Posts Tagged ‘prices’
“He, indeed, who gave fewest pledges to Fortune, has yet suffered her heaviest visitations”*…
As Zachary Crockett explains, taking the kids to a baseball game, a movie, or Disneyland is a bigger financial commitment than it used to be for middle-class families… a much bigger commitment…
In the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called Golden Age of American capitalism — family outings were within the realm of affordability for most median income earners. Many blue-collar workers could afford new homes and cars and still take their kids to Disneyland.
Despite rising wages, many of those same activities are now out of reach for everyday Americans.
The Hustle analyzed the cost of three family activities in 1960 vs. 2022:
1. A baseball game
2. A movie at a theater
3. A one-day Disneyland visit
We found that these family outings have increased in cost at 2-3x the rate of inflation — and that, in order to afford them, today’s American families have to work up to 2x as many hours as they did 60 years ago…
The painful details at: “America’s favorite family outings are increasingly out of reach,” from @zzcrockett in @TheHustle.
* John Maynard Keynes
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As we rethink our plans, we might recall that it was on this date in 1951 that Disney’s Alice in Wonderland had its American premiere (in New York, two days after premiering in London). The average price of a movie ticket that year was $0.47 (or $4.53, adjusted for inflation); popcorn was 5-10 cents per bag.
“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own”*…
The “R word,” unpacked…
It’s being whispered and murmured about. The president is facing questions about it. Business leaders and investors are already bracing for it. The specter of recession is once again rearing its monstrous head.
It’s feasible that the economy could chug along without any bumps or crashes. But boom-and-bust cycles remain a seemingly inescapable feature of capitalist economies. Some countries have done well avoiding busts. Starting in 1991, Australia had a run of almost 29 years without a recession, the longest stretch of economic growth of any nation in modern history. That ended in 2020, when the pandemic led to a big contraction — and Australia (briefly) succumbed to the beast.
While Australia had zero recessions between 1991 and 2020, the United States had two, a mild one in 2001, amid the dotcom crash and the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and a catastrophic one known as the Great Recession, between 2007 and 2009. Since 1854, the first year for which we have official economic data, the United States has experienced 35 recessions.
The National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee is the official body that keeps track of recessions in the U.S. The committee has traditionally defined recessions as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”…
Recessions– what they are, what they aren’t, and how they happen: “Fear The Vibe Shift: Are We Entering A Recession?,” from Greg Rosalsky (@elliswonk) at Planet Money (@planetmoney).
And for a dive into the vibe in question, see Derek Thompson‘s (@DKThomp) examination of why many Americans believe that they’re personally doing well, even as they feel that the country and the economy are going to hell: “Everything Is Terrible, but I’m Fine.”
See also: “There are 2 very different kinds of recessions—and the U.S. is likely headed for something totally different than 2008” in @FortuneMagazine (source of the image above), and “A recession in America by 2024 looks likely– It should be mild—but fear its consequences” in @TheEconomist.
* Harry S. Truman
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As we batten the hatches, we might send carefully-considered birthday greetings to Robert Aumann; he was born on this date in 1930. An economist and mathematician, he is best known for his contributions to game theory, especially for his work on repeated games (situations in which players encounter the same situation over and over again). He developed the concept of correlated equilibrium in game theory, which is a type of equilibrium in non-cooperative games (like most of those in our economy), a more flexible version than the classical Nash equilibrium.
For these and related contributions to game theory, he shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics.
“The basic underlying problem does not entail misbehavior or incompetence but rather stems from the nature of the provision of labor-intensive services”*…
Why is it that stuff– clothing, electronics, toys– keep getting cheaper, while services– healthcare, education, child care– continue to rise on price?
Agatha Christie’s autobiography, published posthumously in 1977, provides a fascinating window into the economic life of middle-class Britons a century ago. The year was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and Christie’s husband Archie had just been demobilized as an officer in the British military.
The couple’s annual income was around around £700 ($50,000 in today’s dollars)—£500 ($36,000) from his salary and another £200 ($14,000) in passive income.
hey rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was £90 for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for £36 ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”
The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy.
“Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,” Christie wrote. “But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.”…
By modern standards, these numbers seem totally out of whack. An American family today with a household income of $50,000 might have one or even two cars. But they definitely wouldn’t have a live-in maid or nanny. Even if it were legal today to offer someone a job that paid $2,600 per year, nobody would take it.
The price shifts Christie observed during her lifetime continued to widen after her death…
As you can see, cars aren’t the only things that get cheaper over time. In the last 30 years, clothing, children’s toys, and televisions have all gotten steadily cheaper as well—as have lots of other products not on the chart.
It’s one of the most important economic mysteries of the modern world. While the material things in life are cheaper than ever, labor-intensive services are getting more and more expensive. Middle-class Americans today have little trouble affording a car, but they struggle to afford a spot in day care. Only the rich have nannies.
Who is to blame? Some paint the government as the villain, blaming excessive regulations and poorly targeted subsidies. They aren’t entirely wrong. But the main cause is something more fundamental—and not actually sinister at all.
Back in the 1960s, the economist William Baumol observed that it took exactly as much labor to play a string quartet in 1965 as it did in 1865—in economics jargon, violinists hadn’t gotten any more productive. Yet the wages of a professional violinist in 1965 were a lot higher than in 1865.
The basic reason for this is that workers in other industries were getting more productive, and that gave musicians bargaining power. If an orchestra didn’t pay musicians in line with economy-wide norms, it would constantly lose talent as its musicians decided to become plumbers or accountants instead. So over time, the incomes of professional musicians have risen.
Today economists call this phenomenon “Baumol’s cost disease,” and they see it as one of the most important forces driving the price trends in my chart above. I think it’s unfortunate that this bit of economics jargon is framed in negative terms. From my perspective as a parent, it might be a bummer that child care costs are rising. But my daughter’s nanny probably doesn’t see it that way—the Baumol effect means her income goes up…
A thoughtful consideration of a counterintuitive phenomenon: “Why Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car,” from Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) in Full Stack Economics (@fullstackecon).
From Baumol himself…
Briefly, the book’s central arguments are these:
1. Rapid productivity growth in the modern economy has led to cost trends that divide its output into two sectors, which I call “the stagnant sector” and “the progressive sector.” In this book, productivity growth is defined as a labor-saving change in a production process so that the output supplied by an hour of labor increases, presumably significantly (Chapter 2).
2. Over time, the goods and services supplied by the stagnant sector will grow increasingly unaffordable relative to those supplied by the progressive sector. The rapidly increasing cost of a hospital stay and rising college tuition fees are prime examples of persistently rising costs in two key stagnant-sector services, health care and education (Chapters 2 and 3).
3. Despite their ever increasing costs, stagnant-sector services will never become unaffordable to society. This is because the economy’s constantly growing productivity simultaneously increases the community’s overall purchasing power and makes for ever improving overall living standards (Chapter 4).
4. The other side of the coin is the increasing affordability and the declining relative costs of the products of the progressive sector, including some products we may wish were less affordable and therefore less prevalent, such as weapons of all kinds, automobiles, and other mass-manufactured products that contribute to environmental pollution (Chapter 5).
5. The declining affordability of stagnant-sector products makes them politically contentious and a source of disquiet for average citizens. But paradoxically, it is the developments in the progressive sector that pose the greater threat to the general welfare by stimulating such threatening problems as terrorism and climate change. This book will argue that some of the gravest threats to humanity’s future stem from the falling costs of these products, rather than from the rising costs of services like health care and education (Chapter 5).
The central purpose of this book is to explain why the costs of some labor-intensive services—notably health care and education—increase at persistently above-average rates. As long as productivity continues to increase, these cost increases will persist. But even more important, as the economist Joan Robinson rightly pointed out so many years ago, as productivity grows, so too will our ability to pay for all of these ever more expensive services.
William J. Baumol, from the Introduction to The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t
* William J. Baumol
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As we interrogate inflation, we might recall that it was in this date in 1933 that United Artists released the animated short “Three Little Pigs,” part of the Silly Symphonies series produced by Walt Disney (though some film historians give the date as May 25). A hit, it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. In 1994 a poll of 1,000 animators voted it #11 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time.
Its song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” written by Frank Churchill, was a huge hit and was often used as an anthem during the Great Depression.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”*…
… and the interest rate on that loan is rising.
There’s much discussion of what’s causing the sudden-feeling spike in prices that we’re experiencing: pandemic disruptions, nativist and protectionist policies, the over-taxing of over-optimized supply chains, and others. But Robinson Meyer argues that there’s another issue, an underlying cause, that’s not getting the attention it deserves… one that will likely be even harder to address…
Over the past year, U.S. consumer prices have risen 7 percent, their fastest rate in nearly four decades, frustrating households and tanking President Joe Biden’s approval rating. And no wonder. High inflation corrodes the basic machinery of the economy, unsettling consumers, troubling companies, and preventing everyone from making sturdy plans for the future…
For years, scientists and economists have warned that climate change could cause massive shortages of major commodities, such as wine, chocolate, and cereals. Financial regulators have cautioned against a “disorderly transition,” in which the world commits only haphazardly to leaving fossil fuels, so it does not invest enough in their zero-carbon replacements. In an economy as prosperous and powerful as America’s, those problems are likely to show up—at least at first—not as empty grocery shelves or bankrupt gas stations but as price increases.
That phenomenon, long hypothesized, may be starting to actually arrive. Over the past year, unprecedented weather disasters have caused the price of key commodities to spike, and a volatile oil-and-gas market has allowed Russia and Saudi Arabia to exert geopolitical force.
“This climate-change risk to the supply chain—it’s actually real. It is happening now,” Mohamed Kande, the U.S. and global advisory leader at the accounting firm PwC, told me.
…
How to respond to these problems? The U.S. government has one tool to slow down the great chase of inflation: Leash up its dollars. By raising the rate at which the federal government lends money to banks, the Federal Reserve makes it more expensive for businesses or consumers to take out loans themselves. This brings demand in the economy more in line with supply. It is like the king in our thought experiment deciding to buy back some of his gold coins.
But wait—is it always appropriate to focus on dollars? What if the problem was caused by too few goods? Worse, what if the economy lost the ability to produce goods over time, throwing off the dollars-to-goods ratio? Then what was once an adequate number of dollars will, through no fault of its own, become too many...
… if the climate scars on supply continue to grow, does the Federal Reserve have the right tools to manage? Stinson Dean, the lumber trader, is doubtful. “Raising interest rates will blunt demand for housing—no doubt. But if you blunt demand enough to bring lumber prices down, you’re destroying the economy,” Dean told me. “For us to have lower lumber prices, we can only build a million homes a year. Do you really want to do that?
“Raising rates,” he said, “doesn’t grow more trees.” Nor does it grow more coffee, end a drought, or bring certainty to the energy transition. And if our new era of climate-driven inflation takes hold, America will need more than higher interest rates to bring balance to supply and demand.
A provocative look at the tangled roots of our inflation, suggesting that “The World Isn’t Ready for Climate-Change-Driven Inflation,” from @yayitsrob in @TheAtlantic. Eminently worth reading in full. Via @sentiers.
* Native American proverb
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As we dig deeper, we might send carefully calculated birthday greetings to Frank Plumpton Ramsey; he was born on this date in 1903. A philosopher, mathematician, and economist, he made major contributions to all three fields before his death (at the age of 26) on this date in 1930.
While he is probably best remembered as a mathematician and logician and as Wittgenstein’s friend and translator, he wrote three paper in economics: on subjective probability and utility (a response to Keynes, 1926), on optimal taxation (1927, described by Joseph E. Stiglitz as “a landmark in the economics of public finance”), and optimal economic growth (1928; hailed by Keynes as “”one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made”). The economist Paul Samuelson described them in 1970 as “three great legacies – legacies that were for the most part mere by-products of his major interest in the foundations of mathematics and knowledge.”
For more on Ramsey and his thought, see “One of the Great Intellects of His Time,” “The Man Who Thought Too Fast,” and Ramsey’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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