When you look through old ads and feed them into an inflation calculator, a few things become obvious:

• Housing has gotten expensive much faster than inflation.
• College tuition has gotten expensive much faster than inflation.
• Food went up slightly slower than inflation for most of the last few decades, but caught up in the last 4 years to close that gap.
• Cars have gone up slightly slower than general inflation, but the bottom of the new market has essentially disappeared, replaced with the fact that used cars last a lot longer. In terms of cost to drive a particular distance, the price of fuel going up slower than inflation and efficiency going up over the years has made it so that transportation costs per mile are cheaper than they used to be.
• Furniture and apparel have gone up much slower than inflation, and are comparatively cheap compared to 50 years ago.
• Electronics, audio/visual equipment, communications equipment, etc., have gotten much, much cheaper over time, when adjusted for inflation.

So we’re in a weird place where the average monthly rent costs like 10 big screen TVs, where you can video call people on the other side of the world using a device that costs like 10-20 hours of unskilled wages, but where a semester of university at a state school costs 1000 hours worth of wages.

The ratios are all messed up.