Inflated asset prices means most folks are never going to be able to purchase a home, and equities (which generates wealth with no further effort besides the capital invested, for the most part) will continue to be owned by the wealthiest. Inequality worsens when asset prices increase faster than wages.

This doesn't check out to me (well, the home part does, but I'm not sure we've seen significantly above normal growth there compared to historical norms, outside of hot coastal markets), but for other assets the price doesn't matter, as you can just get a fraction of them or they're split.

> well, the home part does, but I'm not sure

Hey, this checks out with the very thing that the younger generation complains about, correlates with social injustice in the grandest scale (homelessness), that is one influencing factor in major social unrest in the country (racial disparity in access to real estate). But let's ignore that.

Have you considered that the deflection in the economy caused by the inflation happened to manifest itself unevenly across various market segments, and the primary direction that the deflection moved into is the very one you're ignoring?

The wealthy own a lot more assets than the poor, therefore asset inflation increases inequality.

It means that if you don't already own those assets, then you have no hope of ever owning said assets.

No you just need to be ingenuitive and solve a problem the world needs solving. Look at Jeff Bezos 30 years ago.

To buy a house, just start one of the largest companies in history. Easy-peasy.

You can literally buy a house by making a YouTube video now a days. It kinda is easy-peasy. Go look at all those TikTok stars. Your ancestors lived in caves be thankful you can even live in a house. It would be much harder to do that without Banks like the FED.

The problem is that you think you need to solve a grand problem instead of inventing something simple like a post-it note or a makeup tutorial. You seem to somehow believe that incumbents ALWAYS win. That is not true. Ingenuity with a superior product is what upends the market, shifts and creates new wealth.

The people who are working in the post-it note and makeup factories want houses too, you know.

The argument wasn't that they had to invent something to buy a house, it was that it's not a hopeless situation where there is no class mobility. Someone substituted ASSETS for HOUSES for some reason but its not the same thing. ASSETS are what allow some people to have an advantage over others in business.

So many babies on these forums whine about their inadequacies instead of bettering themselves. Making my imaginary number go down does change the fact that YOU AND ONLY YOU have the most power to change your life not some "system". If you can't afford to buy a house, get a better job. Sorry that's harsh. Who said life was easy?

I think you do have some interesting things to say and could convey them better without the negativity of the last paragraph.

I'm coming from the perspective of someone whose extended-extended family ranges from dirt poor laborers to set-for-life landlords.

I'm also drawing on my own experiences. I'm a software engineer, currently on hiatus to work on a YouTube series. I lost a good chunk of change from non-housing assets in 2008 from the meager 401k my internship paid into. I lost the rest when I had to cash in the 401k and sell furniture to have enough cash to wrap up my startup when the market I was in dried up (more like soaked up and polluted by the giant 800lb sponges, plus numerous other factors nobody cares about) and Apple took Primesense out.

So here's what I am saying and relates to what I think everyone else is saying: at every point in my life where I've felt like "now is the time to buy a house," I've just been a few percent short on the down payment. So I keep working and getting promotions and raises and saving, and wouldn't you know, now I'm several more percent short on the down payment despite having more saved, because the treadmill keeps getting longer and spinning faster. And as for other assets, yeah, my stocks are up, but houses are still up more than my risk-tolerable gains.

Meanwhile the people who would have been able to buy reasonable houses in reasonable neighborhoods with reasonable jobs don't have stocks to begin with, and are priced out by migrants with portfolios from even higher cost areas and the massive investors I'm currently having to rent from.

I think you don't understand the difference between "anyone can" and "everyone can". For every hit YouTube makeup tutorial there are a thousand failures.

> You seem to somehow believe that incumbents ALWAYS win

Did you mean to respond to someone else? Where did I say that?

Food, shelter and transportation aren't included in the CPI. Yet those things are essential for quality of life. Inflation is the reason you can't own a house and support a family on a single income anymore.

There are a couple other indexes out there that track total cost of living that are pushing ~10% per year inflation right now.

> Food, shelter and transportation aren't included in the CPI.

This is wrong. Food, shelter, and transportation are all included in the basket used to compute CPI. [0]

> The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W). BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups (food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services).

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm

From your [0]:

> 9. Is the CPI a cost-of-living index? ... > Both the CPI and a cost-of-living index would reflect changes in the prices of goods and services, such as food and clothing that are directly purchased in the marketplace; but a complete cost-of-living index would go beyond this role to also take into account changes in other governmental or environmental factors that affect consumers' well-being. It is very difficult to determine the proper treatment of public goods, such as safety and education, and other broad concerns, such as health, water quality, and crime, that would constitute a complete cost-of-living framework. Since the CPI does not attempt to quantify all the factors that affect the cost-of-living, it is sometimes termed a conditional cost-of-living index.

Public services are being gutted in the US. I think this explains why cost of living indexes can be north of 10% while the CPI is < 2%.

It doesn’t explain how groceries, rent, medical care and education costs have all skyrocketed without raising the CPI. My guess is that people are spending less than they used to on things like recreation and apparel, due to lack of money.

I think he refers to the fact that those categories have their inflation higher than CPI.

CPI weights changed in 1980, and seemly when using old weights the CPI is 10% instead.

I've read (I didn't checked with all details, I don't live in US so it is not that relevant to me) that a major change is that the cost of having a shelter had its weights greatly reduced. (I don't mean the "housing" category in general)

I should have been more specific. Certain rents are included, but house prices are not. Gasoline and bus fairs are included, but the cost of buying a car is not. And, various food items are seasonally adjusted in a favorable manner.

Over time, the index has changed in a manner that grossly underestimates the inflation the average person experiences.

If you did include houses and cars, how would you account for their general improvement over the years? My grandpa used to get rid of his vehicles as the approached $50k miles. They were just too unreliable and costly repairs were right around the corner. Today even junky cars can make it to $150k. They use less fuel, they have better comfort, and they can just do more in general with tech inside them. So if the value the car provides goes up 4x but it's price goes up 2x, what is its contribution to inflation?

Your grandpa could buy a new car for $1500. More like price went up 20x. Incomes have not kept up with this even if you can argue that a new car today is 10x as "valuable" as one built in the 60's. And, the people making the call on those gray areas have an incentive to adjust reported inflation downward.