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Comment by blevin | Hacker News Reader

A price inflation measure like CPI is a summary statistic, so it does not capture the underlying dispersion of costs as various people experience them. It is true that imported, mass-manufactured goods remain cheap, such as TV’s. At the same time, domestic resources like housing, health care, and education are difficult for many to afford. It turns out those things are vital to a good life, more so than TV’s.

A monetary supply inflation measure like M1 shows a remarkable rise since 2008. The central bank added lots of money by financing the US government debt, and that has indirectly bid up financial assets, VC, etc. If you owned US financial assets over the last decade you are flush; if you didn’t you are wondering why important things in life are so expensive.

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Education is more accessible now than ever. It's amazing that anyone anywhere in the world can watch Feynmann and Leonard Susskind's lectures on General Relativity without giving a penny to CalTech/Stanford. There is also plenty of cheap housing in the US, just not in large cities and highly desirable areas. If you do decide to live in a low-cost area, there are more options for remote work than ever before.

Over the last 20 years, humans have really mastered cooperation on a global rather than a national scale. IMO, the economy as a whole has expanded as a result.

> Over the last 20 years, humans have really mastered cooperation on a global rather than a national scale.

There may have been improvements, but mastered? I guess a lack of global scale cooperation has nothing to do with our failure to address global warming....

It is being addressed. Not at the level of governmental cooperation, but some of the things that really matter are being done in spite of that.

Solar cell prices have decreased by 300x over the last 40 years and continue to do so. Similarly, solar production capacity and installations have increased very significantly.

There are also more electric car companies and models than ever before.

Is this a joke? I mean, I understand the sentiment, and agree with it, but (probably unfortunately) the current value of education is more highly correlated with the ability to _prove_ that one is educated than education itself - the "piece of paper" if you will. Coursera is moving toward a model where affordable certification is possible for topics normally restricted to an advanced traditional post-secondary education in the US, but the reality that the value/cost ratio of post-secondary education for the average American has decreased significantly over the past 50 years.

Note: I'm doing this calculation under the assumption that the value of an undergraduate degree has remained constant, while the average price of tuition has increased significantly. Some might even argue that the value of a degree has even decreased due to looser lending practices enabling more people to obtain degrees, further increasing this disparity.

Those domestic goods are kept scarce either through regulation or difficult to build attributes such as brand power of schools.

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