Those things have significantly outpaced inflation, and inflation is an entirely fallible metric in and of itself: you can literally game it in one extreme or a

Those things have significantly outpaced inflation, and inflation is an entirely fallible metric in and of itself: you can literally game it in one extreme or another based entirely on the things that you choose to index, how you account for them changing over time, and how heavily you weight things within the index. Furthermore, with things like housing, we get major distortions of real world meaning that are completely obscured by macro trends. For example, the average housing price across the country has outpaced inflation metrics by a little, but if you narrow it to places of economic opportunity, it has drastically outpaced inflation. Any new growth in economic opportunity has been accompanied by even more severe growth in housing costs. The end result is that average housing prices appear flat-ish relative to income, but it has stayed that way due to massive emigration of economically disadvantaged people away from areas of economic opportunity. What has really happened is that America fell in love with dysfunctional markets. Free market prices, but with significant regulatory capture. We've got cartels on housing via hyper-localized land use regulation that decreases the relative supply of housing.