Hedonics (which I had mentioned) are an inescapable confound. We can't go back and live in 1990 with 1990s goods.

The cost of an equivalent quality of life (by our best reckoning) is measured in the various CPI. But people expecting more in life (safer products, more computing, etc) isn't exactly "inflation". And if we treat increases in quality of life as an increase of cost of living, we're really measuring something else.