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Comment by wz1000 | Hacker News Reader

Two things:

1. It isn't clear that the (real) cost of essentials like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education is actually going down significantly.

2. Even if what you say is 100% correct, this "extraction of wealth due to inflation" seems to be a somewhat stable scenario, and certainly hasn't lead to the apocalyptic visions of collapse that inflation hawks perennially create a ruckus about. So even if you think we are living through a hyper-inflationary doomsday scenario, certainly this is a very different doomsday than what one is usually led to imagine (Zimbabwe, Wiemar Republic, Venezuela etc.). Maybe inflationary Armageddon isn't so bad after all!

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I generally dont worry about inflation, I roll my eyes when certain financial people talk about the inflation boogieman that hasnt existed for 40 years.

however, we are in a unique situation that has the potential for causing hyper inflation. I say potential because I still think it's not a likely outcome. We are paying people not to work, but eventually someone has to produce something. We ALL can't wfh or be unemployed and collect checks as if we were employed and expect our Amazon deliveries and canned food to arrive; someone has to make and deliver it.

Eventually all the extra money laying around today will chase yesterday's production. I think this is why we often see hyper inflation scenarios stem from low inflation environments. it sounds counter intuitive at first.

This is why we have to be extremely careful when we try to pick and choose what is essential or not. Now we got situations were food is rotting on the vines and milk being dumped down the drain. I dont think we will enter hyper inflation, but we have to be careful about it.

I only glanced through the wikipedia, and it doesn't seem at all like hyper inflation stems form low inflation environments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperin...

> 1. It isn't clear that the (real) cost of essentials like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education is actually going down significantly.

It is if you think about it. In the 1970s a baby born premature at 28 weeks would have been unlikely to survive. Healthcare quality has increased enormously. If you could get 1980-level healthcare it would cost less of your wage than it did in 1980.

Food, clothing, transport, and heating have unambiguously fallen as a proportion of wages.

Education is perhaps an outlier here. The spiralling cost is usually explained as a zero-sum social signalling mechanism that is super important for life outcomes, and its rising price as being enabled by the falling cost of everything else.

The spiralling cost of education is a bit illusory; the actual cost of education is rapidly approaching 0. I can gain free access to a stunning amount of front-line academic research, and anyone can have access to pretty much all of it for prices that are low relative to what it would have cost in the 80s.

You can probably listen to free lectures by country-leading authorities on any STEM subject. Well, TEM. I'm not sure about biology and the other sciences. Access to humanities-related texts is also unbelievable vs the 80s.

The cost of getting socially certified as having become educated is growing. Not the cost of education.

I won't call it cause but there certainly seems to be correlation between lowering food costs and healthcare increasing.

Truth is, worldwide there are more deaths from the side effects of too much food, than not enough.

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