No, because the level of services and cost to provide them scales also.
Inflation. What paying workers costs. What is considered an “acceptable” level of poverty vs abject poverty as we get richer. New, expensive medical procedures. And as the world gets richer, defense gets more expensive.
We can’t pay 1930 salaries to workers, field a 1930s army, nor would we consider it humane for our elderly to end up with an impoverished 1930s standard of living with 1930s medical care.
Inflation is misleading for these purposes, too, because it includes hedonic adjustments. So a new better procedure or bigger apartment costing 40 pc more might only be 10 pc higher from an inflation point of view, even though you can’t really buy the old one.
Re: insurers— it is an oversimplification. Suffice it to say they are at scale where they have market power and thus don’t price where p=mc, and the regulatory pressures and price opacity push them even further away from efficiency. They are not completely insulated from costs or market pressures, but it’s fairly close.
> GDP without qualification is 'real GDP', not 'nominal GDP' i.e it's already adjusted for inflation.
Nah.. I can't intuit what you are thinking or arguing. But I already addressed much more than you responded to. e.g.:
> > Inflation is misleading for these purposes, too, because it includes hedonic adjustments. So a new better procedure or bigger apartment costing 40 pc more might only be 10 pc higher from an inflation point of view, even though you can’t really buy the old one.
Inflation. What paying workers costs. What is considered an “acceptable” level of poverty vs abject poverty as we get richer. New, expensive medical procedures. And as the world gets richer, defense gets more expensive.
We can’t pay 1930 salaries to workers, field a 1930s army, nor would we consider it humane for our elderly to end up with an impoverished 1930s standard of living with 1930s medical care.
Inflation is misleading for these purposes, too, because it includes hedonic adjustments. So a new better procedure or bigger apartment costing 40 pc more might only be 10 pc higher from an inflation point of view, even though you can’t really buy the old one.
Re: insurers— it is an oversimplification. Suffice it to say they are at scale where they have market power and thus don’t price where p=mc, and the regulatory pressures and price opacity push them even further away from efficiency. They are not completely insulated from costs or market pressures, but it’s fairly close.