It is all funny money. The cost of living has risen much, much more than the government will acknowledge. A real CPI adjustment based on NECESSITIES would go a long way toward explaining how high the stock market looks. If you look at the price of gold from fifty or sixty years ago compared to today it makes the official inflation statistics look absurd. In 1950 if you sold fifteen hundred dollars worth of stock you could buy a new Ford sedan and have money left to take your wife out for fine dining and buy her some jewelry. Now you could maybe buy four good tires, take her to Burger King and buy her a pair of cubic zirconium earrings. Fifteen hundred would have rented a decent house in Carolina for three or four years back then, now it would get you maybe two months at best.
Be fair, today there are a lot more necessities than there were back in 1950.....In many places then, you still didn't even necessarily need a car. And the average square footage of a house was probably half of what it is today. Good luck though finding such a sized house today.