[fatherzine]

First, prices per se are irrelevant. The ratio of labor price to goods&services price is relevant.

Second, the labor / goods&services price ratio itself is irrelevant, as measured in the short term. What is relevant is the long term outlook of this ratio. See eg the Dutch Disease.

Third, even the long term labor / goods&services price ratio is irrelevant. Not everything in this world is, or should be, reducible to simplistic financial value.

One way to approach the underlying intuition is in terms of homeostasis, at nation state level.

[wholinator2]

I'm confused, are you asking we close our eyes and only operate on internal bias? Where does the world matter if no single metric is relevant? Regardless of number metrics, what do you think matters? I think a family that can no longer afford a laptop for their child's education matters. I think 10,000 or 100,000 such families matter a lot. How do we tell that story? What options have we but the numbers?

[fatherzine]

Long term median purchasing power, especially of essentials eg housing / food / energy / education, matters more to the health of a nation than the price of hitech on open global markets at a specific time instant. Furthermore, while the health and wealth of a nation are correlated, they are not the same. I wonder if there is a sensible way to prioritize health over wealth.