[mindslight]

> inflation has arguably been far too low for far too long anyway...

Do you not need a roof over your head, health insurance, a car, college education, etc? Inflation has been rampant, it's just not apparent in manufactured goods because the actual cost of production dropped rapidly with offshoring and technological progress. Without significant inflation, we would have seen a steady march down of consumer prices, as happened in computing.

[Ericson2314]

Yes the not-so-hidden inflation has been rampant, but universal health care, basic income, and direct infrastructure investment would help, not hurt those.

Let's go over Housing, healthcare, and education in turn:

- Housing, overpriced because the jobs are concentrated, stupid zoning, etc. We deserve dense cities but UBI means no job, no stave, which in the short term takes away the demand to move. Let's not rest on that and continue to stupid-suburb, but do take some refuge in that short term benefit of decreasing the necessity of people moving.

- Education, overpriced because of a shortage of work and a credentialist rat race. I'm all for people being educated---say a liberal arts that includes engineering not because it pays well but because one has to understand the machines that surround us to understand the modern human and social condition. But it's stupid to expect people to stuggle to acquire credentials that won't get them hired and won't actually help with the stupid jobs that get if they are hired.

UBI helps eliminate unproductive by removing the desperation that forces people to take them. The decreased demand for employment hopefully will end the credentialism rat race, lowering the cost of education. And the decreased drudgery of the education that remains should make the education better, and push employers to shoulder more of the remaining cost.

- Healthcare. Unlike the others this probably is less overvalued; avoiding being sick or getting well when sick is incredibly valuable to the individual, and thus I view the price gouging as inevitable. I don't think there is a market based solution to this one, but that's OK. Just do the universal thing and remove this from the market, and now its not subject to inflation in the same way. [The power of the state commands the supply to exist.]

[mindslight]

Housing is overpriced because anyone can go to a bank and get as much cash as the house is appraised for, which is circular. So the actual constraint is just the inverse of interest rates. The same goes for education. There are underlying supply problems with each of these that need to be directly addressed, but they're exacerbated by the current economic policy of giving out as much rope needed to hang one's self.

I think much of healthcare could be solved if providers had to publish uniform prices and couldn't post-facto bill, you know, like every other business. Imagine going to the grocery store, paying at the register, and then two months later receiving a bill in the mail for the cashier's time!

Still, I am not opposed to single payer as a way forward - assuming it doesn't get transmuted into mandatory patronage of the same corrupt system. It's not like Medicare currently solves the underlying issues, it just absorbs the cost disease.

Basic income is a natural extension of quantitative easing. It will help people in rural areas, but do nothing for in-demand areas (being swallowed up by housing). I do agree it's much better than just giving the money to the banks though!

Direct infrastructure improvement - party on! Government "public works" is currently focused on the military, producing a surplus of chaos and misery abroad, while our infrastructure crumbles. I don't know that subsidizing suburban infrastructure fully makes sense, but I do know it's better than squandering the resources elsewhere.

[danans]

> Housing is overpriced because anyone can go to a bank and get as much cash as the house is appraised for, which is circular.

The appraised value is just a signal how much collateral a bank can rely on for the loan, which is why most loans with good interest rates have a maximum loan to value ratio. Banks don't want to own houses, they want to own a piece of the borrower's future productivity, manifested as interest payments.

The limited housing/transit supply (due to zoning restrictions) coupled with concentrated job growth are what drives up housing costs.

[mindslight]

I did go on to acknowledge the "underlying supply problem". But this thread is about financials, and without the endless supply of money, asset valuations would be much lower.

[gzu]

lewis turning point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_turning_point

The inflation has been offshored. China's rural population has been lifted out of poverty. What happens to the world economy when china runs out of cheap labor?

[elsewhen]

There are still many other countries with cheap labor (Bangladesh, Pakistan, lots of Africa etc). It will still take a few more decades for the majority of the whole world to get out of poverty (assuming we don’t go off the rails).

[HenryKissinger]

Some countries will always have cheaper labor than others.

[quotemstr]

If housing prices are too high, it's because there are too many dollars chasing too few houses. Fix one or the other. The easiest and most humane option is to just let people build more housing and stop with the stasis-producing process you see in places like San Francisco

[munificent]

Housing prices are not too high. They are too high in some places.

So what you're really seeing is that physical infrastructure cannot keep up with the massive change in the US from a manufacturing and agricultural economy to a service and information economy.