I don't think we should be including basic necessities alongside improvements in entertainment in the same statistic, because it will just hide problems.
A 2000 sqft house in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming might cost $200k. In SF you'll get far less for the same money. People want to be in SF, because there's more to do, but also because the better paying jobs are there. This uplifts the entire area, but also makes things like housing more expensive.
In a lot of ways I think the cost of housing is dependent on the housing density vs job density of the area. If job density is much higher than the housing density, then the price of housing goes up by a lot.
I think a similar idea can be used to explain the high costs of higher education. Every university has a limited number of spots, so people are willing to pay more and more to get a spot. Loans mean that everyone's capable of paying the money to the university, regardless what they charge.
> A 2000 sqft house in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming might cost $200k. In SF you'll get far less for the same money. People want to be in SF, because there's more to do, but also because the better paying jobs are there. This uplifts the entire area, but also makes things like housing more expensive.
Of course people follow the jobs and other things coming from there being many people around. Hence why the house in the middle of nowhere is cheap, no one wants to live there. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
But would less people want to live in SF if somehow tomorrow there would be X% more housing units available on the market such that the price would be drastically lower? Of course, there being more housing would have to have other consequences which could (and probably would) effect the desirability of the city. I'm not familiar with SF, but for example in Paris that would probably mean replacing older buildings with newer, taller ones.
That would of course change many things, the first of which is its "visual character". Which would make it look more like say NY (because of the tall buildings) than it currently does. People would try to prevent that (if for no other reason than because people are sometimes against change) but, in the aggregate, would that bring less people here? I doubt it.
However, that would probably create more jobs in the city, which would bring in even more people, and so on. After all, today's big cities all started with a bunch of shacks, right?
My hope, as has been discussed in other threads, is that with remote work gaining traction, at least some people will leave the cities. I know many people who would like that because they don't particularly enjoy city life. This would allow, of course, some other people to come in who couldn't afford it but wanted it, but maybe, in aggregate, city population would be lower. I, for example, would gladly go live further out in the suburbs if I only had to come in the office once in a while (say no more than once, maybe twice a week).
I am glad to see that some companies moved south of Paris (Thalès, Bouygues, Dassault Systèmes,...) and people working there and living around our in Versailles can bike to the office.
If we managed to spread companies in the country, we would have less concentration of elitarism and pepole would live a more quiet life.
The cost of housing is dependent on job density * quality only to the point what people are able to pay, and then rest is what they are willing to pay. A lot of people buy/rent slightly above their means if they are willing to pay it. Housing price is like an auction house so willing to pay is a bigger factor than able to.
Artificially reducing number of available houses comes in a lot of reasons/pretense but in the end its just a result of people seeing/forced to see their house as an asset; You acquired your house at price X at auction. A local urban developer want to build 100 more units close to you, from prediction of demand and would be profitable at price X (or even <X), so you passively/actively work against that proposal, tell the developer that he can build up to 90 more units, so price of your estate increase X+N. Now the next 90 buyers that bought the house have a reason to keep the price of estate above X+N, tell the developer that he can only make 80 units. Rinse and repeat.
A cheap phone is vastly cheaper than rent. It's tiresome to see people online act like "If only you would not extravagantly piss away $7/month on a phone, you would be back in housing!!!"
Internet access and a phone number are essential for job hunting and an earned income is a common means to get off the street. You can also do online banking and other essential things much easier than dealing with going in person on foot to the bank and so forth.
but if you can't afford to have a roof over your head I'd argue the smartphone is irrelevant.
A phone and tablet and internet access were essential to my ability to cope and eventually get back into housing. They aren't irrelevant.
If you want to argue we need to do a much better job of making housing something people can afford, I totally agree. If you want to argue that homeless people just are supposed to entirely cease to exist and not care about anything people in homes care about or something....no. That absolutely doesn't work as an argument.
The internet is a really massively helpful thing for people who are homeless.
So no one here is arguing that homeless people shouldn't have phones or internet or anything like that, rather they're arguing that we'd have better housing opportunities if shelter was what had become so cheap, rather than phones. So measuring inflation based on the prices of non-critical goods is fine if you already own a house, but it fails to reflect reality for people who are struggling to make rent.
When I say that, inevitably someone argues against it and tells me it's slum housing. So we have a world in which the folks with money and the folks who have the power to create housing only want to approve upper class housing and then act like homeless people are just lazy and not trying hard enough or something.
Before life got in the way I wanted to be an urban planner. I've had pertinent college classes and managed to find a hundred year old SRO and that's how I got off the street.
Would I like something better? Sure I would. But I don't have the money and this beats the hell out of being homeless.
I've talked about this stuff for years. I mostly get flak.
What makes this really bad is there are a lot more households with fewer than four people than there were when we invented the suburbs. But suburban single family detached housing designed for a family of 4.5 people is our default mental model for "proper housing" and now it's that on steroids and let's not let reality get in the way of our development of this kind of completely inappropriate housing that doesn't even fit the needs of our current demographics.
Yes, I'm cranky. I lived this crap. I've studied it. I get nothing but blown off, usually by people who know way less than me about these issues.
I think your post makes sense.
Land is valuable and to maximise returns, building these SROs wouldn’t make sense in our profit uber alles system.
SROs don’t have too look like concrete blocks from ex communist systems.
This is what design thinking can achieve... just one example https://nestron.house/
It seems there is no money in helping the homeless or people with low income. I guess short term thinking doesn’t consider the cost of a gradually fracturing system, it doesn’t recognise the value of a cohesive society.
It’d be amazing if there was an incentive to build a million tiny houses.
I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of homeless people would disagree vehemently.
Not only does smartphone make it much easier to find a job and get back to the point where you can afford a roof over your head, it allows you to stay in touch with people you care about, people who may help you out now and then. And it gives you access to lots of useful information that can improve your life, like sources of free food.
Luckily I haven't been homeless yet, but there were times when I was too poor to have enough phone credit for internet or even regular calls. Granted, there are places that offer free wifi but only with an order if you are a paying customer, which I think most homeless people aren't.
And most homeless people absolutely can afford to be a paying customer somewhere - a low-cost gym membership for access to showers is fairly common.
A homeless person is just someone who can't afford a home. They're not all your stereotypical pan-handling drug addict in torn, dirty clothes.
I was disagreeing with the statement "if you can't afford to have a roof over your head I'd argue the smartphone is irrelevant".
Contrary to that, if you do not have a home, a smartphone is extremely useful and valuable. In the hypothetical sitation that you find yourself homeless with nothing except clothes and $100, a cheap smartphone is absolutely the best possible use of that money.
Of course I 100% agree that a phone can be used to improve your situation, and I'm sure the OP agrees as well. But a phone isn't enough to be able to go find housing for most people. While it can help you find cheaper shelter, or maybe over time allow you to learn skills that lead to better paying job opportunities that allow you to afford housing, you wouldn't need any of that if housing was simply affordable in the first place.
Ultimately OP isn't saying phones suck and homeless people should sell their phones for a couple nights in a shelter. What they're saying is that phones being cheap does not make up for housing being expensive - no matter how useful the phone is, ultimately the end goal is to have shelter, and if you can't afford shelter then it doesn't matter how cheap anything else is.
I can't agree with that either. Housing is not everything. Even if you are homeless with no prospects of getting out of that situation, it still matters a lot how cheap many other things (food, clothes, access to showers, communication with friends and family, even entertainment) are. A phone with internet access is not just important as a tool to get out of homelessness, it also represents a significant improvement in your quality of life.
Admittedly, this may look somewhat different in climates where a lack of shelter can be fatal.
Access to information helps you obtain and maintain a roof over your head.
> I don't think we should be including basic necessities alongside improvements in entertainment in the same statistic, because it will just hide problems.
Agreed.
And yet, it doesn't matter if you have a smartphone and internet access if there are no jobs, or if those jobs don't pay sufficiently.
Likewise, a flagship phone 5 years ago might be technically less advanced than a flagship phone today, but that doesn't mean todays flagship phone is any better at looking at job ads today than the other one was 5 years ago either.
This idea that we should weight technical improvements like this when judging how the economy is performing just seems like a (maybe unintentional) attempt to paint a rosier picture than actual reality to me.
The problem is that hosing (specifically land) is fundamentally a scarce resource, and since the 50s competition has only gotten higher (total population going up, people becoming more concentrated into cities). It's not that shelter has gotten more expensive, it's shelter in desirable places have gotten more expensive.
The housing crunch in hot markets is really just a zoning issue. For example a federal mandate that new housing must be zoned into the area when adding new office space, retail, or residential space would largely solve the issue.
Exactly. But you can buy a 50" TV today for less than the price of a car! That hardly matters to anyone struggling to pay rent and the supermarket bill.
The CPU is faster and it has more RAM but somehow the user experience is absolutely atrocious - it was not even fast enough to be able to reliably answer calls (the UI was stuttery and it took multiple seconds to unlock the screen, which by then the call went to voicemail).
It would constantly fail to do every days tasks (apps would freeze and crash, including the built-in apps) and would slow down randomly making it barely usable.
Of course it is very difficult to compare for entirely new product categories, though the good news is that brand new products likely are not a large portion of the consumption basket at the time they are introduced. So it shouldn't make that much of a difference. Otherwise, you are comparing each year to the next in a sort of "family resemblances" kind of way - maybe you can't directly compare a smartphone to something in the 1950s, but you can do incremental comparisons along the way.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...
This claim is crazy. Sorry. No one in the BLS or BEA is trying to “steal benefits”. They are trying to understand the very hard problem of valuing consumer goods for which prices are generally falling and quality is generally increasing.
How so?
Luxuries change century to century and within decades but those hardly matter for inflation since those are by definition not necessities.
Even with the necessity bucket, things change century to century which I think should not be considered luxury. Electric utility service and internet access I do not consider luxuries, but they were obviously not available in 1850 and 1950, respectively.
I know that this is a tangent to your point and I'm not trying to be pedantic, but it always crosses my mind when people mention "access to all the knowledge and entertainment" — how much that would actually cost someone, even with the internet?
For knowledge — You have access to Wikipedia and it's a great resource for what it is, and more and more, universities are making some of their material available for free. But there's still an awful lot of academic knowledge that's locked up in research journal subscriptions and a huge amount of knowledge & expertise in e.g. industry text books from publishers like O'Reilly.
For entertainment, leaving aside piracy (as otherwise a discussion on costs seems odd), how much would it cost you to be able to access all TV, films, music, books? You'd probably need recurring subscriptions to multiple platforms to even cover main-stream (Prime, AppleTV, Disney+ etc.) Then there's titles that aren't on any subscription service, etc.
I wonder how many days labour it would cost to actually get access to all of these?
Or how much of the world's knowledge is actually relevant to what you want to access at a given moment.
30 years ago was 1991. That was one year before the IBM Simon was announced - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Forerunner People definitely imagined smartphones back then. When it went on sale a couple of years later it cost a little over $1000, or less with a cellular phone contract.
You couldn't get the internet on it though. Web access on mobile devices didn't arrive until about 1999 with things like iMode.
We're seeing a lot of coming-to-terms with both the positive and negative fallout from this access.
Hopefully soon we might be able to start deriving a utility function based on what people are using the devices for, and then assigning positive and negative utility accordingly, with externalities factored in.
Then we could make an attempt at assigning dollar values, and begin to figure out what that means in an economic sense.