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Felix
Thanks for letting us know about the Lincoln ad. The ad showed up while on a visit to nytimes.com and I signed up. I read about 300 articles a month on the website and was ready to pay the subscription fee (I don’t get the paper) but I am glad to get free access for the rest of 2011.
That NYPost article was even worse than I thought it was going to be.
I can’t believe people have bought the whole, “people in queens don’t use Ipads” angle, and the guy in the audience was an idiot for not understanding the very simple concept of decreasing price per processing power.
That’s on some level where I was heading with http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/20 11/03/17/the-nyt-paywall-arrives/comment -page-1/#comment-25025
I rather imagine people would grasp that if a sandwich stays at $5 but declines in quality, that that is inflation. Dudley may have been a bit clumsy in making his point — which in part was that the Fed can’t target relative prices, and in part was that inflation isn’t the Fed’s only concern. “How many of you would like to lose your jobs so that prices would stay lower?” might have been a good question for him to ask.
dWj, the real problem is how to describe a multi-dimensional situation with a single number.
It is true that quality has improved. Your typical car today is more reliable and has better engineering than a Mercedes from the 1980s (especially the one Mercedes that my grandparents bought — that was a lemon).
Still, you can’t eat quality. A household needs housing, transportation, food, communications… And if the “lower quality” items are no longer available, then they have no choice but to pay for the “improved” version.
In many areas, we’re past the point where technological improvement makes any real difference. The only time I’m happy for a faster broadband connection is when I’m forced to play annoying animated ads. And I’ve found that a 1.8 GHz processor from 10 years ago runs decade-old software just as well as a more modern machine runs the latest releases. Are the “improvements” really worth 50% more?
hsvkitty, it appears they have finally caught (and convicted!) the man responsible for the financial crisis!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/busine ss/26nocera.html
Now that he is behind bars, we are all safe.