931–940 of 1001 posts
I hear the inflation numbers and I'm always like "are they living in the same world as me?" Pre-COVID I used to able to run and get lunch for under $5. Now I'm lucky to spend less than $15.
Is that in the UK? I live in NY and I feel like inflation is something happening to other people. I guess I don't watch prices very closely, but things seems just as annoyingly expensive as they did 3-4 years ago without any really noticeable difference.
There's a lot of arguments about the mechanisms of inflation, and its various symptoms, but surely the root cause of inflation is elevated energy prices? I mean energy underpins the price of everything else in an economy, especially production and transportation, which in turn affects the price of groceries. I guess as far as groceries go there's also a significant labor component, but still, it must surely be the co…
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> I’ve seen £5 for a tube of normal toothpaste and £6 for a tiny Pizza that is sometimes available for £3. How people on modest salaries survive I don’t know. I took up cooking from scratch as a hobby a couple of decades ago. I highly recommend it. After a bit of a learning curve, it's cheaper, tastier. and better for you than highly processed foodlike substances.
I have learnt to unpack a few things here. Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper. But food is also a class issue. Those with time to spare (ie rich) can indulge in for example "stuffing a mushroom" - Shirley Conran famously recanted twenty years of writing cookery lifestyle books exhorting women to become corden bleu cooks by saying life was to short to stuff a mushroom - and t…
> But food is also a class issue.
If we put these two beliefs together (and I think we're of similar minds), I think we should amend the first to be "meal planning and preparation is a life skill". Unfortunately the cooking craze over the past few decades has done nothing to improve, let alone restore, that life skill.
> I mean Gordon bloody Ramsey does not prepare food the way he tells you to in his cookbooks - it's too slow and inefficient.
Here I disagree. Someone like Gordon Ramsey possesses incredible knife and other preparatory and cooking skills. To use an analogy, he may not run a sub 4 minute mile every time he goes for a run, but even his leisurely runs would exhibit abilities that would seem extraordinary yet appear effortless on his part to most people.
That said, as a successful restaurateur Ramsey likely has meal planning skills at least as impeccable as his culinary skills. And meal planning is the most critical aspect to successful, economical home cooking. People seem to think the reason for failure is difficulty in preparation and cooking, thus the popularity of slow cookers, instant pots, etc. But such gadgets address the wrong set of problems. (The emphasis on recipes is misplaced for similar reasons.)
FWIW, I have horrible meal planning skills. Developing a good sense for how to mix and match ingredients is one important aspect; among other reasons, so you can reuse ingredients across multiple meals in a week. Relatedly, learning specific styles of cuisines and their rules also helps--French, Spanish, and Italian cooking all commonly use what in Spanish-influenced cuisine is called a sofrito. But there are many other dimensions to meal planning.
On that note, anyone know of good meal planning books or resources?
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Gives anybody with elementary knowledge of econ a heart attack. How far up the supply chain do you want to go with these price controls to try and avoid the inevitable shortages and black markets? Labor price controls? Would that be effective? > "It happens when someone decides to raise the prices" What would drive someone to raise the price of something with the confidence it will still sell at that price? Rising de…
> Gives anybody with elementary knowledge of econ a heart attack
Plainly, this isn't true. This opinion is not uncommon amongst so-called "Marxist economists" such as Richard Wolff. You can disagree that price controls and rationing would be the best way to solve the problem, but it is outright ignorant and needlessly insulting to make this claim.
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Because all of europe is in the same or worse place? No matter how much remainers want to blame brexit for everything, it isnt’t always the case. Central europe is around or a few points less than the um while easter and western europe are higher https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11zwtif/annual_infl...
That's ok, but UK literally ran out of tomatoes, eggs and many other items
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So, do you feel that the focus of the central banks to keep interest rates low and inflation low is to protect the lower class? I would submit that what the central banks want is to benefit the main asset holders who suffer the most from erosion by inflation.
Asset holders do not suffer the most from erosion by inflation; asset holders benefit from inflation (which is a devaluation of the currency) because the price of their assets increases. It is those whose wealth is mostly in cash that suffer the most. Keeping interest rates low keeps inflation high. Raising interest rates reduces inflation but also hurts asset prices and can potentially bankrupt some heavily indebted…
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I think the basis for this feeling is that people keep moving here. We feel it when traffic gets worse, etc... Not really sure IF there's a real solution. The more people there are, the worse things get in small spaces. We have an entire country that is mostly empty.
California is mostly empty too. It's larger than Japan and has almost 3x fewer people.
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Why not? Surely if you can get away with price gouging, then you would want to price gouge on more stuff, right? Of course, there are diminishing returns here, because as you produce more stuff, you might be able to gouge less and less. But certainly there must be some max-profit equilibrium higher than the current price, if you are already able to gouge. Price gouging usually leads to producing more stuff, if it goe…
In many countries there is a tendency in healthcare to perform a lot of medically unnecessary or even harmful surgeries (back, hips,...) to make a larger profit. The optimal treatment would be cheaper and less profitable, so it is not chosen.
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> Debtors over savers. This is well documented in econ textbooks - inflation is a transfer of wealth from savers to debtors, because debtors can pay back their debts with less valuable money. Wouldn't this be true when interest rates are fixed only? People with variable rates will suffer as interest rates tend to spike during inflation and drive bankruptcy. Also given wages lag inflation, the debt cost proceeds the p…
The debt effect is true for the term that the interest rate is fixed for. So for a 30-year fixed mortgage, you lock in expected inflation based on the interest rate when you take out the mortgage, and if inflation happens to run above that, you profit. For a 7/1 ARM, you lock it in for 7 years, then the principal will have inflated away by some percentage, and then you're at the mercy of current inflation expectation…
Also regarding job hopping, that may be true but taking a macro view of the world, most people don't or can't job hop that often, so I feel this is more the exception that the rule.
Generally I'm not convinced debt is a good thing during inflation as a broad rule. I feel it's more there are good exceptions if the right conditions align but this is not true to the average.