You got a deal. Around 1989 I sold a 315MB IBM "Winchester" drive to the phone company, for a whopping $10,095 (list price at the time). It slid into a fairly clunky PS/2 Model 80, as I recall.

Where I live and work (as a CSR consultant), Indonesia, people also don't eat if they don't get a job. Among other failings, malnutrition of children under 5 years runs at around 35%. That causes stunting and is associated with poor cognitive test scores, which is in turn correlated with lower income. I don't have the data for China handy, but your solution is overly simplistic and reflects poorly on your understanding of the article and the issue.

Toronto has poor to adequate taxi service. Vancouver has NO taxi service. It is not a taxi town, everyone drives cars. Taxis, when you can get them (airport or phone in) cost real money. Public transit is perfectly fine for the young and poor. Vancouver also has the worst traffic in North America, according to Wikipedia.

I understand your point -- please don't jump up and down saying I don't get it. I disagree with it. You are correct that your money today, even in nominal terms, can arguably buy more value in manufactured goods. That may or may not be true, but it is only a small subset of what we buy. Manufacturing (both what we buy and who we employ) is a constantly decreasing share of the economy in most countries -- including some in the developing world. Services can generally be grouped into professional and unskilled, and there are more and more people looking for fewer and fewer unskilled jobs.

Others are correctly pointing out that the important criterion is what the person with the median income can buy. That excludes the education many of us older folks got, the DB pension our parents got and many other things. Medicine is probably a wash, depending on where you live and in the US your coverage.

There is, tragically, no doubt that the median earner has experienced a decline in his standard of living. Real median incomes are declining, and the cheaper cost / higher functionality of manufactured goods today is not enough to compensate.

Your post is strong evidence that at least one of us is. Since you're taking on and defaming scientists as a group, perhaps you would care to share your analysis leading to your figures of "trillions" and "5%".

Here's where we disagree. I don't believe fundamentals influence, in any way, exchange rates. What influences exchange rates is only expectations of future exchange rates. These are regularly very different from past experience. I speak from intense personal experience in Indonesia in 1999, when the rate of the local currency dropped from 2,500 to the dollar to more than 15,000 in a little more than a month.

Stock prices yes, exchange rates no -- they are solely based on subjective impressions of future trends.

I know you're joking, but there's nothing I would want more.