I have a different conclusion. The article mentions that the car would have cost her 3 months of income. That doesn't sound too much and is roughly about the same what people pay for cars today, maybe even more.
The reason she thought about the car as a luxury and not a necessity is that then the society wasn't dependent on cars like we do today. They travelled less, worked closer to home, milkman brought milk to home and grocery shopping could be done closer to home as well.
Interesting that he compares everything that is hard to compare but ignores one thing that would be very easy - rental pricing. You had to pay it then and you have to pay it now.
"four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was £90 for a year."
According to one CPI calculator (https://www.in2013dollars.com) "£90 in 1919 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £4,951.54 today" and "£700 in 1919 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £38,511.97 today".
Google search also reveals that average yearly wage in London in 1920 was £205 and average wage in London in 2021 was £53,700 so £700 income in 1919 was 3.5 times the average which in 2021 would be £187,950 (quite a bit more than "equivalent in purchasing power to about £38,511.97 today").
A quick web search for 4 bedroom apartment (not sure about sitting rooms) in London shows that rent is between £2,000 and £8,000 per month - let's say £5,000 for a nice one like what Christie's sounds like which is £60,000 per year.
They paid £90/£700 = 13% of their (3.5 the average) annual income for rent and now the equivalent rent would be £60,000/£187,950 = 32% of the 3.5 the average annual income.
Even just comparing the plain average income, person in 1919 could rent the same apartment and still have £205 - £90 = £115 to live on for the year (which seems possible considering maid lived on £36 per year but in 2021 the average income leaves you £53,700 - £60,000 = £6,300 short on the rent alone.
So ignoring the tvs, computers, holidays, cars, healthcare and all the things that we cannot compare and comparing what we can, it is obvious that just to live in 2021 we need more money that what we are making and so it is easy to see how most people feel that the living standards have gone down.
That still doesn't seem like an "easy" comparison.
Rents tend to be tied to the infrastructure/facilities and earnings potential within a given radius of the property.
1919 London was dirty with terrible air quality (far worse than Beijing or Mumbai today, literally choked my great grandmother to death on a bad day) and with nowhere near the infrastructure or work opportunities it has today.
A fairer comparison to 1919 London would be a hypothetical working class town where the primary employers are steel mills and environmental standards are simply unenforced.
Indeed, this seemed to indicate that the rent has increased disproportionately. The article mentions that the rent would cost $500 in today's dollars. That's very cheap for 4 bedroom apartment everywhere in western world, especially in London.
Maybe that car was really rubbish by today's standards and technology-wise therefore it is expected that now the real costs have come down. But with apartments I don't think there is that much of an improvement that justify average increase from $500 to $5000.
> So ignoring the tvs, computers, holidays, cars, healthcare and all the things that we cannot compare and comparing what we can, it is obvious that just to live in 2021 we need more money that what we are making and so it is easy to see how most people feel that the living standards have gone down.
The thing is, you can live today without all of that and your living costs would be comparable to Christie's.
A house without electricity, centralized heating, safety regulations of today will cost far less to rent, if you can find one that is.
Today's housing comes batteries included with all of that so it will be more expensive. People might feel their standards of living going down but if they were to spend a week in a 1919 house they'd be much more grateful.
Interestingly enough, I'm typing this in Singapore, where in 2022 it's quite common to have a "maid" (helper/domestic worker, in the current local lingo), but no car.
Singapore imports domestic workers for poor neighbouring countries like the Philippines and Myanmar, which keeps wages very low, on the order of US$450/month, not too far off Christie's inflation-adjusted US$220/month. Even the fully loaded cost with government levies, insurance, food & board etc is on the order of $1000/month, considerably cheaper than most other childcare options, particularly if like most Singaporeans both parents work longer hours.
By comparison, Singapore strictly limits the number of cars on the road, auctioning permits called "Certificates of Entitlement" to the highest bidder and imposing around 100% taxes on the cars themselves. As a result, a plain vanilla Toyota Corolla costs US$120,000 all in. What's more, half of that is the COE cost, which is valid for only 10 years, meaning the value of the car depreciates by around $10,000 every year. Add in petrol, servicing, parking etc, and having a live-in helper to run errands and drop off kids etc starts to look quite affordable in comparison.
Sure, the cost of a car is one factor, but the bigger factor is that Singapore is small and well-connected with public transport. It's quite normal for someone to live in one end of the city and take bus / train to the other end for work.
"
The couple’s annual income was around around £700 ($50,000 in today’s dollars)—£500 ($36,000) from his salary and another £200 ($14,000) in passive income.
They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was £90 for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for £36 ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”
The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy.
"
Ignoring the point and rest of the article but it's a strange and uncanny framing to start it, while simultaneously giving the true numbers, trying to suggest that Agatha Christie in this circumstance of having income 25x that of the working class might not be considered well-off.
"Back in the 1960s, the economist William Baumol observed that it took exactly as much labor to play a string quartet in 1965 as it did in 1865—in economics jargon, violinists hadn’t gotten any more productive. Yet the wages of a professional violinist in 1965 were a lot higher than in 1865."
This is actually brilliant and deep. We may argue a lot that music education became more expensive, violins themselves cost more, musicians should pay their rent, which is also increased century over century, but the fact stands still: it took exactly as much labor.
Talking about the rent: housing prices are driven by the average income (because the balanced market will extract maximum wealth from its participants). So the Baumol's cost disease can be one of the key inflation factors.
Didn't read the full article, but couldn't you argue that with audio recording and distribution 1 hour of string quartet playing labor can yield many more person-hours of string quartet listening in 1965 than 1865?
They are driven by the average income of the wealthiest $number_of_homes renters. If there are not enough homes in a single city then a lot of people will pay very significant part of their salary to have a place to live.
Allow me to be an armchair social scientist for a second, I think this proof that work and labor participation in the economy is firwt above all a social contract. So we did not deem musicians useless in this time and forced to change careers, we have to make them part of society still. Same reason we have bullshit jobs.
The invention of recorded music had made that modern string quartet much more productive. Millions could now hear that music that maybe tens to hundreds heard in the previous century.
"Even if someone managed to invent a robot nanny that kept kids safe as well as a human being, I wouldn’t want it to take care of my baby. I bet you wouldn’t either."
This glosses over the purpose of child care -- it's more than safety, it's socialization, learning, etc. In a world where some level of automation (or offshoring) is possible for these services, I could definitely see some adoption. Think "Diamond Age."
Given the amount of discussion during the pandemic of "open the schools so the parents can go back to work, even if that means transmitting the virus between families", I think the demand for automated childcare would be huge.
It would be a status symbol to not have it, of course - real organically raised human children! - but the struggling middle class would pick up robonanny-as-a-service immediately if it was cheaper than other childcare.
I always feltin Diamond Age they were basically describing the iPad. We have that now but it's still not quite there. Maybe it's not personalized enough or comprehensive enough?
Agatha Christie's quote is well-known but the exact same situation still holds today in many countries. Here in Viet Nam it is extremely common for middle income families to have a maid or nanny (or both) but not a car. The cars themselves are quite expensive. A Honda Civic is $33,000 by itself whereas a nanny (6-days a week, 10 hours a day) is $400-500/month and a maid who works 9 hours a week, i.e. 3 days a week, 3 hours each time) is $90-100/month.
So a single car not very expensive car costs the same as 5 years of a full-time nanny and part-time maid.
And that's without figuring in all the extra costs of a car, especially parking. There's not really free parking most places here. So you'll be paying for parking literally everywhere you go.
Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage. And the space for a garage isn't cheap either. If you're a middle income family you're probably living in one of the capital cities and most people would probably be shocked at how expensive land is in the capital cities nowadays.
I had a fellow American friend who lived in Bali for a year in the mid-70s. When he arrived, he shopped for his own food and cooked it. But he found that, since the merchants charged people by their social class, he could hire a housekeeper and have them buy and cook his food for the same price as buying his own found. And people expect him to do this.
It pretty much comes down to labor costs. I spent some time in VN and anything that requires unskilled labor is incredibly inexpensive.
Delivery? Sure, someone will bring it across the city, in the next hour for 35,000 Dong ($1.50USD).
Want to buy shoes? Msg a store, they’ll send pictures, choose a few and they send a store employee over to your house to try them on.
That is changing though. Covid completely messed up the labor market and rather than get locked down, losing your job and still having to pay rent and food, people just went back to the countryside with family and are staying there for now.
As a result labor shortages, even nannies, and wages are going up. I think it’s a good thing, it’s the bottom moving up.
I expect you’ll see a similar transition as the UK eventually. Maids and nannies becomes something exclusive to the rich. Unless of course they continue to import them from lower income countries - a la Singapore.
It's not a surprise - today's Vietnam per capita GDP is same as U.S. (and probably UK since the countries were close in their economic development) in 1919 (13-14% of today's U.S. level).
Interestingly, in societies with several "tiers" made up of people of different origin (many of them full-on citizens anyway, it's not about legal rights but about race/class which is perceived to be same thing), it can work even on a much higher level of economic development.
Cyprus where i live is at around 60% of U.S. level, and average family can have a full-time maid, as long as she's from Philippines. I was surprised to know that many of these Philippines maids have better immigration status than myself and this is certainly not because they are "forced to work for pennies or risk being kicking out of the country". It's just a perception of how much a Philippine maid is worth.
I'm in a moderately ok country, and I still see buying a new car as a luxury. It's something you do much later in life/career, when you can't be bother to take care of the extra management a used car comes with. And definitely not for everybody - there's quite a few people I know that are middle age with kids and don't even think about a new car. They just have chose other tradeoffs
> Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage.
I don't know if this is meant to be serious, but you could just park your car outdoors, like city dwellers do?
Interesting that he brings up "a robot to automatically brew Starbucks-caliber coffee".
Here in Australia, you can get a really high-quality coffee from just about any petrol station for $1 (in AUD; around 70c in USD). Yet in spite of this, we have a thriving cafe scene where people will gladly pay $4-$5 for a take-away latte.
What's equally "irrational" is that Starbucks, despite the high amount of effort put into each drink, is generally considered to be worse than the $1 coffee from 7-11 or Coles Express.
I'm not 100% sure what the takeaway point is, but it was just so jarring to read that Americans view Starbucks as a luxury rather than some kind of bizarro-world meme.
I remember when Starbucks first arrived in Australia there were several articles talking about exactly this topic. Because cheap espresso coffee is ubiquitous in Australia, Starbucks doesn't provide the same value-add that it did in the US where most coffee was weak drip coffee to begin with. I think it took years of careful marketing till Starbucks was able to "train" Australians to pay double for their mixed drinks than what they used to pay for regular espresso coffees. I suspect nowadays people don't really see Starbucks as a coffee, but as its own exclusive flavored hot drink that operates more as a status symbol.
As a coffee enthusiast I wonder what the definition of "really high quality" is here. For me the coffee bean needs to be well roasted (most/all big brands roast too hot to save time and burn the bean. Starbucks too, they cover it with milk and lots of sugar), freshly grinded before brewing and made with a portafilter. No full automatic coffee machine I used produced high quality coffee, at best acceptable coffee, usually nearly undrinkable office caffeine shots.
While Starbucks coffee isn't top quality coffee, it still beats your usual office space full automatic poison by a long shot and is readily available everywhere. That's why it's considered good coffee by many.
I stopped reading this about four paragraphs in and did a bunch of web searches to try to find the phenomenon it reminded me of.
Once I had successfully found it with my second search ([economics name for effect raises orchestra]) I came back and found Baumol in the very next subhead. Whoops. All a great read though!
In retrospect every year at the student newspaper when we ran the "here is how much tuition is going up and here is how much financial aid is going up" article we probably should have invited an administrator or professor to comment on Baumol's cost disease.
In 1919, one did not need a car to live, especially in London (true even in 2021). It was a luxury item. The lifestyle improvement of owning a car in London in 1919 was probably marginal except for social status. On the other hand, having a maid and nanny would dramatically improve your life, especially before inventions of washing machines.
It is analogous to living in places like Singapore or Hong Kong, where owning a car is less common than having a domestic worker.
Quip from a friend from a (relatively) poor country: “Before I moved to the US, it would have seemed bizarre to me that someone could be rich enough to afford a car but not be able to afford a driver”.
Being able to afford a full time housekeeper is really dependent on the local economy - in any major city in Pakistan if you were to convert 330 USD a month to rupees that would be a very competitive market rate salary for such a position.
To the extent that I met a number of people who had 2 or 3 full time domestic staff but if they had decided to emigrate to the UK or USA would not be able to afford any, and based on their career/education/experience would likely be living in a 650 square foot apartment.
The point is how much money does it take today to have the equivalent wealth status in society as Christie.
It is almost certainly far more than $50,000, which is a tradesman's salary these days.
So, irrespective of what that money now buys, the true inflation figure (how much does it cost to live at a certain level in society) is far greater than the official figure.
Baumol's cost disease has been discussed on HN a bunch in the past, but I really liked how the author reframed it as "Baumol's bonus", i.e. nannies are certainly not lamenting that they're getting paid more.
The most obvious thing that this fails to address is literally the largest expense that the vast majority of people have, and the need for it has not changed: housing.
The idea the Christie’s multi bedroom apartment would be as cheap as stated is laughable and demonstrably false.
The unwillingness of governments to include cost of housing in inflation calculations is more reflective of their pressure to make the landed happy than any attempt to reflect reality.
As an aside, I doubt the example of a musician not getting more productive is correct. The invention of cheap recording media and especially radio and TV has made musicians massively more productive if you measure it by number of listeners. Also fast travel makes them more productive, if you can play 5 major cities a week you make much more money than with 5 shows in the same city, hence musicians going on tours.
> “The full treatment, including surgery and chemotherapy, can reach between $8,000 and $10,000 for a dog or cat.”
Meanwhile, full cancer treatment for a human can easily cost 100x that, because care for pets is a free market and care for humans is very far from it.
Television's "The Brady Bunch" depicted an upper-middle-class household with a live-in maid and a nice house in an LA suburb that did not otherwise live extravagantly by the standards of a decade or two later, when basically no one in the US except maybe the out-of-sight-rich had live-in help any more.
Housing cost being not too far from 100 years back seems suspect even inflation/per capita wealth adjusted.
Increasing urbanization in cites and sheer population growth would have increased housing costs whichever way it is measured (ownership /rental/median /average) over 50-100 year period.
Both the car and the nanny have a TCO that is vastly higher than the purchase price/salary: the car needs maintenance/service, parking, repairs, fuel, taxes and insurance, and the nanny needs a place to stay, food, and he/she consumes water and electricity.
People tend not to calculate TCO or even be aware of it, they just look at their monthly incoming and outgoing money and check if their cashflow doesn't hits 0.
[+] [-] NoPie|4 years ago|reply
The reason she thought about the car as a luxury and not a necessity is that then the society wasn't dependent on cars like we do today. They travelled less, worked closer to home, milkman brought milk to home and grocery shopping could be done closer to home as well.
[+] [-] dmz73|4 years ago|reply
"four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was £90 for a year."
According to one CPI calculator (https://www.in2013dollars.com) "£90 in 1919 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £4,951.54 today" and "£700 in 1919 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £38,511.97 today".
Google search also reveals that average yearly wage in London in 1920 was £205 and average wage in London in 2021 was £53,700 so £700 income in 1919 was 3.5 times the average which in 2021 would be £187,950 (quite a bit more than "equivalent in purchasing power to about £38,511.97 today").
A quick web search for 4 bedroom apartment (not sure about sitting rooms) in London shows that rent is between £2,000 and £8,000 per month - let's say £5,000 for a nice one like what Christie's sounds like which is £60,000 per year. They paid £90/£700 = 13% of their (3.5 the average) annual income for rent and now the equivalent rent would be £60,000/£187,950 = 32% of the 3.5 the average annual income.
Even just comparing the plain average income, person in 1919 could rent the same apartment and still have £205 - £90 = £115 to live on for the year (which seems possible considering maid lived on £36 per year but in 2021 the average income leaves you £53,700 - £60,000 = £6,300 short on the rent alone.
So ignoring the tvs, computers, holidays, cars, healthcare and all the things that we cannot compare and comparing what we can, it is obvious that just to live in 2021 we need more money that what we are making and so it is easy to see how most people feel that the living standards have gone down.
[+] [-] AussieWog93|4 years ago|reply
Rents tend to be tied to the infrastructure/facilities and earnings potential within a given radius of the property.
1919 London was dirty with terrible air quality (far worse than Beijing or Mumbai today, literally choked my great grandmother to death on a bad day) and with nowhere near the infrastructure or work opportunities it has today.
A fairer comparison to 1919 London would be a hypothetical working class town where the primary employers are steel mills and environmental standards are simply unenforced.
[+] [-] NoPie|4 years ago|reply
Maybe that car was really rubbish by today's standards and technology-wise therefore it is expected that now the real costs have come down. But with apartments I don't think there is that much of an improvement that justify average increase from $500 to $5000.
[+] [-] DeWilde|4 years ago|reply
The thing is, you can live today without all of that and your living costs would be comparable to Christie's. A house without electricity, centralized heating, safety regulations of today will cost far less to rent, if you can find one that is. Today's housing comes batteries included with all of that so it will be more expensive. People might feel their standards of living going down but if they were to spend a week in a 1919 house they'd be much more grateful.
[+] [-] jseban|4 years ago|reply
The rent for that apartment today would be more than 100% of the average middle class income.
[+] [-] dustintrex|4 years ago|reply
Singapore imports domestic workers for poor neighbouring countries like the Philippines and Myanmar, which keeps wages very low, on the order of US$450/month, not too far off Christie's inflation-adjusted US$220/month. Even the fully loaded cost with government levies, insurance, food & board etc is on the order of $1000/month, considerably cheaper than most other childcare options, particularly if like most Singaporeans both parents work longer hours.
By comparison, Singapore strictly limits the number of cars on the road, auctioning permits called "Certificates of Entitlement" to the highest bidder and imposing around 100% taxes on the cars themselves. As a result, a plain vanilla Toyota Corolla costs US$120,000 all in. What's more, half of that is the COE cost, which is valid for only 10 years, meaning the value of the car depreciates by around $10,000 every year. Add in petrol, servicing, parking etc, and having a live-in helper to run errands and drop off kids etc starts to look quite affordable in comparison.
[+] [-] Arnavion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsbauauvhabzb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notfbi|4 years ago|reply
They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was £90 for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for £36 ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”
The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy. "
Ignoring the point and rest of the article but it's a strange and uncanny framing to start it, while simultaneously giving the true numbers, trying to suggest that Agatha Christie in this circumstance of having income 25x that of the working class might not be considered well-off.
[+] [-] SergeAx|4 years ago|reply
This is actually brilliant and deep. We may argue a lot that music education became more expensive, violins themselves cost more, musicians should pay their rent, which is also increased century over century, but the fact stands still: it took exactly as much labor.
Talking about the rent: housing prices are driven by the average income (because the balanced market will extract maximum wealth from its participants). So the Baumol's cost disease can be one of the key inflation factors.
[+] [-] jerrre|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mFixman|4 years ago|reply
They are driven by the average income of the wealthiest $number_of_homes renters. If there are not enough homes in a single city then a lot of people will pay very significant part of their salary to have a place to live.
[+] [-] hogrider|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amanaplanacanal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] addaon|4 years ago|reply
This glosses over the purpose of child care -- it's more than safety, it's socialization, learning, etc. In a world where some level of automation (or offshoring) is possible for these services, I could definitely see some adoption. Think "Diamond Age."
[+] [-] DarylZero|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|4 years ago|reply
It would be a status symbol to not have it, of course - real organically raised human children! - but the struggling middle class would pick up robonanny-as-a-service immediately if it was cheaper than other childcare.
[+] [-] sgarman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarybits|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freddie_mercury|4 years ago|reply
So a single car not very expensive car costs the same as 5 years of a full-time nanny and part-time maid.
And that's without figuring in all the extra costs of a car, especially parking. There's not really free parking most places here. So you'll be paying for parking literally everywhere you go.
Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage. And the space for a garage isn't cheap either. If you're a middle income family you're probably living in one of the capital cities and most people would probably be shocked at how expensive land is in the capital cities nowadays.
[1]: https://www.honda.com.vn/o-to/san-pham/honda-civic/index.htm...
[+] [-] joe_the_user|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|4 years ago|reply
Delivery? Sure, someone will bring it across the city, in the next hour for 35,000 Dong ($1.50USD).
Want to buy shoes? Msg a store, they’ll send pictures, choose a few and they send a store employee over to your house to try them on.
That is changing though. Covid completely messed up the labor market and rather than get locked down, losing your job and still having to pay rent and food, people just went back to the countryside with family and are staying there for now.
As a result labor shortages, even nannies, and wages are going up. I think it’s a good thing, it’s the bottom moving up.
I expect you’ll see a similar transition as the UK eventually. Maids and nannies becomes something exclusive to the rich. Unless of course they continue to import them from lower income countries - a la Singapore.
[+] [-] newyankee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anovikov|4 years ago|reply
Interestingly, in societies with several "tiers" made up of people of different origin (many of them full-on citizens anyway, it's not about legal rights but about race/class which is perceived to be same thing), it can work even on a much higher level of economic development.
Cyprus where i live is at around 60% of U.S. level, and average family can have a full-time maid, as long as she's from Philippines. I was surprised to know that many of these Philippines maids have better immigration status than myself and this is certainly not because they are "forced to work for pennies or risk being kicking out of the country". It's just a perception of how much a Philippine maid is worth.
[+] [-] radu_floricica|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andi999|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yreg|4 years ago|reply
I sold my last car for €500 and it wasn't in the worst shape.
[+] [-] Grustaf|4 years ago|reply
I don't know if this is meant to be serious, but you could just park your car outdoors, like city dwellers do?
[+] [-] pyuser583|4 years ago|reply
So instead of parking the car, it would just be driven around the block again and again.
[+] [-] jerry1979|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bothandeach|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AussieWog93|4 years ago|reply
Here in Australia, you can get a really high-quality coffee from just about any petrol station for $1 (in AUD; around 70c in USD). Yet in spite of this, we have a thriving cafe scene where people will gladly pay $4-$5 for a take-away latte.
What's equally "irrational" is that Starbucks, despite the high amount of effort put into each drink, is generally considered to be worse than the $1 coffee from 7-11 or Coles Express.
I'm not 100% sure what the takeaway point is, but it was just so jarring to read that Americans view Starbucks as a luxury rather than some kind of bizarro-world meme.
[+] [-] alisonatwork|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascar|4 years ago|reply
While Starbucks coffee isn't top quality coffee, it still beats your usual office space full automatic poison by a long shot and is readily available everywhere. That's why it's considered good coffee by many.
[+] [-] tourist2d|4 years ago|reply
7-11 or Coles Express coffee do not have high quality coffee. Everyone I know who drinks it does so just because it's convenient.
[+] [-] rjsw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mherdeg|4 years ago|reply
Once I had successfully found it with my second search ([economics name for effect raises orchestra]) I came back and found Baumol in the very next subhead. Whoops. All a great read though!
In retrospect every year at the student newspaper when we ran the "here is how much tuition is going up and here is how much financial aid is going up" article we probably should have invited an administrator or professor to comment on Baumol's cost disease.
[+] [-] j7ake|4 years ago|reply
It is analogous to living in places like Singapore or Hong Kong, where owning a car is less common than having a domestic worker.
[+] [-] umanwizard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
To the extent that I met a number of people who had 2 or 3 full time domestic staff but if they had decided to emigrate to the UK or USA would not be able to afford any, and based on their career/education/experience would likely be living in a 650 square foot apartment.
[+] [-] jacknews|4 years ago|reply
It is almost certainly far more than $50,000, which is a tradesman's salary these days.
So, irrespective of what that money now buys, the true inflation figure (how much does it cost to live at a certain level in society) is far greater than the official figure.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olliej|4 years ago|reply
The idea the Christie’s multi bedroom apartment would be as cheap as stated is laughable and demonstrably false.
The unwillingness of governments to include cost of housing in inflation calculations is more reflective of their pressure to make the landed happy than any attempt to reflect reality.
[+] [-] shellfishgene|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustintrex|4 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, full cancer treatment for a human can easily cost 100x that, because care for pets is a free market and care for humans is very far from it.
[+] [-] buescher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manquer|4 years ago|reply
Increasing urbanization in cites and sheer population growth would have increased housing costs whichever way it is measured (ownership /rental/median /average) over 50-100 year period.
[+] [-] jll29|4 years ago|reply
People tend not to calculate TCO or even be aware of it, they just look at their monthly incoming and outgoing money and check if their cashflow doesn't hits 0.