… which for many is all eaten up by runaway inflation in certain key constrained areas like housing.
This is why in the US there are hordes of homeless people with smart phones and why the poor generally have no problem having houses full of appliances and giant TVs. Gadgets have indeed gotten radically cheaper.
The things that are hard to make cheaper for structural or physical reasons like housing, health care, tuition, and child care tend to inflate so as to eat the surplus. Housing is the worst culprit in many markets.
Not sure about other countries, but the US also made this worse by encouraging people to use housing as an investment and retirement vehicle, so you have a lot of people who really don't want housing to get cheaper because it means their retirement savings or investment will be worth less.
That's a very different and much more recent development, two interconnected ones actually. Housing is now an investment for money that should be able to be used in more productive pursuits. Part of the reason for that is the inflationary economy compels you to invest your money in something that will provide a consistent return. Those two things have very little to do with industrial efficiency.
This is why in the US there are hordes of homeless people with smart phones and why the poor generally have no problem having houses full of appliances and giant TVs. Gadgets have indeed gotten radically cheaper.
The things that are hard to make cheaper for structural or physical reasons like housing, health care, tuition, and child care tend to inflate so as to eat the surplus. Housing is the worst culprit in many markets.