the objective perspective is if you compare prices to food.
historically, food was one of the first type of products to be optimized as much as can be, because people in the 19th and 20th century understood very well how central and important food is for a society. like, for example, under hitler, in nazi germany a whole lot of focus was put on how to produce as much food as possible on the area available. as a consequence, everything about the food production process got optimized as much as possible. the same happened everywhere else in the west at roughly the same time btw, i was just citing nazi germany as an example because there’s extensive literature about that one, but you can probably find fair amounts of literature about the situation in england and the US as well.
anyways, food production got optimized as much as possible early on, in the first half of the 20th century, and as a consequence, food production could not ever be truly improved (from an economics point of view) ever since, because it’s already “maximum performance”. as a consequence, the price of food production (in terms of real resource use and labor use) is already the lowest it could be and did not change in the last 75 years. that is why, from a realist point of view (i.e. one that looks at objective reality such as materials used and labor hours worked) its cost has stayed constant for a long time.
on the other hand, luxury products like TV screens, entertainment, and such had not experienced similar optimization in the first half of the 20th century, instead these things got tackled only much later starting around 1970 when companies realized that there was still a lot of improvement among these products so they continued to invest and develop the production processes for these products. as a consequence, from a realist point of view, the production processes for these products got much more efficient in the last 50 years.
the objective perspective is if you compare prices to food.
historically, food was one of the first type of products to be optimized as much as can be, because people in the 19th and 20th century understood very well how central and important food is for a society. like, for example, under hitler, in nazi germany a whole lot of focus was put on how to produce as much food as possible on the area available. as a consequence, everything about the food production process got optimized as much as possible. the same happened everywhere else in the west at roughly the same time btw, i was just citing nazi germany as an example because there’s extensive literature about that one, but you can probably find fair amounts of literature about the situation in england and the US as well.
anyways, food production got optimized as much as possible early on, in the first half of the 20th century, and as a consequence, food production could not ever be truly improved (from an economics point of view) ever since, because it’s already “maximum performance”. as a consequence, the price of food production (in terms of real resource use and labor use) is already the lowest it could be and did not change in the last 75 years. that is why, from a realist point of view (i.e. one that looks at objective reality such as materials used and labor hours worked) its cost has stayed constant for a long time.
on the other hand, luxury products like TV screens, entertainment, and such had not experienced similar optimization in the first half of the 20th century, instead these things got tackled only much later starting around 1970 when companies realized that there was still a lot of improvement among these products so they continued to invest and develop the production processes for these products. as a consequence, from a realist point of view, the production processes for these products got much more efficient in the last 50 years.
so you consider the price basket excluding luxuries to be objective?
yeah, more or less, especially food.