There is no inherent value to money. We used to tie the value of money to the value of gold, but what good is a bar of gold when you’re hungry in a famine? It’s all arbitrary valuation so we don’t need to go through the hassle of bartering anymore.

Luxury goods that can be mass produced by mass mechanisation can reduce the price of something that would take one individual hours to build down to a few cents. Give me a plastic mold and some base material and I can probably crank out a few light switches in an hour, but a machine can do hundreds. This stuff is especially cheap if you put them in low wage countries like China or India.

On the other hand, basic needs such as food and water can’t be mass produced. Plants and animals need time to grow, and many foods can’t be harvested entirely automatically. Most good production involves leaving a bit of land unused for anything but waiting for food to happen. Land and the infrastructure around it is a finite resource worth a whole lot of money.

Water is especially difficult, since desalination is still prohibitively expensive and rain is unpredictable. Many nations are draining their aquifers which still hold some ground water, but that too is a finite resource. Eventually, the water runs out and land will go dry. Those with access to land close to ample water will be able to charge whatever they want for access to it.

One: High demand, low supply, lack of regulation. Prices can rise arbitrarily and since there’s always some richer guy than you who will pay that price, the price goes up. It can’t come down either, because the house the previous owners are moving to is even more expensive, so they need the money. The only exception is dead people’s houses, but those can get inherited and sold off for greed. After all, if you’ve run into a million dollar home, why would you sell it for 100k?

Two: Innovation is slowing down. Computer parts have been incredibly fucking cheap for a decade and a half, but prices are rising again. You used to spend the equivalent of 4000-5000 dollars on a normal computer, that steeply dropped around the dot com bubble, and prices are now climbing again because computers don’t become twice as fast every year anymore. From the start of the 2000s computers and chip production capacity advances at break-neck speed.

I don’t think computer parts are even that expensive. You don’t need 24GB of VRAM or a 13900k or a 4TB SSD. Get yourself a 500 dollar computer and you can do much more than any 1000 dollar computer could do for the past three decades. It’s only the top of the line stuff like Macbooks and extreme gamer graphics cards that have gotten more expensive. That said, consoles did rise in price, but that’s because modern consoles aren’t the underpowered messes that they used to be back when they were cheap. The Switch is still console priced, but the PS5 is basically an expensive gaming PC stuffed into a small box. I doubt Sony or Microsoft are making any money on selling the hardware itself, especially on the newer models.

Oh, and another reason for the computer situation: you need extremely complex industrial tooling to produce chips. There are only a handful of companies in the world with the know-how and tooling to do so. If China were to nuke Taiwan and Hamas would wipe Israel off the map, we’d lose smart phones computers, consoles, smart cars, everything; our ability to produce the chips and the knowledge to build the necessary machinery for all of the tech we’ve come to rely on has been concentrated into a select few locations.

For one part of the chip production process at 3-7 nanometer levels, you need a certain laser system. There is one single country in the world (ASML) that can build that technology. Other companies have gone bankrupts, have been bought out, or are decades behind. Other parts of the chip production process have similar bottlenecks.

So, when COVID hit and imports/exports to and from Taiwan froze, everything went to shit. We didn’t notice for the first few months because of transport delays, but cracks started to appear across the global production chain and there simply wasn’t enough capacity to build enough chips. Combine that with an unfortunate drought (chip production consumes a lot of fresh water) and a factory plant burning down after it’s been running longer and faster than it was ever designed to, and you’ve got yourself a situation where Ford’s infotainment system is competing for chip production capacity with the PS5 and heart rate monitors.

Lastly, floods and fires in low wage countries producing technologies such as hard drives, RAM, and flash storage have done a number on computer part prices a few years before COVID.

Three: Mass produced electronics with little quality control. Sometimes you’ll get a dud, but there’s no brand to damage and the quality requirements aren’t that high. Mass produced shit imported from China doesn’t need to be expensive, especially if you’re targeting sales quantity over quality and features.

Four: Rent and fuel prices to up, so prices of products and services go up, or the business would be making a loss. If you think your rent is high, try renting a restaurant building anywhere downtown, you’ll find out you’re actually getting a bargain on your $1500 broom closet. Normally wages would also go up, but that’s not something that’s happening everywhere.

All of these prices can be affected by government policy. You can set a cap on what a square meter of land or building can be sold or rented out for. You can set an import tax to prevent the continuous stream of mass produced plastic trash from being so cheap. You can set maximum prices for consumer goods, especially the luxury ones.

However, aggressive price control can make it unfeasible to sell products within your country, and cause shortages. Businesses also don’t tend to like being told to lower their prices, and a significant amount of voters work for businesses and get more money if their company does well.

Shortages have driven up the price and prices don’t tend to come down naturally unless consumers exert pressure on businesses. With big chains having wiped out most of their competition with extremely low prices, there’s little pressure you can exert ad a consumer these days. Your local grocery store couldn’t compete with Walmart in 2005 do now Walmart can ask whatever prices it wants, it’s not like you can go anywhere else. You’d think anti monopoly laws would do something about this, but in many areas the people voted into power don’t really care about fixing this problem.