Monday, January 10, 2011

What Your Money Can Buy

What ~$5300 bought in 1964:



What ~$5300 buys today:

All of this--



PLUS all of this--




Now try to imagine the increased affordability and the innovations which could have occurred in the field of medicine if we had had a fully free market in health care since 1964, instead of the explosion in government control since Medicare in 1965.



(Images from Carpe Diem)


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3 comments:

garret seinen said...

Beth this post of your caused me to think of something I saw afew years ago. It was at the Dallas fed site and turns out it was their 1997 report, Time Well Spent - 1997 Annual Report - FRB Dallas
It compares how the hours we work for something has shrunk over the years.

But is that not how we measure productivity - by how much human energy it takes to do something? When we do more in less time we have increased productivity.

HaynesBE said...

Garret---
Exactly!
The most scarce resource on earth is human labor. To increase productivity is to increase that resource--and the way we increase it is through human ingenuity--the ultimate resource. Thus, humans are both the "problem" (scarce labor) and the solution. Kind of neat, huh?

HaynesBE said...

Garret--Thanks for the recommendation to Time Well Spent. Great article.
Have you also read "By Our Own Bootstraps"? --same authors.