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Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

I am not an economist but I think we’re just measuring inflation wrong: anecdotal, but I have noticed for my peers housing and education is now expensive to the point where there aren’t many dollars left to participate in other economic activity.

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I'm a systems engineer in Seattle. Thanks to my student loans I can't afford a house, I can't afford to have a child with my wife - thankfully my employer is kind enough to provide health insurance or else I'd probably be screwed there, too. Anyone who thinks this economy is booming is kidding themselves.

It's booming for some people. You and I are not those people.

We think the economy is booming because these costs are increasing (inflation). Stupid.

Same with GDP. A 50 car pileup will increase GDP!

Can you please explain this to me in more detail? Costs inflating causes economists to think the economy is booming, how? Is it based on how they measure “economic boom”?

Why would a 50 car pile up “increase GDP”? I’ve heard similar criticism of how we measure GDP, but don’t understand precisely what the problem is.

1. Most central bank economists have abandoned the standard of price stability, and now target a specific CPI number. The Fed targets 2%, for example.

2. A 50 car pileup will employ EMS personnel, hospital staff, tow truck drivers, road cleanup crews, etc. Then later, new car assembly, transportation, DMV workers, and car salesmen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

It's worse than that. Central bankers define 2% inflation as price stability. 2% isn't even stable, it's compounding, prices go up more every year than in the previous year, and CBs say they achieved "stability". Odd use of the word!

Myopic and hyperbolic. While this may indeed be what you're experiencing, and while it sounds as if you're being very negatively impacted, your experience is not universal and is likely due to a number of contributing factors (a couple of which you've hinted towards in your post).

Myself and many of my peers have had a decidedly opposite experience during the last 2-3 years and are enjoying a thriving economy. I'd suggest you're kidding yourself that it's -not- booming, and are suffering the results of choices made despite the state of the economy.

I'm actually rather happy with the choices that I've made in this economy. I would be much worse off not making these choices - however, almost everything I want is unaffordable....things that I view to be human rights.

Whatever you may suspect to be the cause of my circumstance, I am positive the good things you are experiencing are a result of good timing and luck(I'm sincerely happy for you, don't get me wrong but please stop patronizing me - the world is filled with real people) Forgive me for wanting a future where those things aren't necessary for housing or family-raising.

Maybe it is time to leave Seattle? It is pretty entitled of you to say that it is your human right to have a house in one of the most expensive metros in the country.

The economy is booming. Go find a new job. You will be able to and you'll get a pay raise.

Cities aren't inherently expensive. Even in some of the richest and most prosperous cities in our human history, there have always been people less well off that could afford to live there. The only reason we have this concept of cities that only exist for a certain class of people is because we have deliberately made them that way.

People don't choose cities the way they choose a home. This isn't like someone thinking they have to live in a nice apartment when all they can afford is a nice apartment.

Cities are places where people can choose to live, but more likely than not they are where they haven't chosen to live. Their choice to stay is a choice to be with family that they need or that needs them. Or a choice to advance a career that they are unlikely to find elsewhere. Or to stay in a place that is culturally important to them.

We can afford to give people the possibility of not having to leave a place that they love, or comfortably afford a city they can't leave for whatever reason. It may mean that some people don't get rich off of rent-seeking housing markets, but it is entirely possible, and we should do it. It isn't any more entitled to want to do so than it was for our entire nation to want Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness when we didn't have it.

I'm sympathetic to people living near where they grew up or where there family is at. I live where I live because of family. If it weren't for them, I would have left after college and never looked back.

Cities are inherently expensive. The more people you have wanting to bid up the limited amount of real estate in a city, the more expensive it will get. This pressure could be alleviated with higher density housing, but no one has a right to that.

Likewise, no one has the right to restrict density on property they don't own.

Property owners have actual rights...they are listed explicitly on the deed or easement. Buying a property does not and never will confer the right to restrict other people's decisions of what can and can't be done on their property.

Society may decide on those restrictions together. But it is a bad precedent to give some parts of society more power than others when deciding on those restrictions, and it is in no way "entitled" for a member of society to complain about the results of this trend or want to fix it.

I’m waiting for housing to drop in price over the next few years. The boomers are dying. Their houses, and I mean all those investment properties as well as their private homes, will hit the market when their kids don’t want them.

The price of education will only decrease when more people take up manual labor jobs. You can get paid 24$ here in Florida if you’re willing to work on a ladder.

It looks like the US population is expected to increase [0]. If the boomers are dying, it looks like we're going to have people to replace them.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183481/united-states-pop...

In theory housing prices could still go down if the people replacing dying boomers have less money to spend on housing.

Just to follow up on this thought: in theory this would not be a departure from the historical norm unless boomers are more wealthy in comparison to incoming people than previous generations of older folks were.

It won't happen within a few years. Boomers are still relatively healthy thanks to improved health care. If you count on that, then you should expect at least decades more.

Friend skipped college and joined the electricians union during the 2007-8 crash. Started his own business three years ago and is already charging essentially whatever he wants as most electricians are old and retiring. He barely knows any electricians our age.

I knew a man that joined the Navy because he advanced so fast as an electrician that in his early 20s he had people working for him that had been in the industry for 30 years and he was tired of being hassled by them.

I knew another man that started working at a shipyard out of high school as a rigger (guy that lifts stuff, doesn't get much more blue collar), and in a couple years was supervising the assembly of Warships making thousands of dollars a week - SV eat your heart out.

This is something Mike Rowe has been advocating for years. Not only is college not cheap, even if it was free it's a worse option in every way for a lot of people.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2018/08/30/dirties...

Unfortunately it’s not just about the money. In many circles of our society, non white collar work is seen as inferior and lower class. This stigma needs to be lifted before we can expect more people to enter these trades.

The stigma will automatically be lifted once people see non white collar workers living in the nice parts of town sending children to the nice schools and generally having a nicer quality of life.

Maybe. Or maybe it'll just cause frustration, resentment and denial when people realise the expensive degrees that were supposed to confer on them a superior intellect and lifestyle don't seem to have worked.

Let’s not forget medical care.

Included in inflation measurement ( https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_09132018.htm ), but alas it's not perfect, because employer paid portion is increasing, but it's not counted. (A methodology change can be easily argued for, the BEA had a healthcare expeditures price index, but it stopped updating it in 2014.)

There's been plenty of inflation in sectors like education and healthcare except the government, conveniently, doesn't count that as 'core.'

Inflation is pretty well measured (and "core" - which is a term not used by BLS - includes healthcare, education but does not include food and energy: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_09132018.htm ), but there are a lot of crackpots out there, for example read this detailed rebuttal of one such:

https://moneymaven.io/economonitor/emerging-markets/deconstr...

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