Back in the day, with two flatmates, we bought a VCR for about $1000.

It was a remote control albeit this was connected by a cord to the machine – luxury
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAtSw3daGoo
These days, DVD players go for $50.
Cafe Hayek makes these wonderful elaborations about how ordinary people live their lives as well as the billionaire Howard Hughes did in 1965:
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Hughes could afford to talk on the phone for hours to someone hundreds or thousands of miles away. Even the poorest pays no long-distance charges even when making an overseas telephone call. There is Viber and Skype.
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Hughes could afford to equip his house with a large screen, a state-of-the-art projector, an impressive sound system, and a film library filled with thousands of movies, documentaries, and television shows, so that he had a virtual movie theatre in his home. Today, nearly everyone can buy a large-screen hi-definition television, a surround-sound speaker system, and download movies.
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Hughes could afford to staff his kitchen with chefs from Thailand, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Morocco, Lebanon, and India. Today, such restaurants are common-place.
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Hughes could easily afford to equip each member of his family with an automobile of his or her own. Today it’s not unusual for a middle-class household to have one car each for every person in that household who is at least 17 years old.
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Hughes could easily afford to holiday in a foreign country. In New Zealand, overseas travel is included in living wage calculations.
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Hughes could afford to fly to whatever distant locations he visited. Air travel is now emphatically routine even for high school students.
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Hughes hired servants to wash his dishes. Today, automatic dishwashers are the norm.
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Hughes could afford to equip his residence with an always-at-the-ready dark room so that he could take high-quality photographs and view them minutes later. People upload their photos and videos to Facebook and Instagram moments after they take them.
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