If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 (https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-...), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "meg" of RAM costs US$0.0066 today.
So the dollar's value has increased by roughly a factor of 36700 over those 38 years, averaging 32% per year.
That would be an average yearly inflation of -24%.
Too bad you can't live in DRAM or eat it when you're hungry.
> If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM
We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today.
Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it.
Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for running a modern OS/Browser.
Math says that's stupid. You can still do everything with a "meg" of RAM that you could do in 01987. In fact, the "meg" of RAM you get now is enormously faster, and you can interface it to other things that you couldn't get at the time, such as SSDs, so you can do strictly more with it.
Economics says you're spending newly abundant resources freely in order to conserve those that are still scarce. Economics also predicts that people will adapt to RAM prices doubling by using RAM more frugally, spending more of other resources to compensate.
They seem to fail to capture a whole lot of things. Supposedly $1 in 2000 is worth $1.88 in 2025. So 88% inflation over the 25 years. Meanwhile the median home price has increased by 150%. Family insurance by 350%. Median college tuition by 225%. Childcare costs have risen by 200%. But sure. We can buy super cheap 65" tvs now. Hurray for us! Literal kings who lived hundreds of years ago couldn't possibly imagine a world with cheap large screen tvs. So the poorest among us should rejoice at the wonders they are able to enjoy while they skip meals and ration their insulin.
A dozen eggs is up over 350%, but a 6-pack of Budweiser is only up 60ish% since 2000. So you know, it all balances out. Maybe drink a few extra cans of Bud with your next meal.
This explores the ideas behind your post: important things, like education and healthcare, have disproportionately risen in price while not-so-imortant thing have gotten less expensive.
The inflation basket only represent a hypothetical average person, who doesn't even exist.
It's more useful to construct multiple separate inflation measures that represent different types of people. Like a "typical renter" inflation figure vs a "typical homeowner" inflation figure. It wouldn't be hard to do and would shine a light on inequality and help explain the rise of populism in certain segments of society.
An even better measure would somehow appropriately normalize the figure by the average disposable income in each of the segments to come up with a figure that measures the felt impact better.
The figure would be negative for wealthy people (who actually benefit from inflation because of asset price inflation) and positive for poor people (whose disposable income mostly goes to rent).
You can go one step further than that and calculate a fairness measure using something like the Gini coefficient (*) and analyze how much it has changed over time.
What a ridiculous statement. We have a massive number of people in the USA relying on financial support for purchasing food. Not every single American is fat, especially those who literally can’t afford to eat.
There are lots of Americans who go hungry, but mostly outside the USA. Starvation deaths inside the USA are almost entirely secondary to medical conditions that interfere with eating.
Generally there is a hidden starvation (I'm not sure the exact term), when one consumes just enough calories to survive a bit longer but almost no vitamins and minerals to live normal life.
Similar to polluted air/environment such deaths will hardly be backtracked to the true roots.
The most recent were deaths in conjunction with COVID. Was it due to COVID directly, indirectly or it was so bad that COVID could not really make it worse...
