It also provides an interesting second metric for labour arbitrage: “How many minutes must a journeyman carpenter work to earn the price of a Big Mac (or before that index was proposed, a kilogram of bread) in the local economy?”
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When I was 5 or 6 and started saving and spending allowance, a Hot Wheels was $1.00. Over 40 years later, a Hot Wheels still costs $1.00 (sometimes less).
When my 5-year-old and I look through the buckets of my old Hot Wheels cars at Grandma’s house, it seems to me the 1960s-1970s era cars involved more metal, had more details, thicker paint, more moving parts, etc. They were just plain heavier. They were also made in England, the US, and Japan, whereas now they’re all made in some gigantic industrial zone in China.
Although the modern cars are a miracle of modern manufacturing and globalism, the constant price actually represents a large decrease in their real-world-purchasing-power cost, and it shows.
Anyhow I’m hoping you’ll be able to process your pants better.
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Silence consumer! Flat screen TVs used to be science fiction and are now cheap enough for the poors to battle to the death for on Black Friday; ergo you are better off!
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Depends. Is outsourcing an option?
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The elevator pitch for the concept of money is simple and obvious enough that everyone understands it, and that’s its main (only) selling point: you may not be the best player, but you trust and understand the rules. It’s the same as bartering, but instead of considering each possible combination of haves and wants, you consider everything against “money”.
The problem is, that simplicity is kind of a lie. It supposes that, if you had infinite information and computing power, you could determine a “correct” price for anything, in the same way you could measure its length or weight. That’s kind of true, in the tautological sense that $1 worth of something is worth $1. But really, it’s like measuring the “length” of a tree – you’ll never get the same result twice, because you’re asking a poorly-formed question.
In a sense, we don’t entirely know what a 2018 dollar is worth in 2018 dollars. Asking what it’s worth in 1968 dollars is getting into angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin territory. And, since it’s a question about money, you can be sure that any answer you get has an agenda behind it. I would not ask “what is the most accurate measure of inflation?”, but rather, “what is the agenda behind the metric we are using to pretend to measure inflation?”
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Probably, but I recall they and/or Matchbox were made in Hong Kong or Macau. But that may indeed have been later on. (More recently I’m remembering Thailand.)
I also remember Tomica, made by Tomy in (presumably) Japan, also $1.
If production moved from US (Hot Wheels)/UK (Matchbox) happened after I started buying them then that would certainly account for the price staying low (effectively going lower vs. inflation). But I (perhaps mis)remember them always being made overseas.
Now I’m remembering something I spent money on where the price did go up: scale model kits. I don’t remember ever spending more than $5 or so on a 1/72 or 1/144 airplane. It might be $30 or $40 now, and (at Michael’s or similar) it probably will be a military plane and not an airliner (which I figure is reflective of some post-Reagan cultural shift).
ETA:
Well that fairly much confirms my faulty memory…
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are complaining that immigrants should be blamed for an alleged decline in the quality of life.
Model kits have become more expensive but AFAIK they’ve become more complex as the market for them has become more specialized and in a vicious cycle the smaller market demands more and more complex kits.
As far as model planes go, you may be having a case of selective memory. I distinctly remember lots of military plane models being available in the pre-Regan years. There was a time when what I loved most was to buy several different model kits of different things and build one monstrous thing out of parts from all the kits.
I know there were, what I meant was that all of a sudden the civilian planes seemingly disappeared from the shelves.
Hmm, I wonder if that has to do with civilian planes becoming ‘boring’ around that time.
In the 60s and 70s, you had things like Concorde and the jumbo jet but other than those I’d struggle to name a civilian plane that caught the public interest. Air travel was still exciting and glamorous but became more and more mundane and dreary (for most of us) throughout the 80s and onwards.
But the military of course pump out lots of planes in lots of ‘exciting’ variants for model builders.
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