Proper credit for inspiring the below visualization belongs to Mark J. Perry at the American Enterprise Institute. The underlying data come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps detailed records of consumer goods as well as average hourly earnings. Of course, these figures take into consideration inflation.
Before you read any further, spend a minute or two looking at the chart… Study it a little… Move your eyes from left to right… Observe what has moved by how much in last 20 years…
What is the first thought that comes? What does it make you feel?
‘Basic’ necessities costlier, luxury cheaper?
Obvious that the cost of what is truly important in basic human life… What are our necessities (other than clothing) – home, medicines, food, education… They have risen exponentially… And what was ideally a luxury and ‘good to have’ things have fallen drastically…
And that makes us feel sad…
Misplaced human priorities? Is it issue of quantity or quality?
Is this a case of misplaced priorities of humanity? A cursory thought will certainly accuse so… After all if we as species had prioritized the necessities correctly their cost would have reduced… Supply and demand determines price… And since demand for necessities will never go down… Supply should have been kept up… And hence price kept at constant if not less…
But than have not all or most countries subsidised public schools and government hospitals… It is probably that the subsidised ones lack both in numbers required and the quality of services, the expectation of which has now risen… And hence the mass subsidised ones not having kept pace with individual human desires… Maybe more so on quality then anything else…
But then we have been expecting more and more from internet, software’s, TVs, etc as well… So really the expectation of better quality can be served at a lower price if there is enough invention that is rolled out correctly…
What it then comes to is that in the luxury needs, the inventions have come in hordes and hence the shelf life of anything new is very momentary, thereby reducing prices regularly… Whilst in case of housing, education and healthcare, there is a limit of our inventions – not many new drugs get discovered as much as mobile technologies… The R&D cost of medicine is much higher than that of software…
The issue is with intellectual limit, is it? Or is it we wanted to become complacent?
So maybe the real reflection of the above graph is that anything that requires higher intellect but cannot be mass produced (both conditions fulfilling) – the cost has risen more – see college education, hospital services… even if intellect is required but if that can be mass produced by a machine once set – the prices drop (see software, TV, etc)…
We are now in billions on earth… and we continue to pay premium for intellect – an attribute that only we as a species are known so far to possess… if one was to draw the graph of human population growth on the same chart, we would see that we went from 6 billion to 8 billion in the same period… a 133% factor – somewhere close to the college text books line… Hence even with a 33% more supply of intellect, we continue to pay more for intellect… even if you discount a 25 year gap from birth to availability of intellect, our population in the 25 years before 1998 grew at the same pace or even higher…
We have essentially hence pushed our intellect to be deployed to areas where we felt the most need or found it easier…
After becoming the top predator… after finding that we have reached 90th percentile in terms of our limits (post which for us finding solutions would be like an infant climbing Mount Everest) for organic life extension and conquering almost all diseases to allow us a respectable life term (for post 70’s a body with no disease but no energy is not appealing enough to push for and to find the elixir of youth is pushing for the last 10 percentile in this quest)…
So with no real challenges – we decided to relax in style and luxury… and harnessing our intellect to provide for material comforts and intellectual stimulation’s at the lowest cost, in the fastest way, with the most convenience…
So where does this lead to next?
I had an observation earlier – measure of human happiness… read it… it alludes to the same thing… and this graph… this is the measure… this is the visual to that post…
Where will this lead to next? Yuval Noah Harari asks the same question in Homo Sapiens and Homo Dues, what is it that we humans will aim for when we have everything (and by that he means even a life whose length we can control)… and we have no challenges to surmount… It is an unnerving thought…
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