A lot of economic news or developments don't make sense unless you understand that we have lived in permanent inflationary times for the past 50 years.
A lot of economic news or developments don't make sense unless you understand that we have lived in permanent inflationary times for the past 50 years.
What is this 'real' money you speak of? You mean the relatively extremely volatile value of Gold and Silver? Did you even check a graph of the inflation-adjusted gold or silver price for the past 30 years? Here, I'll link you: http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/gold-and-silver-prices-100-y...
So is the 'true' value of gold $400 inflation-adjusted dollars or $1800 inflation-adjusted dollars?
I'm neither claiming expertise with oil or economics, but some cursory Google searches seem to strongly disagree with what you're claiming. Just taking from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_petroleum
Adjusted for inflation, our current oil prices appear to be equivalent to 1860s era prices, which places them at 4 - 5 times higher than they've been for the entire intervening period.
Not to mention oil prices being subsidized in the US, your claim that the "true cost" of oil hasn't risen seems totally nuts. Care to elaborate?
Since most people would disagree that gold and silver are real money, the burden of proof is on your side. I think an equally compelling explanation for your observations can be built from the premise that gold in particular has been inflating an speculative bubble during the same time frame of 50+ years (or more precisely, that since about the 2nd half of 20 century gold price had been recovering from a previous drop in historic prices, and that a bubble has formed around that pattern and just began to inflate about ~10 years ago).
If on the other hand you consider the fact that petrol is a finite resource, and that the challenges to build a flying device powered by either nuclear energy, solar, wind or hydro, it is very likely that tourist class aviation will be in permanent decay from now on.
I think the capacity to fly is extremely valuable, so it will be preserved by nation states for as long as possible, mainly for military purposes, but also for the rapid transportation of diplomats and other high ranking officials. And if the technical capacity of flying is preserved in any way, the upper layers of civil society will find a way to buy their ways in as well (bringing back the original meaning of the term "jet set" as a side effect). But, mark my words... the days of regular, scheduled flights for the hoi polloi are numbered.
It might be twice as expensive, but most people would still be able to fly.
However, you have to consider the economic feasibility, not just the technical one. If you follow news about airlines, you will recall that they have gone through a series of hardships, raw times and infighting between different groups of stakeholders (unions vs companies). You can write it off as random incidents, or you can understand it under the lens of increased costs and multiple competitors trying to get each a bigger slice of a shrinking pie.
I have seen during my lifetime how conditions for the passengers have deteriorated. I recall as a teenager or a young adult, boarding a plane was a wonderful experience. Now a days, they treat you like cattle, and I am not just talking about the hardships imposed by TSA screenings (though they take a fair share of the blame).
If you add two plus two, you will find that this decreased passenger comfort is tied to cost cutting measures. But why to cut costs if you can simply pass those cost to the customer and keep the quality of service up? I do not presume to know the answer, but my intuition tell me that the leadership at airline companies have run the numbers and figured out that there is some sort of inflection point in the demand curve, and an increase in prices would cause a severe drop in usage.
Instead, a less bad alternative is to cut cost, punish quality, and face a small decrease in demand, but as long as the margin remains in the black the company can keep operating, and wait for better days. My fear comes mostly for the moment when airlines run out of comforts, and begin cutting cost in critical areas of operations such as plain maintenance. Even a modest number of non-fatal incidents may shift perceptions of safety and make the bottom of the bucket fall from under the demand pool.
Now that I think about it, this is a market ripe for disruption.
For example, gold was at $1780/oz as of September 2012, and is now at $1326/oz, a difference of -34%. Prices for goods and services have not fallen 34%. On average the prices for consumer goods have increased by a few percent in dollar terms, so an ounce of gold will buy you less than 34% of what it would have two years ago.
Intelligent comparisons of prices are done with inflation-adjusted dollar values rather than gold-adjusted values for a reason.