Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
OK, let's try this again.
Individual products do not track well to the CPI. And it's not the job of the CPI to say that "any product that costs more than it did in 1970 (in adjusted dollars) is a rip-off."
That belief ignores dozens (if not hundreds) of complicated factors including disposable income, wages, currency values, the product's popularity and sales rates, the price range of the product, taxes, consumption rates, tariffs, imports vs exports....
The CPI is a broad measure drawn from a "basket" of goods. The likelihood of one specific product perfectly matching the CPI is as unlikely as a company's growth rates to perfectly match GDP, or its stock price to perfectly match the S&P 500.
Uh huh. If you average out the increase in CPI from 1970 to 2009, the annual rate is approximately 4.5%. (I.e. start with $1 in 1970, increase your amount by 4.5% per year, and in 2009 you'll have $5.56.)
What does it take to roughly double that ($1 in 1970, to $9.70 in 2009), as books have done? An annual average increase of 5%.
Wow. Books outpaced inflation by an annual rate of 0.5%. What a pack of thieves. 
Of course that does not in any way reflect the reality. Inflation was very high in some years, low in others; book prices rose much faster than CPI in some years, and not in others. |
None of which changes the fact that, in relation to what your money is worth today, books are twice as expensive as they were in 1970. It matters not that they stuck the knife in slowly, we're all still bleeding the same.