The Most Important Cheque in Economics

It isn’t clear but did metal mining get more efficient or just more of something else got in there like plastic parts reducing demand (+metal prices work off big cycles)?

Food is an interesting one as substitutes like pink slim and wood pulp seem to be replacements for real food to keep prices down. Natural fibers for clothing is another area where plastic and almost plastic fibers are replacing natural.

I have generally two problems with clothing. I’m in the 1% for height and I get skin rashes on my upper body from mostly unnatural fibres. Sizes have tended to narrow, particularly pants. And it’s getting harder and more expensive to find clothing with all or very high percent of natural fibres.

If looking blind at an object like an inflation statistician might look at it, all is good, but a little deeper and I suspect we are having a lot more inflation when we look at apples to apples. (And I get the point that replacement is part of the ingenuity of people but not all things are living there).