[JamesBarney]

Education, housing(rent, not the price of a house), and medical care. Are all included in the CPI. Education and medical care are going up due to reasons unrelated to inflation. Shelter is going up at 3% due to supply constraints.

The prices of houses, stocks, art, and startups are not. The reason is that assets prices are very heavily affected by interest rates.

Imagine a house that costs $100,000 but rents out for 10,000 a year in profit because interest rate are 10%. Now imagine interest rates drop to 1%. Arbitrage will mean that individuals will borrow money at 1% and buy the house and collect 10%. This drives up the price until the return on the house matches the return of other investments, or basically until the house is worth $1,000,000. Now the cost of rent hasn't changed, but the price of the house has gone up 1,000%.

Did the economy experience 1,000% inflation? No because the cost of living hasn't changed.

[take_a_breath]

Assets experienced a 1,000% inflation. People can still scrape by being consumers and renters (cost-of-living), but owning assets moves farther and farther out of reach.

Since our economic system is built on assets (they appreciate, you can borrow against them, etc.), the inequality gap keeps growing.