Adjusted for inflation, that glass is still a little more than half full

There's always trouble with prosperity. And it takes a political economist (usually left-liberal) to make the most cheerful innovations of life, let's say dismal. Here's a running discussion on the Consumer Price Index and its failure to capture the ubiquity of technology.

And this, to me, is the area where the CPI overstates inflation most dramatically. When a good goes from being non-existent to existent, how do you capture the impact that has on inflation or consumer prices? Basically, prices have dropped from infinity (it's out of reach to even the most willing to pay consumer, even if he could offer the wealth of the entire world) to something that costs $50-$100 at BestBuy.

All of the things Jane mentioned that would prevent her from going back in time are things which came into existence quite recently. It's hard to take dour, left-wing academics seriously when the moan about how little things have improved for the common man while they pull links, citations, and documents from all over the planet electronically, and then post their thoughts to an audience of thousands, again all over the planet, without leaving their desks, with a technology that's cheap as chips today, and could not be found anywhere a decade ago. The truth is we live in an age of Wonders.

Meanwhile, Brink Lindsey takes one of those academics, Jacob Hacker to task in a review of the latter's book, The Great Risk Shift:

No matter how the doom-and-gloomers torture the data, the fact is that Americans have made huge strides in material welfare over the past generation. And with greater wealth, as well as improved access to consumer credit and home equity loans, they are much better prepared to deal with the downside of increased economic dynamism.