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 Originally Posted by oskar
So what about someone who doesn't own a smartphone and prefers to read in his free time? Is he fucked because he does not participate in the magic that is television?
He's impacted by the same positive evolution of stuff. Some of the largest effects may be in electronics, though they occur in everything.
Aren't there proper measurement standards? Like the cost of a loaf of bread,
I'm glad you brought that up. Bread is among the least changing stuffs. Even so, it too has undergone change, and we get a much fuller story when we look at food in general. Taste increases, taste profile changes, and alteration of access and transportation are three ways in which food has changed quite a bit that tend to go unnoticed. One small personal example: there's a hot sauce that improves my appreciation of food by a significant margin, and nothing like it existed 20 years ago. Now that hot sauce is everywhere.
square foot of living space... compared to median income.
Government restriction of housing has put a huge damper on this. In good news, if you go somewhere that doesn't have much housing restriction, it's "like normal".
Is there a good reason you choose to ignore those and turn to consumer electronics instead? Let's be real if we could swap the housing and refrigerator prices back to what they were in 1950, would you decline?
I'm happy you brought up housing. IIRC, what's going on is that people are spending more on nicer houses. I was watching an Elizabeth Warren lecture back in 2008 in which she made the case that the change in family expenditures over the decades has been putting more into nicer homes. She had persuasive data to back it up, and this was before she became a full blown Marxist.
N=1: I work for a construction company, and one of the things I have become aware of that I was not before is that people are spending more money on more pleasing designs than they were just 10 years ago. There is a particular design that was very, very rare 20 years ago yet it is SUPER common in new houses today. That design doesn't improve the function of the home by much (if any). Why does everybody building a house these days use that new more expensive design? Because it's more aesthetically pleasing. They get the same square footage and the same function for more money, because they want something that looks nicer. This coincides with what Warren observed, that people are spending more than they used to on stuff that measures the same regarding square footage or function just because they want something that looks/feels nicer. This may be a good sign that even if square footage isn't increasing, median folk are still getting richer.
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