The fact that housing is more like stocks than bread is what's fucked up.

Everyone rich or poor can only eat so much bread, but you can always buy more stock or real estate. Supply is harder to increase as well.

> Everyone rich or poor can only eat so much bread

True, and that's great!

> but you can always buy more stock or real estate.

There is nothing innate about this state of affairs. What is "ownernship"? How many acres of land and I keep to myself with my own shotgun? Surely that's bounded too?

> Supply is harder to increase as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floor_area_ratio

Every person deserves some amount of floor space near other people's floor space. They do not so deserve private land area.

Land area is held in common in parks, whose size, beauty, and other factors vary inversely with their accessibility. We can vary the park distribution and the vacation distribution to do nice things with the expected nature rejuvenation.

This is completely separate from housing.

not too long ago i remember there was backlash against investors buying up real estate (i think the example was london) and then just sitting on the investment. The houses weren't being used for housing, but as stocks.

I'm sure if it wasn't for the fact that bread expires we would see it traded like stocks too.

Grocery costs don't vary nearly as much regionally as housing, and also are not as significant a percentage of household budget, so that makes sense.

Personally I find grocery shopping quite affordable, as I'm sure do most in the HN demographic. However the rate of people experiencing food insecurity in the US was around 12% prior to the pandemic, which shows that grocery costs are a serious concern for many. People in that group, which has expanded this year, do not have the option to increase their grocery budget in proportion to price inflation.

It's definitely true that lower-income people spend a higher percentage of their income on groceries.

But it's also true that the % of income spent on groceries on average has been dropping over time.

Groceries may have made more sense as a metric when the CPI was invented than they do now.

"Between 1960 and 1998, the average share of disposable personal income spent on total food by Americans, on average, fell from 17.0 to 10.1 percent"

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

How does the growth and concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires affect that data? An average doesn’t seem like a reliable stat in this context.

I don't think relatively few billionaries would effect this kind of average much mathematically.

But I'm not really sure how they calculate this number in the first place, the USDA page's only citation is "for more information contact", which is kind of lame. It seems likely that it's based on a survey sample though.

It makes sense to me though; we have whole categories of expense that our grandparents just didn't have, they had a lot less stuff than we have. But they needed about the same number of calories. (On the other hand, I bet average % of income spent on rent has gone up...)

Apparently Americans also spend less % of income on food than most other countries, which is kind of odd.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...

For this discussion, the reason it matters that less % of income is spent on groceries -- is that it makes a CPI based on groceries not as good a metric of relative buying power overall.

Grocery costs are a concern? Perhaps. But I'd say that's driven by housing costs. That is, you can skip meals but a least (or property taxes) is a non-toggling commitment. When in doubt, the rent gets paid.

There's also the cost of healthcare, or the financial repercussion of not having coverage.

People are food insecure. It's freightening. But the root issue is more than food.

Technological advances continue to increase the productivity of agricultural output both in “the first world” and lesser developed countries.

In this way, I expect the prices of consumer goods like foodstuffs to continue to decrease over time.

We are living with economic theory that was posited when the most advanced computer was a slide rule.