A car that you could buy for a few thousand today is much more capable than the cars people bought for a few thousand in the past.

New cars are status symbols or toys. I never understood how people could trade a human's full time salary for a car. People take old cars to work every day for a small fraction of the cost.

American lifestyles have inflated much more than the price of comparable goods. Average home size is way up over time, people prepare less of their own food, people buy fancy big cars with lots of horsepower and unnecessary capability.

I would complain about iphones and big TVs but in reality- the only things relevant to most of our budgets are our insistence to compete for the hottest real estate and new cars

I was hesitant to use the car example exactly because of this argument. My point was if you wanted a new car you paid 3-4k. Now a similar new car would be 30-40k. Oh sure it is all around a better car. You can however see the same approximate scale in many goods. Such as food and big ticket items (like refrigerators, lawn mowers, etc). What made cars much better is better manufacturing allowed by the use of computers (both in the manufacture and in the car). Adding a few dozen controller nodes does not add nearly 30k to the value of a car. Most of that is inflation. Before the inflation hit in the 70s my parents bought a home for about 14k. Last time I looked if they wanted to sell it was around 120-140k. I have not looked but I would take a guess that a 'used car' price would scale depending on model and usage with current used car prices and age of the car.

Conspicuous consumption of goods is a interesting argument and probably worth talking about. But my point was scale and inflation.

> New cars are status symbols or toys. I never understood how people could trade a human's full time salary for a car. People take old cars to work every day for a small fraction of the cost.

It's not that simple. If nobody bought new cars, where would the used cars come from? :D

And their prices would go comparatively up.

So basically, they are just like everything else that you can get cheaper (which is, really, everything). Eg. you can get a comparable laptop for 1/2 the price most likely (maybe not with new M1 macs, but in a few years). Or the phone.