Health care and tuition are the other cost disease centers. People today are better off and richer when it comes to everything except housing, health care, and tuition. I’ve heard these called “the big three.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those three things are all areas where we simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.
1. Housing. Increase supply of affordable housing. Which means upzoning existing land for denser redevelopment. Which means more public transit. (And outlaw the realtor / commission system for transactions)
2. Health care. Increase supply of GPs and allow mid-level providers more independence (within bounds) to take less complex work off their plates. (There's also the inefficiencies created by the ridiculous number of middle layers. To which, single payer)
3. Tuition. Make highly-automated online degrees the new base normal to increase scalability of the system. (And use the stick of government tuition assistance to bludgeon any university that disagrees or exceeds set administration cost caps)
Student aid and subsidized loans should require that the admin to teacher ratio not exceed a certain value. That would help a lot.
For the others you nailed it. Housing is tough though, because the existing policy is a massive success for older homeowners who bought before the prices rose and property speculators.
Hence the solution is cutting off the student loan money spigot. Everything else will automatically fall into place.
Congress can surely do pass a law removing access to taxpayer backed student plans starting whenever they want.
And one can safely assume schools are already cramming students as much as they can to maximize budget for other expenses that benefit administration.
In any case, the number of students should be declining for a very long time, so they will have to figure out how to compete for the students’ business.
My general sense was that the government was equally (or more) monetarily involved, in terms of total funding sums.
But less involved with regulating.
Then, inevitably, fraud and scandal happened, which begat additional regulation, which begat regulatory capture by industry.
And then the government stopped directly buying/doing most things, which introduced a new layer of intermediaries, which in turn required additional regulation to police.
The older I get, the more I think paying the graft tax for direct government production but getting a simpler, more manageable/agile system might be a preferable outcome.
But I just went through Springfield Armory last week... which managed to supply 1/2 a Civil War, most of 2 World Wars, and innumerable minor wars from a government enterprise (while innovating). So maybe government successes are readily at hand in my mind.
Yes. A lot less. The US government was fairly small until WW2.
> So maybe government successes are readily at hand in my mind.
You have to look at the cost before determining if it is a success. Not simply the volume of production.
It looks like we went from ~20% GDP federal budget pre-WWII to ~35% 2023. [0]
Digging in, most seems like it's from the creation of health and social security entitlements? And certainly (sadly) most YoY growth. [1] [2]
> You have to look at the cost before determining if it is a success. Not simply the volume of production.
Well, cost and capability. There are many government functions that industry doesn't really need to do.
And if you create businesses for the sole purpose of performing government functions... aren't those just outsourced government departments, albeit managed by contract instead of directly?
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spendi...
[1] "Table 3.1—Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940–2028" OMB https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/hist03...
[2] "Historical Tables" OMB https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/
But maybe the U.S. is a super-special case and whatever works for the rest of the world doesn't work for the US shrug.
Single family home ownership rates were the highest in the world.
Healthcare cost a tiny fraction of what it does now.
Life as a college student is definitely more expensive than it was, but that's mostly because of housing.
https://fortune.com/2023/10/04/college-tuition-isnt-getting-...
But that means real wages are lower.
> People today are better off and richer when it comes to everything except housing, health care, and tuition.
Interesting spin to saying people are worse off and poorer but can afford leased iphones and cars that break often.
> Reuters reports that New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley was heckled at a speech in Queens today when he suggested that the rising cost of food is offset by how cheap iPads are. (2011)
https://news.yahoo.com/news/blogs/lookout/fed-official-heckl...
"Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful"
- this is idiotic.
Just because performance of phones improved 1000x does not mean I can buy a functioning phone for $ 0.1.
Just because 5G is 100x faster than 2g, does not mean my mobile phone bill is now $0.1. And they turned off 2G.
our inflation calculation is fucked.
Lots of us were able to cut costs in housing. And many of us were able to cut costs in healthcare through preventative care. Tuition is entirely optional.
If you've got a mandatory need for a big house, have some pre-existing condition to maintain, and want to get a Harvard Divinity School degree then yeah, life's going to be much much worse.
For my part, I'm very glad I was born now and not then. Life has been so much better.
No need for a big house or any more tuition - never wanted kids so I guess I’m saving lots of money there and then when I see what family health insurance costs these days during open enrollment, I’m pretty glad about that.
It may be that the fix for me is a hip replacement which has had some advancements in the past decade or two so that is also something I suppose.
I don't really know why I'm replying. I'm sure it's no consolation to you. Just... it really hit me and I feel for you. I'm sorry.
In theory, we each have 8 great great grandfathers (though these things are not always perfect). I can name 1 of mine because I dug the grave for his youngest daughter who was buried at his feet, but he is little more than a name on a stone to me. Can you name more?
I’d say fundamentally that is what I don’t want to have to tell a child. Global warming isn’t looking too good either, and I’m happy to avoid that one as well.
Essentially, there is almost no part of this world I would wish to tell a child about, and seeing them today causes me much sadness. It used to be that I was envious of their youth because they would live to see science and tech advances that I would not, however these days I feel quite the opposite. Maybe I'm wrong; I hope I am, but it's hard to see a happy path for humanity these days.
I fully agree with this. Unfortunately ai is a bullshit generator and is controlled by bullshit people. I personally speculate that some are suffering from a mild form of schizofrenia but thats an entirely different topic.
However i do recommend a change in personal environment because things while grim are not as grim as to wish an end to procreation. Life os pretty cool in some places - the further away from corporate dictatorships the better.
This seems exceptionally vague. If you're telling me to get therapy as many have, I can tell you I've been in therapy for much of my life at this point and on one medication or another as well, but they never seem to be able to create any meaning to any of this. I do have appointments with new ones scheduled actually, but I suspect I'll still be bothered by the same issues that have plagued me for much of my life at this point; the "Death of God" as Nietzshce would call it and the continuing environmental degradation I have to live through (my hometown set a new high temperature record this year and it was oppressively hot all summer). I don't think a new medication will solve this, but I obviously am still willing to try. I can't help but wonder, what if I'm not depressed, but simply see things clearly?
I am not of the opinion that you are depressed nor am i recommending therapy. What i am recommending is a change of setting. You’d be surprised how your outlook changes once in the right environment. Also i am not saying you are wrong all i am saying is that it depends on how you look at things and what things dominate your life and the setting influences both. Issues may be more acute in certain parts of the world than others. For instance in country people living in London can only dream of owning a property, whereas outside london thats not an issue. That doesnt negate the problem of london housing. Similarly weather patterns are shifting to worse in some areas but to better somewhere else. Theres loads of nuance around us.
Surgery is tricky. I had one recently and asked the nurses to drug the shit out of me. When i saw pipes one with blood coming out of my belly and one stuck in my willy i felt i was going to pass out. I even considered asking to be put down humanely. When they pulled it out i asked for permission to curse and boy i did. A person in a bed next to mine said they had a boner when they removed theirs. To each his own i suppose.
But i did have my surgery, it’s all sorted and a thing of the past, i am recovering, all is good. It’s a thing that a decade or two form now will be just another “ah yeah i did that”. Water under the bridge. My mind is somehow erasing the memory because it now feels as if it happened in another life. Of course each experience is unique but overall i’m laughing at myself at how scared i was, and i am a full grown adult. I say that now but i’d terrified of doing it again. There were bits that did hurt but 90% was all in my head - mostly what ifs, and they suck more than pain. As everyone else i too have fears but some things just need to be done - assuming the risks are low, and other t&cs. Just like data, you “click” your head, switch in low power mode, and walk through hell. There’s light at the end.
And you're right about the surgery, though sadly it's not necessarily a one-time thing, but a part that could require future surgeries to maintain (though the hope is that current materials will mean it will last decades). Nevertheless I try and tell myself what you said, that it's a few weeks or months of life to recover and then on with it. The what ifs are indeed the worst, but both people I've talked to online and in my life have gone through with it much success. A therapist would say to focus on the good outcomes rather than the negative, and the statistics really do bare that out too.
Anyway, I truly appreciate the kind words.
I've done all 3 of these things to great degree of success. I've always lived 1-2 hrs away from jobs, exercise like a dog, and skipped college.
Contrast that with the software business, which is very free market. There is pretty much no government interference with it. And costs have trended to zero. Literally to zero!
if you weight inflation baskets by how discretionary the spending is i dont think wages are higher. theyre much lower. you cant live in an iphone but you can easily live without one.
This has been called in-deflation or disinflation and has been the dominant paradigm since the turn of the century, at least in the US and much of the developed world.
The terminal end state of the disinflationary economy is desperate people living check to check but carrying supercomputers with instant access to all knowledge and all media in their pockets.
Wages have risen a bit lately (in real terms even after inflation) but not nearly enough to undo 20 years of the above pattern.
Eye, people who are sick and uneducated are very employable, have good prospects in life
> Food, water, and clothing are cheaper than eve
yes and no, we prodyce loads of unhealthy food cheaply, you wont starve. Fresh produce costs, organic, ethicslly farmed stuff us really expensive. The latter is probavly a closer comparison to food as it was produced in good old days
Interesting claim.
Just think of the settlers that came over the Oregon Trail, not that long ago. Where was their tuition and health care?