funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people.

plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encountered one at a place where it is cheaper than its main rival and is directly attributable to (by the company or otherwise) to lower prices?? in my view all it did was remove some jobs. that's the preview. that's it. you will lose jobs and you will pay more. congrats.

even with year 2020 tech you could automate most work that needs to be done, if our industry wouldn't endlessly keep disrupting itself and have a little bit of discipline.

so once ai destroys desk jobs and the creative jobs, then what? chill out? too bad anyone who has a house won't let more be built.

To give backing i’m from Australia which has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita of US citizens but a lower average wealth. This shows through in the wealth of a typical citizen. Less homelessness, better living standards (hdi in australia is higher) etc.

Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the issue; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

This is a recent development where the median wealth of citizens in progressively taxes nations has quickly overtaken the median wealth of USA citizens.

All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening taxes on the middle class… seems obvious right? Yet things gave consistently been going the other way for along time in the USA.

Those are all expensive because of artificial barriers meant to keep their prices high. Go to any Asian country and houses, healthcare and cars are priced like commodities, not luxuries.

Tech and AI have taken off in the US partially because they’re in the domain of software, which hasnt bee regulated to the point of deliberate inefficiency like other industries in the US.

It would be kinda funny if not so tragic how economists will argue both "[productive improvement] will make things cheaper" and then in the next breath "deflation is bad and must be avoided at all costs"

Housing is a funny old one and speaks to it being a human problem. One thing a lot of people dont truly engage with with the housing issue is that its a massive issue of distribution. Too many people want to live in too few places. Yes, central banks & interest rates (being too low and also now being relatively too high), nimbyism, and rent seeking play an important role too but solving the "too many people live in too few places" issue actually fixes that problem (slowly, and possibly unpalatably slow for some, but a fix nonetheless)

The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are concentrated in too few places, and that leads to consumerism stimulating those places and making them further more attractive. Technology, through Covid, actually gave governments a get out of jail free card by allowing remote work to become more mainstream. Only to just not grasp the golden egg they were given. Pivot economies more to remote working more actively helps distribute people to other places with more affordable home. Over time, and again slowly, those places become more attractive because people now actually live there.

Existing homeowners can still wrap themselves in the warm glow of their high house prices which only loses "real" value through inflation which people tend not to notice as much.

But we decided to try to go back to the status quo so oh well

Food and clothes are much cheaper. People used to have to walk or hitchhike a lot more. People died younger, or were trapped with abusive spouses and/or parents. Crime was high. There was little economic mobility. It really sucked if you weren’t a straight white man. Houses had one bathroom. Power went out regularly. Travel was rare and expensive; people rarely flew anywhere. There was limited entertainment or opportunities to learn about the world.

yeah that my question to the author too - if A.I is to really earn its keep it means A.I should help in getting more physical products into people's hands & helping with producing more energy.

physical products & energy are the two things that are relevant to people's wellbeing.

right now A.I is sucking up the energy & the RAM - so is it gonna translate into a net positive ?

>in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars.

Think of it another way. It's not that these things are more expensive. It's that the average US worker simply doesn't provide anything of value. China provides the things of value now. How the government corrected for this was to flood the economy with cash. So it looks like things got more expensive, when really it's that wages reduced to match reality. US citizens selling each other lattes back and forth, producing nothing of actual value. US companies bleeding people dry with fees. The final straw was an old man uniting the world against the USA instead of against China.

If you want to know where this is going, look at Britain: the previous world super power. Britain governed far more of the earth than the USA ever did, and now look at it. Now the only thing it produces is ASBOs. I suppose it also sells weapons to dictators and provides banking to them. That is the USA's future.

It's interesting to see Cyberpunk 2077 became somehow relatable more and more.

Well, politically, housing becoming cheaper is considered a failure. And this is true for all ages. As an example, take Reddit. Skews younger, more Democrat-voting, etc. You'd think they'd be for lower housing prices. But not really. In fact, they make fun of states like Texas whose cities act to allow housing to become cheaper: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1nw4ef9/...

That's just an example, but the pattern will easily repeat. One thing that came out of the post-pandemic era is that the lowest deciles saw the biggest rises in income. Consequently, things like Doordash became more expensive, and stuff like McDonald's stopped staffing as much.

This isn't some grand secret, but most Americans who post on Twitter, HN, or Reddit consider the results some kind of tragedy, though it is the natural thing that happens when people become much higher income: you can't hire many of them to do low-productivity jobs like bus a McD's table.

That's what life looks like when others get richer relative to you. You can't consume the fruits of their labor for cheap. And they will compete for you with the things that you decided to place supply controls on. The highly-educated downwardly-mobile see this most acutely, which is why you see it commonly among the educated children of the past elite.

It's inflation, simple as that. The US left the gold standard at the exact same time that productivity diverged from wages. Coincidence? No.

Pretty much everything gets more expensive, with the outliers being tech which has gotten much cheaper, mostly because the rate at which it progresses is faster than the rate at which governments can print money. But everything we need to survive, like food, housing, etc, keeps getting more expensive. And the asset class get richer as a result.

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