Comment by AnthonyMouse

> Consider the fact that median real income tends to move up [1]. This is the metric that matters.

Well, it's what matters if the CPI metric is perfect and doesn't e.g. over-weight things like food that haven't increased in cost as much as some other things.

And again, nobody is claiming that efficiency hasn't improved or that that isn't good. The issue is, if efficiency improves by 300% and then you get a 70% improvement out of it, that's bad -- people should have gotten the whole thing instead of having rent seekers capture a huge proportion of the improvement.

And for some specific subset of "efficiency improvements" the result isn't even guaranteed to be positive for the average person, so we don't need to lump them all together into an aggregate.