Everything but housing and education you mean. Standard of living is probably on the whole worse. My dad had a high school education and a ridiculously good pension, full health vision dental, profit sharing, working in the maintenance department in the 80s.
Its really just because of supply and demand. We made it illegal to add more supply. Los Angeles up until the 1960s was zoned for 10 million people with a population under 3 million, you were allowed to develop your single family home into a 25 foot wide 5 story brick apartment building and many of these went up in neighborhoods like hollywood and koreatown.
Today homes are out of reach for middle class because we have a population of 3.9 million in los angeles, but have a zoning capacity of only 4.2 million. It's not exactly rocket science how to fix this mess. Legalize building housing and housing will appear to satiate demand.
The best reason for housing prices increasing faster than inflation is that the western world has made it policy that middle-class wealth is based on housing prices rising faster than inflation so many economic actors will personally benefit from higher and higher housing prices.
