But is this actually true, or just something that declining economic sentiment in the newspapers has led us to believe? People are consuming more food, more education, more square feet of house, more travel. My sense is that is surprisingly hard to find a quantitative signal that purchasing power has collapsed.
Maybe it is just that positional goods (access to the best neighborhood in the best city) get harder to obtain as the population grows?
But is this actually true, or just something that declining economic sentiment in the newspapers has led us to believe? People are consuming more food, more education, more square feet of house, more travel. My sense is that is surprisingly hard to find a quantitative signal that purchasing power has collapsed.
Maybe it is just that positional goods (access to the best neighborhood in the best city) get harder to obtain as the population grows?