Everything is more expensive, except the things that quietly became almost free

I want to defend a claim that sounds insane in 2026: some of the most important prices in your life have collapsed, are still collapsing, and you have never once celebrated it.

Not “risen slower than inflation.” Collapsed. Fallen so far that the old prices read like typos. And the fact that you can't name these items off the top of your head, while you can recite the price of eggs from memory, says something fascinating about how human brains keep score.

Let's start with the most extreme deflation ever recorded in an American price index.

The television: down 98 percent, and nobody threw a parade

In 1997, Fujitsu's first 42-inch flat-screen cost around $15,000-$22,900. In 2005, a 40-inch Sony LCD was $4,000. Today a 65-inch 4K smart TV goes for under $300 at Walmart.

An analysis of 25 years of Black Friday ads found TV prices down more than 90 percent since 2000 — before even adjusting for the fact that screens quadrupled in size and resolution. The official quality-adjusted CPI index for televisions fell 98.5 percent since 1996; no other item in the entire index comes close.

Imagine the reverse headline. “TVs up 4,000 percent” would be civilizational news. The actual story got zero riots, zero congressional hearings, zero viral receipts. Deflation is the tree that falls silently in the forest.

Light: the most beautiful price chart in human history

Here's my favourite price of all time. In the 1700s, George Washington calculated that burning one good candle five hours a night for a year would cost him the equivalent of over $1,000 today.

Economist William Nordhaus reconstructed the full arc: a 60-hour week of hard labour bought about 54 minutes of quality light in the deep past; by 1990, ten years of light; today, around 52 years. In the UK's long-run data, a million lumen-hours cost about £34,000 in the 1300s (in 2000 prices) and £2.15 by 2023 — a 16,000-fold decline.

The price of banishing darkness fell by a factor of roughly 500,000. A thing once so precious that people rationed it minute by minute is now so cheap you forget to turn it off. That sentence describes the single greatest consumer bargain in history, and it has never once trended.

The collapse is still happening, right now

Lithium-ion batteries, $9,200/kWh in 1991 to $78 in 2024

-99%

Solar modules, in the 2010s alone

-90%

Televisions, quality-adjusted, since 1996

-98.5%

This isn't a museum exhibit. Solar module prices fell roughly 90 percent in the 2010s alone, turning the most expensive electricity source into the cheapest in most of the world. Clothing rose only 50 percent in nominal terms since 1980 while everything else rose 319 percent, meaning your wardrobe got dramatically cheaper in real terms without ever printing a negative number.

Even the panic staples flip when you use the right lens: an egg cost an unskilled worker about 12 minutes of labour in 1919 and 2.4 minutes today, even at post-shortage prices, and a 42-item food basket fell from 27 hours of blue-collar work in 1919 to under 4 in 2019.

Zoom out to the whole 2000-2024 basket: prices rose 87 percent, wages rose 123 percent, so the average consumption bundle got about 19 percent cheaper in work-time.

At this point, half of you want to throw your phone. Good. Stay with me, because your objection is correct too.

Why the collapses happened (and where they didn't)

The cheap things share a signature: globally traded, technologically compounding, ferociously competitive. TVs got cheap because LCD manufacturing scaled through billion-dollar fabs pumping out a million displays a day, mother-glass generations cut equipment cost per panel by 80 percent, and competition was so brutal one Corning presentation called the industry “a 25 year suicide pact for display manufacturers.”

Batteries and solar follow learning curves: every doubling of cumulative production cuts prices roughly 18 to 20 percent — thousands of small improvements compounding, no single breakthrough.

Now list what didn't collapse: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. They share the opposite signature: local, labour-intensive, supply-constrained and heavily gatekept. You can't manufacture an apartment in Shenzhen and ship it to Toronto. Regulation is part of the story — one industry estimate puts government-imposed costs at roughly 24 percent of a new US single-family home's price — though how much weight to give regulation versus land scarcity, labour costs and demand is genuinely contested territory, and anyone who tells you it's all one villain is selling a politics, not an analysis.

The honest summary: we got spectacularly good at making things cheap, and we remain terrible at making places and care cheap. Same economy, two opposite curves.

So the optimist is right that your ancestors would weep at your abundance: 52 years of light for a week's wages, a supercomputer in your pocket, strawberries in January. And the doomer is right that the entry tickets to a stable adult life have inflated beyond an ordinary wage.

Neither is lying. They're describing the two halves of the same weird economy, and the argument between them — the one currently detonating in every family group chat — is really an argument about which half you're forced to buy more of.

The bargains are invisible until you look

One last thought. Every price collapse in this article happened in slow motion, one or two percent per quarter, and slow-motion miracles are invisible by design. Nobody's brain flags “slightly cheaper than the anchor” as news; it just quietly re-anchors and forgets.

Which means the only way to actually see the moving prices around you, up and down, is to check your instincts against reality on purpose.