Everything you really don't need is cheaper, everything you do need (rent, groceries, education) is much more expensive while wages haven't increased since the 90's.
And inflation is completely within the desirable range, as it always is, regardless of any real world price changes.
On a positive note, it is encouraging to see a much broader of diversity of opinion on certain topics lately, where one year ago many of the comments in this thread would have been heavily downvoted. I believe there is a genuine change of sentiment underway even among the well paid tech classes.
I agree that certified education got more expensive.
Education price in general got much cheaper with the Information Age. Just look at the body of knowledge that is available to everyone through scihub but also through legal venues. With enough of drive you can pick up a lot of knowledge for free.
If you’re smart you can self-educate yourself in many areas to a better level than 80% of the ivy-league alumni.
What you don’t get is:
- certificates with prestige
- network
- extrinsic motivation
You're minimizing the value of "certificates with prestige". The reason they are valued is that they are a very quick and easy indicator of ability, even if they are only moderately accurate. It's incredibly difficult to judge the ability of someone who is self-taught, you have to dig into their self-study plan and prior projects. If you need to evaluate and sort 10 candidates in 2 hours, you don't have time for that type of research.
With the internet what it is, there ought to be a way to make this evaluation process less labor intensive.
And not only that, it's crazy how much the simple act of going to a university and surrounding yourself with other university educated people contributes to raised wages. For example, I have met a factory worker who through the internet have read a ton and learned several topics to a high level in his free time and he is undoubtably driven but there are so many behvioural and cultural reasons why people would pass over him in an instant.
This is a common argument, but not sure I buy it. Sure, going to university helps a person identify established business and social norms, but so does working and interacting in society.
Anti social folks who don’t go to college will very likely still be anti-social if they do.
The main benefit of a standardized certificate is that it helps people evaluating your skills do so more easily. There’s no question that a smart hard-working self-taught super-social person will have a harder time than a less skilled person who has a respected institutions stamp of approval.
Rent can be fixed by moving. A lot of people move out of California and NY for a better life. Companies will follow.
College and education are being disrupted. Hopefully online courses and independent certification can fix the problem soon.
Healthcare is expensive because people in US are obese and unhealthy. And there is a lot more treatment for previously untreated problems but at a very high price. Go walk around a hospital to see where your insurance money is spent.
"Dr. Baumol’s insight in the 1960s was that costs inevitably rise fastest for things that are difficult to automate, including medical care, garbage collection and the live performance of a Mozart string quartet.
It came to him in the middle of the night.
“It was 4 in the morning,” he recalled in an oral history. “I suddenly woke up and said I know why those costs are going up! I got up, wrote down a few notes, and went to sleep again.” His theory became known as Baumol’s Cost Disease."
