Which was horribly tone deaf, but not incorrect: yes, technological improvements do free up money for food. According to the New York Times, in the 70s your average car would survive for 100k miles. Today you can buy a car that not only survives more than twice as long, but it has far fewer costs: engines using a tiny fraction of the oil, coolants that last the car's lifetime, spark plugs that last several times as long, incredible safety features...

The 2021 Chevrolet Spark costs $13,400 (and appears to come with $1000 of "bonus cash" that would bring that down to $12.4k?), gets 38 MPG highway, and has a standard rear camera and touchscreen. You can buy it today - a brand new car, of reasonable quality, from a top name American company, for $160-ish a month for a 7-year note. It is far safer than any car sold in the 70s, it accelerates faster than most cars sold in 1970, it has navigation and a backup camera standard in the base model. Its paint and coatings will last forever, its battery is sealed, and it requires nearly zero service in the beginning of its life.

Look at a budget car in 1970 - Car and Driver's recommended budget pick was the Ford Pinto, $2500 as tested. It was described as "uncomfortable" with four adults - you really should stick to two, they said. The fact that the cars were still running after the first 15,000 miles was, according to Car and Driver, "an indication of the soundness of their basic engineering." It had painful, uncomfortable bucket seats. The Pinto, and I quote, "substantially more powerful than normal store-bought economy cars", had a 0-60 time of eighteen seconds - this is a car described as "nimble and powerful" in its time. _All_ of the budget cars delivered to Car and Driver had "serious defects" straight from the factory - in the Pinto's case, the camshaft had been installed incorrectly. Ford apparently built a whole series of them that way, then lost track of which. For a budget car to not squeak while braking was apparently impossible, so instead of discussing _if_ they squeaked reviews discussed how the squeaks sounded (the Pinto was apparently not bad - the Chevy Vega was described as a "depths of hell" squeak.) According to the manufacturer, in the first 24k miles, you would need a minimum of eleven hours of shop time, best case scenario, to keep the vehicle running. People describing their normal use mentioned they added a quart of oil a week to the Pinto - ludicrous today. And I won't even get into the safety of 1970s cars - a reminder that the Ford Pinto was famous for literally exploding into flames (the controversy came eight years later, 1978 or so), but despite this its safety is considered today "comparable to other 1970s subcompact cars" (aka terrible, but not remarkably so for the time.) Despite all this, it was a popular car for the time and got good reviews in its day.

At the current low minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, you would have had to work about the same amount of hours to buy a budget car today as in 1970 - the budget cars of today being spaceships in comparison. Drive a 70s car and a 2020s car down the road and you'll quickly understand that the modern car is a paradise of comfort in comparison - noise, smoothness, how it drives, handles, vibrations, emissions, etc etc. Many Western states have top speed limits of 80 mph, where the flow of traffic is 85 or higher - your Pinto would feel terrifying and be extremely unsafe at such a speed: if you crash you die.

Of course, the same applies to many things. Improvements in phone cameras mean that for many people, the cost of a phone+camera has gotten far cheaper. Quartz watches can last a lifetime and are far more accurate than mechanical watches. Remote control toys, flashlights, batteries, lightbulbs, washing machines - all cheaper. These things add up!

Reading your other comments in the adjacent thread, I think you're not seeing the forest for the trees. Yes, a CPU that is 10% faster has little marginal utility, and it does not provide you with much (if any) dollar savings in your pocket. But at the same time, the largest single-year increase in the price of bananas in the last few decades was a few cents a pound: those few cents in your pocket don't really do much either. For increases in both the cost of living and food, you're going to have to look at the ten- or twenty-year picture. Look at the total cost of a laptop that meets your average Joe's requirements. Look at the total cost of ownership of a car. Look at the cost of lightbulbs, toothbrushes and bicycles.

So yes, he is correct: technological improvements do cancel out increases in the cost of living elsewhere! The few bucks you save by not topping up your oil can pay for more expensive bananas, the thousands you save by your car lasting longer can pay for higher rent, the hundreds you save by not needing a camera can pay for a fatter bar tab. But, at the same time, tone deaf to say that to a working class audience in Queens NY in the depths of a recession while you're bailing out the big banks.