Technology

Buying a cell phone is becoming more and more expensive

No, buying a top end cell phone is becoming more and more expensive. There are plenty of options at the lower end that are more than capable.

For example, the phone I've had for the past 3 years retailed at $250 (Moto G Power, 8 core and 4GB RAM IIRC), and I got it for $50 through a cell plan deal ($200 off if I used Google Fi for 3 months). My phone plan (Tello) is $10/month for 1GB data and unlimited talk and text. When I got my first phone ~15 years ago, the phone itself cost $50-100 after discount, and the plan was $50/month with no data and limits on minutes.

Just because you can pay >$1k on a phone and >$50/month on a plan doesn't mean that's necessary but any stretch of the imagination.

And TVs have actually gotten cheaper pretty much every year since they were introduced. I can get a bigger, nicer TV today for the same money as I did a few years ago, and that has been true for decades. I bought a 55" 4k LG TV almost 7 years ago for ~$400 (Black Friday deal), and the price o see today for similar specs (55" 4k LG TV) is ~$360. There are also options for 40" TVs under $200, and 20 years ago I bought a 20" CRT TV for $200-250 (not inflation adjusted).

Average inflation has been nearly 2 digits for the past couple of years

In the US, it was 7% and 6.5% respectively for the past couple of years, and if you'll look, it has been <2% almost every year since 2010, and under 1% for some of those years. So the recent runup in inflation is absolutely an anomaly, and over a longer term it averages out to the normal 2-3%. At least in the US, we're pretty much back to normal now (between 3-4%, normal is 2-3%).

The causes for recent inflation figures are:

• record low unemployment paired with higher labor demand
• global supply chain disruption due to COVID-19 responses
• shift in consumer demand

Basically, more people had money (partially from labor shortage, partially from stimulus packages), and since most people needed to stay home, they tended to want similar things that they didn't before. If you can't go out to shows and restaurants, you turn to things you can do at home (TVs, game consoles, etc), and that increased demand happened just as supply dropped.

People also seemed to want to buy houses at that time more than ever because:

• they needed to work from home, so they wanted more space to do so
• with low unemployment and low mortgage rates, more people could afford to buy at then-current prices

And supply for new construction was limited due to COVID-19 supply chain issues (lumber and steel became much less available), and thus nrw construction became much more expensive. The result was a rapid runup in housing costs (my house nearly doubled over those two years).

If you'll note, prices on things have generally stabilized or gone down since. New cars just didn't exist in 2020 and 2021 due to semiconductor shortages, and now you can find more new cars at original MSRP (used market still sucks, but that'll improve). Gaming consoles were hard to find, and now they're quite plentiful. Housing is still expensive, but that's because it has a much slower replacement cycle (i.e. now that materials are more plentiful, we're having trouble catching up in supply).

From your second article about wage stagnation:

the U.S. experienced two decades of stagnating – actually, declining – average real wage growth, beginning in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1990s

That was the period of stagflation in the 80s, and it isn't particularly relevant to today's situation. This Wikipedia article on stagflation is interesting, and the issues seem to have started with a supply constraint much like COVID (in the case, the Six Day War and later Yom Kippur War ended in oil supply reduction to the West), and when paired with inflationary monetary policy, we ended up with reduced economic capacity and devaluation of currency.

So I don't think it's fair to compare the height of the 70s to today, just as the author in that second post argues. But even if we do, that article shows we are a little higher than the peak in the 70s, despite a huge reduction in the 80s. That's pretty incredible, especially since most of the increase starts just 30-ish years ago.

I can't say much about the rest of the world though, and I'm sure inflation is worse in Europe due to the war in Ukraine, but at least in the US, the average person is better off today than 50 years ago.

The main issue I think is perception. Median wages seem to have increased, but people seem to focus on income inequality, which has also increased. So people are better of today, but they're further away from the wealthy. I don't think that's a particularly useful metric, we should be focusing on the welfare of the average person and the poor, not the relative welfare vs the wealthy.