My personal theory is that huge inflation is going on.

We do not notice it's effect that much on household goods and food, because their manufacturing is getting cheaper every year, which cancels the effect of inflation. But for things which cannot be made cheaper (houses, education, theaters) prices have been growing way faster than official inflation numbers.

Houses and education both can be made cheaper though? We are just choosing not to by building bigger houses and spending more money on education bureaucracy.

Prices of healthcare, education, and housing are definitely going up a lot more than inflation in general though to be sure, I’d just say it’s because of policy choices we are making not because those items are inherently resistant to price decreases.

It's a good point.

I was thinking more about the cost of the land: no matter how efficient we are, it's supply is limited.

Same goes for the education: one teacher can handle a class of 30 kids no matter how advanced our technology is.

Healthcare is a very different beast though...

The cost of housing isn't universal, and price changes are extremely local. Education (college/university) costs are going up due to bigger administrative departments and are sustained by government backed loans. Fewer people go to theaters nowadays, so theaters have to wring more money out of their customers.

How is this decline distributed amongst households, classified by either wealth or income?

If the losses are from stock market declines, the most affected will be those with heavy stock investments, which is to say, the wealthy, and possibly late-career workers or retirees whose investments (and retirement accounts) are heavily weighted to stocks.

This is a decline that may not hit the average, or at least median, Joe or Jane so much.

I frequently wonder how much market volatility is amplified by High frequency trading and algorithmic trigger fingers. With most of the decline reference in this article returned (at least from an index perspective) by March, I wonder how much of this rapid-fire precipitous change was technologically executed without human oversight.

See the Onion Futures Act, which banned trading of onion futures in 1958.

A brief summary is: experts have been divided on the effect that onion futures trading has on the volatility of onion prices.

To me it sounds like the effect of trading on volatility is relatively small.

Beware though that this stance tends to piss off people with both left and right political views.

How is this possible during a booming economy and one of the largest growth spurts in the stock market ever?

Household net worth drops when the stock market drops, and it dropped.

When the government prints money, existing dollars become worth less, regardless of them sitting in an investment portfolio or piggy bank or real estate.