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Old Posted May 9, 2012, 11:39 AM
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Spocket Spocket is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Edmonton
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Okay , I have no doubt that these averages are about right . What I want to know is WHY ? Why have all of these things increased in cost in spite of the inflation rate ?
Bigger houses ? More costly materials ? Plain old demand ? I could see a correlation between some of these things and the average price of a house but it still doesn't seem to account for such a large differential . Of course , I have no real knowledge concerning what goes into a house these days .

As I recall 1984 , things were doing pretty well . There was plenty of demand for housing and we saw some pretty large (relative) construction starts across the country . As for technology ... well , okay , new insulation types and windows along the same lines ... that doesn't cost hundreds of thousands . What am I missing ?

Larger houses ? That's certainly a possibility I guess but as an indicator of market demand , we can't lay the blame for that on anybody but ourselves . Lot sizes have probably shrunk overall , at least in the cities .

Then we get to things like tuition . That one has always perplexed me . While the value of a university education has been cheapened dramatically in the sense that people can take all kinds of useless courses that will never get them the job they really want , we all know that you still have to produce that piece of paper to get virtually any job no matter how unrelated it is to what you studied . Even if the paper says you took four years to learn something you probably could have picked up in a couple of months for a couple grand if it were offered at a community college , that's not the students' fault .

Unless you're majoring in the hard sciences , one gets the impression that %90 of B.A.s are interchangeable . Why we have to pay more for them every year is , again something of a function of market demand . Or we're simply paying for an ever-expanding university bureaucracy of B.A. holders .
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