It seems like everything is always going up in price. Is that because of corporate monopolies or something? Do costs of living get higher as a society becomes more industrialized/advanced?
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The primary factor is money supply growth. All the specific increased costs people are pointing out are the result of central banks creating massive amounts of new money.
Imagine an arcade sells trinkets for the tickets you win at the games. There are things to buy for 1, 5, 10, 100, and 1000 tickets. Most people buy the cheap stuff, a few people buy the 100s, and once a month someone buys the iPod for 1000.
But then someone hacks all the games so that they spit out 10x more tickets than they used to. All of a sudden, the customers are going to be flush with tickets and they’ll want to buy the more expensive items more often. The arcade can either run out of the big items at the old prices or increase the prices to keep up. They’ll raise the prices, things will stabilize so that people are buying the iPod about as often as they used to, but then someone hacks the games again, everyone will have too many tickets again, and they’ll have to raise the prices again. This is how money supply growth works.
Saying cost of living is high because housing costs are high is like saying the iPod is 12000 tickets because the arcade raised the tickets prices of things. True, but why?
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