Understanding vs. Political Posturing
For those interested in how humans really put together emotions, brains, and minds in the real world, I recommend the new book How Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Barrett gives evidence that any given human mind is the result of many brains, some of them not human brains. Every individual is a different result of complex interactions which are never exactly duplicated. Nevertheless, certain generalizations can be made. For example, we know that those children who grow up in poverty suffer brain damage, which is unlikely to ever be repaired in their lifetime. We also know that the 'poverty' is relative: not relative to the standard of living of a dark ages peasant, but relative to other people in their environment.
Lest that sound to 'liberal', it is also true that 'If your brain operates by prediction and construction and rewires itself through experience, then it's no overstatement to say that if you change your current experiences today, you can change who you become tomorrow.' Which sounds pretty 'conservative'.
Which leaves us, I think, with no really satisfactory way of adjusting prices to some ideal index of inflation. In a world of media saturation where everyone is rich and beautiful, does 'rich and beautiful' become the norm against which everyone else experiences poverty? Does that account for the great increase in depression, addiction, and autoimmune diseases in the modern world?
Suffice to say that no human is either determined by the genes they inherited or the insular family life they experienced in childhood or by the society they grew up in. The resultant human is a complex consequence of all those things. Which makes it impossible, I think, to speak with persuasiveness about price trends over decades or centuries.
I have arguments with my son-in-law about my supposed 'pessimism'. He says that both I and his father talk about the 'good old days' when everything was better. But he thinks that everything must have been worse...we didn't grow up with smart phones or video games. I tend to look at things like the freedom we experienced (roaming the woods at will, disappearing after school and showing up for supper, spending the night on a sand bar in the river, etc.); the small penalties associated with childhood mischief (all the cops had teenagers, also); the fact that so much of what you needed to learn was right there in front of you (the blacksmith, the farmer, the tinsmith, the baker, etc.). To my way of thinking, the fact that we had very little fossil fuels was actually an advantage. Neither my father nor my wife's father ever drove a car to work. There is really no way to compare that world to the current world which will convince any naysayers.
Don Stewart