Why the poor can have “things” but can't escape poverty

http://moorewr.tumblr.com/post/121516007260/monkeymancheeks-antigovernmentextremist

by vostrocity • 11 years ago

16 5 11 years ago

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meric2• 11 years ago

The currency will be set to inflate at 0-3%, hedonically adjusted, by central banks. This rate is determined by averaging out costs of a consumer basket of goods, as determined by a central bank. The bank might determine a family only needs to spend 6% budget on college and 20% TVs. The currency will inflate accordingly. This policy benefits those who hold assets that increase in nominal value, as well as those who can access near 0% interest loans.

mindslight• 11 years ago

It's even worse when you take into account that technological goods are naturally subject to strong price deflation, so the explicit policy is for everything else in the average to rise. And that's still ignoring that slight price deflation is the inherent to market competition itself.

We're getting ever more productive, but the debt puppeteers insist on turning up the treadmill ever higher.

dsfyu404ed• 11 years ago

New/used vehicle costs have certainly not decreased (although the gap has shrunk a lot). Anyone with even casual knowledge of the used car market should be able to tell you that.

Cell phone service has not gotten less expensive (maybe in terms of bytes/$, but certainly not in cost/time).

Cars and education share the common problem of easy money (via loans) creates a situation where there is too much money chasing too few goods. It's easy for prices to climb when there is no immediate impact on the buyer, if they want the product (in this case both of which are near essentials for a typical white-collar existence) they just take on more debt.

In short, there's two lines on that graph I 100% call BS on, either for being straight up false or the product of number crunching "creativity". Do I trust the rest of them? Hell no.

meric2• 11 years ago

You've gotten more data now than 10 years ago - to the central bank that counts as a price decrease after hedonic adjustment due to the quality increase. Used cars now have more electronics and are safer and, so, the same thing applies.

cbhl• 11 years ago

Source: https://twitter.com/markmellman/status/462951610042564608

Note that the x-axis spans the years 2005-2014, and that the y-axis is somewhat misleading ("changes in prices relative to a 23% increase").

Why the poor can have “things” but can't escape poverty

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