[j_w]

> There isn’t much of a way I can see to remove data centers from the technological progress we’ve benefited from over the last couple of decades.

That's not really the argument.

The problem with the tweet is that the chart kind of sucks, and it isn't immediately obvious. The category cited is "Computer Software and Accessories" which is under "Information Technology, Commodities"

A more interesting category is "Video and Audio services," specifically the live streaming subcategory. People don't buy software anymore, they pay for subscriptions to services.

Here are links to FRED for both top levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEEE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SERA . Unfortunately the granularity for the Information Technology index isn't available on FRED from what I could find.

So IT price index is down, frankly to a huge degree. But that includes hardware, so it's hard to draw conclusions about software pricing from that specific chart. But Video/Audio services have seen a fairly sizable increase in index in the last decade.

But that's not really very important. We are talking about price indexes, which do tell us roughly how expensive something is over time, but who cares about the price of basketballs unless that's something I plan on buying as a consumer? The BLS charts give a relative importance which we can use a proxy for "how much a price change would affect the consumer." The relative important of the IT category (linked) is 0.745, but the software subcategory is 0.029. Video/audio and live streaming are 0.595 and 0.185, respectively.

Consumers do not purchase software. Companies don't even bother trying to sell software to consumers. The chart linked is tracking a metric that doesn't matter, because it's not important to consumers.

Going back to the relative importance values from 1999 (https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/cpi-detailed-report-58/a...) personal computers are at 0.106. No other categories. 2009 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05192010.pdf) is 0.248. 2012 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05152012.pdf) software is included with an importance of 0.048. At that point cable/television is at 1.387 (see Video/audio above).

So software prices don't matter. Consumers aren't spending on software. Service prices do matter, and they are getting more expensive.

This feels like a schizo post. Sorry for the complete lack of formatting.

[fintechjock]

I think your point on costs here is right. I was treating “computer software” as anything that consumers use: apps that provide a service for free in exchange for data, etc.

Very interesting, thanks!