Comment by araes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by araes | Hacker News Reader

The claim of a difference is 'slightly' exaggerated (~1%) However, the overall inflation data is quite interesting.

- Best tracker of inflation - drinking

- Most inflated - Learning and having a roof over your head

- Least inflated - Changing location and playing dress-up (you or your home)

As always, rent seeking behavior is an issue (or a good investment area).

Getting smarter is getting more difficult (or at least more costly) and unfortunately compounds. If you are already educated and ahead, you don't have to pay those costs, and you have a higher vantage point from which to choose opportunities (like charging other people rent).

Not sure if I believe food - or else probably has a huge amount of spread within it. Some food has dramatically risen, others not (tuna - high, bread - low). Noisiness of food line probably reflects this. An unlikely friend in bulk negotiators like Walmart / Kroger / Amazon. "-> Tyson, Coke, Gen. Mills, keep your prices low."

Transportation is opportunity. Don't like where you are? Leave. Potential foraging range - up. Go live in India, where food is $4 a day, and rent is $100-200. Course, this helps baby boomers too. Retire in Kathmandu, Tangier, Santiago. Lots of money just goes further.

There's a good article I can't find that shows that the things you need are the things that have risen in cost the most while the things you want have risen the least. Hence, the inflation rating actually tracks only the homes you want a d is becoming disconnected from actual costs of living.

Unfortunately Medicare is a big deal that prevents boomers from retiring abroad. If you are rich and can afford private healthcare (even according it at a discounted rate in India or Thailand can be tough), then it’s a great idea, but then you don’t really need to.

> rent seeking behavior

So many people are confused about the meaning of this term lately, to the point where I think we might need to scrap it and come up with a new one. In traditional economics, rent-seeking is a bad thing, because it involves lobbying the government to increase one's revenues without performing any economically beneficial function. This is why the term has a negative connotation. Almost all economists think this type of behavior causes inefficiency.

Buying a house and renting it out does not fall under this category. In this case, you are performing a beneficial economic function (i.e. you are providing someone a dwelling, in exchange for money). There are related rent-seeking behaviors, such as lobbying the government to prevent building new housing stock for the purpose of increasing the value of your dwelling and the amount of your rents. But the act of investing itself? Not rent-seeking. Not considered bad by most economists.

"Rent" in the colloquial sense of payments pursuant to a residential lease is a different meaning from "rent" in the economics sense of the word. The use of this word falls into the trap of many words with differing colloquial and technical meanings. I don't see how abandoning a word's technical definition because of a competing colloquial definition helps anyone.

The problem is that rent seeking, in the colloquial sense, is an attempt to paint a normal activity, like getting paid rent for housing, with the same brush as bribery type behavior.

It's very similar to say, how Trump co-opted fake news to just mean any news he disagreed with. Original creators of the term fake news are rightfully mad because technically it should refer to news that is clearly factually untrue, like pizzagate.

I've never seen "rent seeking" used with the colloquial rather than technical meaning of the word "rent".

Can you point to an example of this usage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17269230

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