Ohio miners forced to attend Romney rally without pay...

[Jester]

Tastiness adds no utility, so I will ignore it (other than possibly fueling my apple addiction).

You, sir, have a strange definition of utility. Do you not prefer tasty apples to not-tasty apples? Because that's what you're saying, economically speaking.

If they double in nutrition, I can eat half as many apples. The other half may spoil, but let's say I can store it until tomorrow. I can't defer my cost by buying (storing) half a computer, or car, or wrist watch.

No dice. Even buying a single unit, costs are a fraction of what they were, at equivalent quality. Hell, in computers, you can't even buy equivalent quality anymore - the cheapest feasible unit is overwhelmingly faster, better, smaller, an improvement in every conceivable way.

Quick experiment: I can buy a Dell inspiron desktop for a whopping $330, in 2012 dollars. That's no magic deal, that's retail price at a major store. If I saw those stats on a computer in 1990 (1.8 GHz processor? 500 GB hard drive? 2 GB of ram?) I would have crapped myself. To buy that kind of power in 1990 was impossible. Top of the line retail was a 386. (I have more power than that on by cell phone, by a lot.) If you tried to come as close as you could, you'd be looking at at barest minimum, $5000, in 1990 dollars. (Which, if we use your preferred inflation calculator, is about the price of a new Camry in 2012 dollars. Realistic? I think not. A 1990 Camry cost more than twice that.) Did there even exist a computer you could buy retail or $330 in 1990? (Or, using shadowstats, for just about $57?)

Now, if we don't fantasize about a Moore's law applying to apple nutrition, but deal in the *real* world of apples, or wrist watches. Then an 1990 1$ apple is about as nutritious and filling as a $9.93 2012 apple. And, it's an apple that suffers a 11% annual inflation rate. A wrist watch still just tells me the time.

Nothing would please me more than to deal in the real world of apples. It would demonstrate just how crazy those figures are.

You're telling me that we've experienced 893% inflation in APPLES since the 1990s? No bloody way. BLS says apples (specifically, a pound of Red Delicious apples) have increased by double in that period, 100% inflation in 22 years. Bureau of Agriculture tells me roughly the same thing, for producer prices, only slightly less than doubling.

Do you have a source that gives me a number even in the ballpark of Shadowstats' figures? I doubt you can for *any* commodity. Even gold (GOLD!), which is sky high right now, and dirt cheap in the 1990s, is only 370% higher. What ARE these commodities, that they supposedly cost ten times as much today as 1990?

The productivity of a person at a 1990 computer does not follow Moore's law. Crazy, I know.

So? The productivity of a person eating apples doesn't change with the price of an apple. Nor does it have to. This is irrelevant.

My car still mostly transports me between work and home -- even though it may be safer or have more features, it still should be measured by it's utility.

Surely I don't have to explain to a follower of Ludwig von Mises the serious fallacy of measuring "absolute" utility? Prices express values, and values are subjective. Your car's "utility" (to you) is expressed by what you'd trade it away for on one end, and what you'd trade away to get it back if it disappeared on the other.

Ask yourself: How many 1990 computers would someone have to trade you, to make you give up your 2012 computer? (Remembering you can trade them or sell them - so no "I only need one" explanations.) That expresses your subjective preferences, your "utility." I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trade at anything less than 50 to 1, and at that point, I'd be selling the things for scrap.

-Jester

Afterthought: Someone built a java applet to calculate inflated values, including an option to use Shadowstats' numbers! http://www.halfhill.com/inflation.html The good news is, his numbers are less crazy than the ones you're ascribing to him (477% inflation, 1990-2012, not 893% - I think you're compounding when you shouldn't be.) The bad news is, this is still completely nuts. Even using PURE GOLD as our commodity, doing the full Ayn Rand/Murray Rothbard, we've still only at 370% or so.