Summary: Our new American Abundance Index measures living standards by asking one question: How long do you have to work to buy what you used to buy? Time prices offer a clearer view of American abundance than wages or dollar prices alone. Using standard government data, the index shows that despite recent inflation concerns, time prices have generally fallen and abundance has risen over the long term for the average worker.

Americans are told, daily, that they are getting poorer. The left points to “record” prices and concludes that capitalism has failed. The right points to the same prices and concludes that America is in irreversible decline. Both sides lean on a familiar statistical trick: they talk about prices or pay in isolation, then invite readers to fill in the rest with anxiety.

There is a simpler and truer way to judge living standards. Ask one question: How long do you have to work to buy what you used to buy?

That is the idea behind the new American Abundance Index, a tool that translates economic health into units normal people understand: hours of work. It uses standard government statistics, comparing inflation (the Consumer Price Index) with hourly earnings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The output is not a partisan narrative. It is a measure of purchasing power that speaks plain English.

The index tracks two measures. Time Price represents how many work-hours are needed to purchase the standard CPI basket of goods and services. Abundance is the inverse. It represents how much of that basket one hour of work can buy.

When time prices fall, abundance rises. When time prices rise, abundance falls.

The American Abundance Index starts in March 2006, when the relevant earnings series become available, and updates monthly following BLS releases. It reports month-over-month, year-over-year, five-year, ten-year, and since-start changes so readers can separate short-term noise from long-term reality.

That distinction matters because the loudest arguments about living standards are usually built on selective time windows.

Recent numbers illustrate the point. For the average private-sector worker, December 2025 saw a tiny monthly decline in CPI and a larger rise in average hourly earnings. The result was a decline in time prices and a rise in abundance for that month. Over the year from December 2024 to December 2025, CPI rose 2.68 percent while hourly earnings rose 3.76 percent. Time prices fell 1.04 percent, and abundance rose 1.05 percent.

Zoom out further. Since March 2006, time prices for the BLS basket have fallen 12.16 percent and abundance has risen 13.84 percent. The index translates those findings into an intuitive claim: over that period, the average private-sector worker gained the equivalent of roughly 1.1 extra hours of purchasing power for every eight hours worked.

The product is not just one headline series. It includes separate views for all private-sector workers and for blue-collar workers. It also includes “upskilling” scenarios that reflect a basic fact of labor markets that both ideological camps often ignore: people do not stay in the same job, at the same wage, for decades. Many workers move from entry-level roles into higher-paying roles as they gain skills. A living-standards tool should help readers see what that typical path implies for purchasing power over time, rather than freezing workers in place for rhetorical effect.

So how does this fit into today’s abundance argument, and the misuse of statistics by left and right?

The left’s favorite move is to spotlight prices, preferably the most salient and emotionally charged ones, then treat the price level as the full story. But prices are only half the equation. Wages and work-hours are the other half. If pay rises faster than prices, the public is not “getting poorer” in any meaningful aggregate sense, even if the public is angry, and even if some groups are falling behind.

The right’s favorite move is different but no less misleading. It treats every inflation episode, every housing squeeze, and every bout of consumer pessimism as proof of national decline. It cherry-picks peaks, ignores recoveries, and sometimes talks as if today’s worker has no mobility and no capacity to adapt. That is how you turn real problems into a permanent story of collapse.

The American Abundance Index does not settle policy debates. It disciplines them. It forces advocates to answer the question that matters to households: How many minutes of my life does this cost, and how has that changed? If your preferred policy raises time prices, you are making people poorer, whatever your rhetoric. If it lowers time prices, you are making people richer, even if it offends someone’s ideology.

The index is also candid about limits. It focuses on averages, may not capture individual experiences, and is most meaningful over longer periods than a single month. That is not a weakness. It is a reminder that serious measurement should separate broad trends from personal hardship, and that anecdotes are not statistics.

If journalists and politicians want fewer mirages and more reality, they should start here: stop counting dollars. Start counting hours.

Summary: A century ago, people used large ice blocks and wooden cabinets to keep food cold. Today, electric refrigeration is more affordable, easy, and reliable thanks to technological innovation. The shift from ice blocks to electrons shows how human ingenuity can transform necessities from costly burdens into everyday conveniences.

In 1925, households kept food cool with iceboxes—wooden insulated cabinets chilled by a block of ice. Depending on size and quality, they typically cost between $15 and $50. With entry-level workers earning about $0.25 an hour, a $35 icebox carried a time price of 140 hours.

Today, a 4.4-cubic-foot mini fridge at Walmart sells for about $184. Entry-level workers in limited-service restaurants earn roughly $18.75 an hour, bringing the time price down to just 9.8 hours.

For the time it took a worker in 1925 to earn the money for one icebox, a worker today can buy 14.3 mini fridges.

The 1925 icebox didn’t actually come with any ice. The price of a 100-pound block of ice in 1925 was typically $0.25, and that could double during “ice famines” caused by mild winters. At $0.25 an hour, a 100-pound block of ice would cost one hour and would generally last for three to seven days. If the ice block lasted five days that would be a time price of 12 minutes a day.

The Walmart mini fridge requires 269 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, or 0.74 kWh per day. Residential electricity runs around $0.12 per kWh, so a year’s supply of electricity for cooling will cost $32.28, or 1.72 hours for entry-level workers. Spread out over the year, it would require 17 seconds a day.

For the time it took a worker in 1925 to earn the money to buy ice cooling for a day, workers today get 43 days of electric cooling.

Electric refrigerators entered American homes in 1927 when General Electric introduced the iconic “Monitor Top,” named for its resemblance to the USS Monitor, a Civil War ironclad warship. The unit sold for $525. With entry-level workers earning $0.25 an hour, the time price came to an extraordinary 2,100 hours. Today, the Walmart mini fridge costs 9.8 hours of work. The time price has fallen 99.53 percent. For the time it took a worker in 1927 to earn enough money for one electric refrigerator, a worker today can buy 214 mini fridges—a stunning increase of 21,300 percent in refrigeration abundance, compounding at 5.62 percent a year.

The US population has tripled from 116 million in 1925 to 348 million today. For every 1 percent increase in population, personal refrigerator abundance has increased 106 percent (21,300% ÷ 200% = 106%).

Summary: Chocolate and roses began as rare, prestigious goods, but industrialization and global trade have made them far more affordable, freeing up more time for what matters most.

Long before heart-shaped boxes lined supermarket aisles, cacao was consumed as a bitter ceremonial drink in Mesoamerica and valued enough to function as a medium of exchange. Among the Aztecs, cacao beans could be traded for everyday goods, and the beverage prepared from them was associated with wealth and status. Chocolate entered Europe in the 16th century as a rare and expensive commodity, with high prices of sugar and spices helping to keep the elaborately prepared drink from the hands of ordinary people. Only with the rise of industrial processing, global trade, and mass production in the 19th and early 20th centuries did chocolate steadily migrate from royal courts to average shop counters, becoming a common indulgence for many children and sweet-toothed adults.

Despite that, there is a prevailing sentiment that everyday luxuries like chocolate are becoming unaffordable, and two-thirds of Americans remain “very concerned” about the rising cost of food and consumer goods, according to the Pew Research Center. This is especially the case for holiday spending, with 2 in 5 Americans reporting Valentine’s Day activities being unaffordable in 2026.

But sticker prices are often misleading. A better way to judge affordability—the method economists increasingly favor—is to ask how long someone has to work to buy something. When prices rise, but wages rise faster, the functional price of a commodity goes down, because more can be bought with the same amount of work, or the same can be bought with less work.

Seen through the lens of time prices, Valentine’s chocolate tells a surprisingly hopeful story.

In 1929, around the time See’s Candies was establishing its reputation, a pound of quality chocolate cost about 80 cents. That same year, the average wage in the U.S. was 56 cents per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A box of chocolate for that special someone would have cost nearly an hour and a half of work.

Today, a one-pound box of See’s assorted chocolates sells for $33.00, just a fraction more than today’s median blue-collar hourly wages of $31.95 per hour. In other words, the time price for that box of indulgence has fallen by 24 minutes over the last century, making the same romantic gesture 28 percent more affordable.

The same applies to the classic bouquet of roses. Today, Trader Joe’s sells a dozen roses for $10.99, or a time price of a mere 20 minutes for the average U.S. worker. That price would have been considered a bargain even 40 years ago, when the same median hourly wage was $9.00 per hour. The time price of roses has fallen by 71 percent in just four decades.

Moreover, before modern greenhouses and supply chains, roses were not even reliably available in February across much of the world. Like the endless supermarket shelves stocked year-round with once-seasonal tropical fruit, technological progress and globalization have made romantic gestures possible in the depths of winter.

Romance has not become a luxury good. If anything, the opposite is true. The time required to buy chocolate and flowers has fallen dramatically, and we now have constant access to goods that were once rare commodities.

For those concerned about consumerism spoiling romance, advancements in time prices are still a welcome boon. When people don’t have to work as long to meet their basic needs, hours free up for physical closeness, quality time, and immaterial romantic gestures. Love, it turns out, is more accessible than ever.

We are excited to share a new tool we’ve been building at Human Progress: The American Abundance Index—an interactive dashboard that tracks US living standards while adjusting for both inflation and rising incomes.

The idea is straightforward: how many hours do you need to work to afford the same basket of goods and services? Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the American Abundance Index converts price and wage growth into “time prices”—the amount of work time required to buy the Consumer Price Index (CPI) basket of goods and services—and “abundance,” which is the inverse: how much of that basket one hour of work can buy. When time prices fall, abundance rises, and each hour of work goes further. That’s the measure of affordability that actually matters.

Conceptually, this work builds off of Superabundance, a book by our editor, Marian Tupy, and his coauthor and Human Progress board member, Gale Pooley. Their core argument—that abundance is best measured in time—forms the foundation of the project. The index itself was built by our Quantitative Research Associate, Jackson Vann.

Users can select multiple worker categories, compare short- and long-run trends, and even see wage growth modeled to reflect real career progression rather than freezing workers in place. All the calculations are transparent and replicable, with the full dataset and code available on GitHub.

So what does the index actually say about American standards of living?

Over the past 12 months, inflation rose 2.68 percent while hourly earnings for the average private-sector worker grew 3.76 percent. As a result, the CPI basket became 1.05 percent more abundant. Since 2006, it has become nearly 14 percent more abundant—roughly equivalent to adding an hour of purchasing power to the average workday.