Item — HN Reader

When people bemoan how things were cheaper back in an earlier time, they are often forgetting to take into account:

CPI Inflation (when adjusted for inflation, these 'cheap' things are often as expensive as they are today) this is seen with the movie ticket example http://greyenlightenment.com/debunking-the-gold-standard/ Maybe some things are a little more expensive, but it pretty much all evens-out.

Improved Utility (you get a better product despite the higher nominal price)

New products (your dollar buys things that didn't even exist even as early as generation ago)

Expenditures such as food & energy constitutes a smaller percentage of income than generations ago.

2 comments

I question things like "Improved Utility"

Sure things have more buttons now. But are they better?

A washing machine from the 60s lasted 20-30 years. A washing machine from the 2010s lasts 5-7 years.

(On the flip side, pretty much any car from 2010s will last 15 years, whereas a ford from the 60s might last 5)

The 60s washing machine likely uses 4x the water and energy of the 2010 washing machine though. While it may not outweigh the total cost to create a new washing machine every 5-7 years, it's a direct improvement for the consumer.

Top google result:

http://www.landtechnik-alt.uni-bonn.de/ifl_research/ht_7/huw...

I'd swap my smartphone for affordable education, housing and healthcare any day.

1920's housing wouldn't be too terrible I guess but 1920's healthcare? Yeah, I'll take the smartphone. I'll also take being a minority today than back then, but I'm assuming like most HN'ers you're a white male, so you should be ok.

Not to mention, many western nations get healthcare right, we just don't. That's a political issue much more than a economic one.

Would you? Can't you get better education (though without the diploma) out of your smartphone than you could out of almost all universities in the sixties? Isn't wikipedia more correct than most textbooks from that day? Isn't pubmed better? Isn't it easy to find lots of scanned textbooks from helpful servers in Iran, Turkey, China, etc.? Much easier than finding good textbooks in a university library back in the day?

>Can't you get better education (though without the diploma) out of your smartphone than you could out of almost all universities in the sixties?

So you're saying that you'd rather no degree and a few notches on your coursera belt than a degree from a prestigious university from the 1960s?

Are you nuts?

>Can't you get better education (though without the diploma) out of your smartphone than you could out of almost all universities in the sixties?

Even if you ignore diploma, networking, and signaling, I still think the answer is no.

I wouldn't swap healthcare of today with healthcare from the 60s, though.