alt Hacker News> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price
This is what so many don't understand, especially among the youth / reddit crowd. They expect their $25 jeans to be equivalent quality to the $25 or even $100 jeans from 60 years ago, for some reason. There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
There's also very few people who understand just how expensive things were back then, likely a result of having infinite cheap crap available. They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350. The only thing that has changed is that there are now options for cheap shitty things. You can still buy a very nice $4000 fridge if you want to.
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> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
But don't we see this everywhere, all the time? Pull up any of the recent Claude Code threads about the product's declining quality and you'll see at least a handful of well-upvoted comments about how text generators are definitely going to get cheaper while simultaneously getting "better" over time.
I bought some $100 jeans a few months ago, hoping they would be better than the $25 I used to buy 30 years ago. They are not better than the $25 jean I can buy elsewhere today.
There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
It's less an implicit feeling, and more explicitly what's being marketed to us. Think about AI. It's being marketed that it will make everything better and cheaper. Computers before that. Machines before that. All kinds of things in between.
I don't doubt this is possible, especially if these technologies are properly democratized, but greed gets in the way, of course. No one wants to sell you just one fridge at a respectable mark up. These tools don't really go into making a better fridge, per se, but finding what you're willing to and how frequently you're willing to replace it and design planned obsolescence around that. They add subscription features. They want you to log into your fridge to track and sell your behavior, etc.
"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).
That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28
To double check, in 1983 a hamburger and fries was $1.82 - https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/m... .
That corresponds to $6.03 now.
What sort of hamburger places were you thinking of that charged 3x the price of McDonald's, and do they only charge $17 now?
Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-compariso...
> They don't know that in 1970, in today's money, a fridge was ~$4000, a burger and fries was $17, and a typical dress was $350.
The Internet Archive claims to have Sears Catalogues from many years including 1970. If we check out Spring/Summer 1970, we can see that they actually have the first 33 pages of a catalogue that prominently advertises "index begins on page 391".
Disappointing.
That said, a women's dress from those first 33 pages costs $11, or about $100 in today's money.
Because this is the promise made to us by capitalism/capitalists. Efficient markets will drive down prices/improve quality. A rising tide lifts all boats.
It's kind of like China after Tiananmen where the promise is quality of life will go up in exchange for nobody talks/questions.
If capitalism can't deliver on it's promise (more and more people don't feel that it is) then we need to have a talk.
> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
But so many things did become cheaper and better: computers, availability and quality [1] of the music I can physically buy, the energy efficiency of modern fridges, the speed and safety of modern cars. Even my milk lasts impossibly long without spoiling.
If the replacement laptop battery I can buy today for ~$50 is leagues ahead of anything available in the 70s, then why aren't jeans and backpacks also miles ahead of what was available back then? No wonder the younger crowd is confused.
[1] Yes, CDs are objectively better than vinyl. Whether the audio mastering has kept up is a different topic.