Why everyone feels broke in an age of abundance.

Yeah, those are all good things.

You know, I was thinking about part of the challenge, I think, at an interpersonal level when we talk about affordability is sort of our point of reference or our frame of reference in terms of what we expect, what other people have.

And there are so many things that have become everyday items and have become very cheap.

that most people don't know that they're cheap because they used to be expensive.

And so an example I used to give with my students is I would talk about price elasticity, right? What's your demand for something, you know, and how when you're really wealthy, you have a relatively inelastic demand for things.

That is to say you're more price insensitive.

So, you know, Bill Gates doesn't care whether the Ferrari costs $80,000 or $90,000, you know, that's kind of immaterial to him.

Same thing for all kinds of things where we would say, okay, $10,000 or $30,000 difference in price is like pretty substantial.

But when you're really, really wealthy, that's not as much of an issue.

And I would tell my students, well, if you've gone to the grocery store recently to buy one of those big containers of salt, like those large ones that will last you years and years.

Do you care if the price is $2.75 or $2.95 or $3.15? And of course, my students don't even know what the price is.

They don't remember the last time they bought salt because it's so cheap.

So I tell them, you're salt billionaires.

When it comes to salt, your demand is inelastic like the billionaires.

But salt, as you both know, salt used to be very expensive.

It used to be very scarce, hard to produce, used to be a really valuable commodity or a very, I should say, pricey commodity.

because substantively hasn't changed that much.

But now it is so abundant that we don't even think about the price of salt as an affordability question, because we just have access to extremely cheap salt.

So anyway, so that frame of reference, there's more things that are becoming, I think, cheap, and yet, People feel the pain with high price tags for very particular items, the car, a house, the medical bill.

So anyway, so I think we kind of will jump back and forth here between the the measures, the economic economic measures of what's really going on and then how people feel, because I think there's a bit of a divide here.

And it's kind of an interesting one to think about where quality is getting better.

Things are getting more affordable, especially in terms of the labor that we produce.

do, and I want to come to you here with some of the examples that you presented recently at a conference.

I think people don't really think in those terms, and they don't have the perspective, right? People weren't, you know, you go to the grocery store today, and they're like, oh, beef has gone up several dollars, you know, a couple dollars a pound or whatever, or chicken's gone up a dollar a pound or two.

And you're like, oh, my gosh, price is really expensive.