Comment by boroboro4
1 day ago
> Now take this idea and average it across a large number of different items and you arrive at inflation statistics
If only it was as simple: you will need to introduce weights between different items, and account to the change of those weights too. Also gold isn't just commodity, it's monetary commodity.
If you use official inflation dollars you get 1$ 1940 ~= 23$ 2025. You can see how magnitude wrong it is for housing or cars in the example above.
Here's food prices from 1940 diner: > A 25-cent platter, 5-cent hotdog, and 10-cent hamburger. Also doesn't really work with official inflation dollars either. And again works much better with gold prices.
Median household income in the 1940’s seems to be something like $2,600. Using your inflation figure that is ~$59800 in today’s dollars.
2024 there seems to be an estimated ~$75,000 median household income.
Housing and cars are also apples and oranges seeing that the average family size and sq footage for even 50’s homes is completely different than today. Today fewer people are living in significantly larger spaces than was normal back then.
Good points.
For houses I think I expect to get better product for same “real” dollars, like with cars or TV. But given somewhat limited supply of houses this can be wrong assumption.
As for income tbh I read it more like real income fell a lot, rather than a proof that inflated dollars reflect reality well. I.e i think if income inequality didn’t grow as much as it did 2024 median household income would have been much higher which would have increased different between inflation figure from real one further.
Today fewer people are living in significantly larger spaces than was normal back then
That's just because everyone is fat now, so larger living spaces are required.
This is what passes for "intellectual contributions" for Hackernews. Notice there is zero dang's preaching about the values of HN to posts like these. He reserves his warnings for things that are popular but also goes against his fascist administration. This site is chock full of outright bigotry but it's acceptable as long as you present it politely.
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