Inflation dominates public attention, but in many technological domains the more powerful force is deflation — the steady collapse of the “real cost” of producing certain goods and services.

This chapter examines what happens when deflationary technological progress collides with financial and institutional structures built on assumptions of steady price growth. The result can be deeply counterintuitive: increasing productive abundance paired with persistent affordability crises.

Leveraging Jeff Booth’s primary argument in The Price of Tomorrow, this chapter suggests that we may be mismanaging deflation’s systemic effects. When cost curves fall but access remains constrained, the benefits of technological progress can (and does) become unevenly distributed.

Understanding where deflation is quietly reshaping economic reality may be one of the keys to interpreting the strange contradictions of the modern economy.