From what little I know it's long been a standard argument in Economics that the price of commodities goes down over time due to technological improvement (mostly). As for general produced physical goods, the change that happened between say 1980 and 2005 is basically "China", which means those of you under say 35 -40 years old cannot imagine how different the west was in terms of physical goods prices before that change. But.. maybe it was just an acceleration of the same basic thing. And services cannot be outsourced/globalized as completely as physical goods manufacture can.