Comment by jparishy
8 hours ago
Upvote for bringing data, since I did not. That said, that quote was in reference to AI, so referred to the past 3-4 years. And of course, our money today is not worth as much as it was 20+ years ago. Also many important goods and services increased in price at a higher rate than inflation or wage increases. It might be interesting to look at such industries for a history of consolidation or PE-involvement.
The data by the Fed linked above is inflation adjusted.
I realized after, yeah, thanks for calling out though.
You are welcome. Though seeing your overwhelming openness and good nature in the rest of this thread, I now feel some regret in how I replied to you here.
I addressed but one of your points here and ignored essentially the rest of your reply. A rather myopic one sentence reply to a more nuanced comment.
Sorry to sink to the lowest common denominator, friend. Thank you for making me see this.
For what it's worth, I thought the rest of your comment was a very accurate description of how labor and capital are reallocated within an industry. The question is simply whether it's a bad thing that Hollywood studios have decamped for Atlanta and Toronto. For the people working in LA that don't want to move, I'm sure the answer is yes. But on net, I think it's probably meant more and better work for more people in general.
I really appreciate your perspective. Mine is definitely malleable on these topics; they're complicated and I'm not an economist.
re: regular people and their money, I will say, something about the bigger picture just feels off. I look at the graphs you linked to, and do not see it reflected in the people around me. I don't mean to be dismissive of the data, more that I feel like I am missing something, or it is, if that makes sense?
Since the 1980s, the wealthy have done fantastic while the rest have not done nearly as well. The argument from CATO and others is that we should be content with the majority of households taking home a shrinking share of an increasing pie so long as their absolute purchasing power isn’t decreasing, but that argument feels wrong in part because it’s human nature to measure status relative to others rather than in absolute terms.
Furthermore, wealth applies more pressure against certain costs like housing[1] than against others like food or durable goods. Cheap toasters only go so far in making people feel like they aren’t falling behind.
[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-prices-surge-five-tim...
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