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 largest factors of cost of living that have skyrocketed are housing costs and education.
For education it’s a bit complicated but the short answer is that universities are not as cost efficient as they used to be. It used to be a small number of people would go to college, and schools would spend most of their budget directly on instructors. Nowadays, schools spend a much larger percent of their budget on other stuff like buildings, administration, student life, etc.
Housing is a bit simpler because obviously a larger number of people all trying to live in the same space makes land prices go up, and then that causes a spiral of everything else – construction supply stores have to pay more for rent, construction workers need more money to pay for their own housing, etc. We don’t really create new metro areas which means the amount of desirable land has stayed the same, with twice as many people competing to squish into it. Before WWII we got around the problem by creating new metro areas, and after WWII we built a bunch of suburbs, but now we’ve run out of space to build new suburbs and no longer build new metro areas.
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