[tuatoru]

> 1. It isn't clear that the (real) cost of essentials like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education is actually going down significantly.

It is if you think about it. In the 1970s a baby born premature at 28 weeks would have been unlikely to survive. Healthcare quality has increased enormously. If you could get 1980-level healthcare it would cost less of your wage than it did in 1980.

Food, clothing, transport, and heating have unambiguously fallen as a proportion of wages.

Education is perhaps an outlier here. The spiralling cost is usually explained as a zero-sum social signalling mechanism that is super important for life outcomes, and its rising price as being enabled by the falling cost of everything else.

[roenxi]

The spiralling cost of education is a bit illusory; the actual cost of education is rapidly approaching 0. I can gain free access to a stunning amount of front-line academic research, and anyone can have access to pretty much all of it for prices that are low relative to what it would have cost in the 80s.

You can probably listen to free lectures by country-leading authorities on any STEM subject. Well, TEM. I'm not sure about biology and the other sciences. Access to humanities-related texts is also unbelievable vs the 80s.

The cost of getting socially certified as having become educated is growing. Not the cost of education.