesn’t solve our problems.

I’d love to see policymakers define the term before promising to fix it.

Because you can’t solve what you won’t clearly name or measure.

And if you’re looking for a discussion item this Thanksgiving, bring it up at dinner and ask your family to define what affordability means to them. Please report your responses back here in the comments. Consider this your official Decode Econ Thanksgiving Project.

Stay curious,

Dr. A