“In the summer of 2024, a passage from J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy gained widespread attention on social media platforms, including X/​Twitter. Vance described his refrigerator from the 1980s, asserting that it preserved lettuce for weeks beyond the capabilities of contemporary models.

This was not just an offhanded comment by Vance, as he also said his takeaway from this anecdote is that ‘economics is fake.’ By ‘fake,’ he means that ‘we became less good at manufacturing in this country, too focused on low cost and not on durability.’ While Vance’s comment was in the context of antitrust policy and consumer choice, we can also interpret this within Vance and Trump’s broader policy agenda, which views international trade as, in many cases, a net harm to the US—including, in this case, for consumers (not just the alleged loss of manufacturing jobs). 

As we shall see, major appliances such as refrigerators have gotten both bigger and cheaper, though Vance would claim they are inferior in some other way (not preserving food as long).”

From Cato Institute.

Summary: Thanksgiving has never been more affordable. Though nominal prices have risen over the decades, nominal wages have risen much faster, meaning today’s workers spend far less time earning their holiday meal than previous generations did. Thanks to innovation, productivity, and economic freedom, abundance has grown even as the population has increased.

Since 1986, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) has conducted an annual price survey of food items found in a typical Thanksgiving Day dinner. The items on this shopping list are intended to feed a group of 10 people, with plenty of leftovers. The list includes a turkey, a pumpkin pie mix, milk, a vegetable tray, bread rolls, pie shells, green peas, fresh cranberries, whipping cream, cubed stuffing, sweet potatoes, and several miscellaneous ingredients.

What has happened to the price of a Thanksgiving Day dinner over the past 39 years? The AFBF reports that in nominal terms, the price rose 92 percent, from $28.74 in 1986 to $55.18 in 2025. However, since we buy things with money but pay for them with time, we should analyze the cost of a Thanksgiving Day dinner using “time prices.” To calculate the time price, we divide the nominal price of the meal by the nominal hourly wage rate. That gives us the number of work hours required to earn enough money to feed 10 guests.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the blue-collar hourly wage rate has increased 251.2 percent, from $8.92 per hour in 1986 to $31.33 per hour in 2025. Remarkably, hourly wages for entry-level workers have increased even faster—from $4.72 to $18.75 per hour, or 297.2 percent.

Remember that when wages increase faster than prices, time prices decrease. As the figure below shows, the blue-collar time price of a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people has dropped 45.3 percent, from 3.22 hours in 1986 to 1.76 hours today, the lowest time price on record. Today, an individual blue-collar worker enjoys a Thanksgiving dinner for the “time price” of 10.6 minutes compared with 19.3 minutes in 1986.

Given that the time price of a Thanksgiving dinner decreased by 45.3 percent, a blue collar worker now gets 83 percent more dinner for the same time it took him to earn the money to buy one dinner back in 1986.

Upskilling Workers

Most people don’t begin their careers as blue-collar workers and remain there for 40 years. Imagine starting as an entry-level worker in 1986 earning $4.72 per hour. If, over the past four decades, you have upskilled and advanced to the US average wage of $36.53 per hour, your nominal wages would have risen 673.9 percent. A Thanksgiving dinner for 10 that required 6.1 hours of work in 1986 now takes just 1.51 hours. The time price has fallen 75.2 percent. For the time it once took to buy a single Thanksgiving dinner, an upskilling worker can now buy 4.03 dinners. Personal abundance has risen by 303.1 percent. The table below summarizes the changes in prices and wage rates:

Population-Level Abundance

To see how food prices relate to population growth, imagine providing a Thanksgiving dinner for every person in the United States. In 1986, with a population of 240 million, feeding the nation at blue-collar wage rates would have required 77.5 million hours of work. By 2025, the population has grown 42.5 percent to 342 million—but over that same period, the time price of Thanksgiving dinners fell by 45.3 percent. As a result of those changes, feeding the entire country in 2025 would require only 60.4 million hours of blue-collar work. That’s 17.1 million fewer hours—a 22.1 percent decrease.

Malthus and Thanos would be confounded. And Paul Ehrlich? One suspects he’d rather not discuss it.

Thanksgiving is a great time to be grateful for the freedom to innovate and for all those who work so hard to transform scarcities into abundances.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

“Scientists in China have solved a 140-year-old chemistry problem in a breakthrough that could

overturn traditional production methods and slash the cost of cancer treatments and other

expensive medicinal compounds…

The researchers proposed a straightforward alternative to the expensive, complex and dangerous method used by the chemical industry for more than a century to synthesise drugs and pesticides from a class of organic compounds called amines. According to the paper, the team’s approach overcomes the many issues that have plagued the classical method, including the risk of explosions, and it holds promise for making the production of important chemicals safer and more affordable.”

From South China Morning Post.

Summary: When President Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971, it created chaos. Gas shortages, rationing, and angry customers became daily realities, teaching one young gas station attendant how disastrous top-down economic planning can be. A decade later, when markets were finally freed, supply returned and abundance followed. The lesson endures: politicians create scarcity, but entrepreneurs and free markets create plenty.

Shortly after I turned 15, President Richard M. Nixon managed to make my life miserable. On Sunday August 15, 1971, against the advice of his economic counselors, and in total repudiation of his party’s campaign platform, he announced on national TV that he was suspending the gold standard, imposing a 10 percent tariff surcharge, and imposing wage and price controls.

At the time, I didn’t know a thing about macroeconomics. What I did know was how to make customers happy at my dad’s gas station: Fill their tanks fast, wash their windows, and send them off with a smile.

Nixon’s decision not only shook the foundations of global finance—it trickled all the way down to a teenager pumping gas on Main Street, teaching me firsthand how government policy can reach into everyday life. Nixon’s policies caused a decade of artificial shortages and almost destroyed my father’s business. As Robert Bleiberg, editor of Barron’s, noted at the time, “Price controls, as their advocates have claimed all along, do work like magic. They can make things disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” For me, Nixon’s policies meant no more happy customers, which translated to no more tips.

Like many gas station owners at the time, my dad decided to attempt rationing his limited allotment of fuel by restricting sales to only five gallons per customer. After waiting in line for sometimes more than an hour, most customers were furious to be told that they could only buy five gallons of gas. They took their anger out on their lowly attendant, not on the perpetrator of the calamity living in the White House.

The president, along with the politicians and corporate leaders who cheered for price controls, never had to face the fury of my customers. They could make sweeping decisions from behind their podiums and boardroom tables without ever paying the price for being wrong. As Thomas Sowell once put it, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

Price controls tied the hands of domestic producers while leaving foreign suppliers, such as OPEC, untouched. The result was the opposite of what policymakers had intended. Instead of fueling independence, the policies throttled domestic supply and handed foreign oil giants the keys to America’s energy future.

In 1981, just eight days after taking office, President Ronald Reagan swept away the federal price and allocation controls on domestic oil and refined products. Overnight, my decade of gas-line misery came to an end. Prices did rise—but for the first time in years, people could fill their tanks without rationing, limits, or fear of empty pumps. I learned a key lesson: Politicians create scarcities, entrepreneurs create abundances.

When oil prices surged in the early 2000s, entrepreneurs and markets responded with a wave of innovation. Breakthroughs such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing unlocked vast new oil reserves, unleashing a surge of supply. America’s unique system of private ownership of subsurface mineral rights—rather than government control—supercharged this revolution by giving landowners a direct stake in production. The results were astonishing: The United States, whose oil industry was once thought to be in irreversible decline, has become a net exporter of petroleum products.

Since 1950 the average time price for a gallon of gasoline has been around six minutes for blue-collar workers. We’re actually around five minutes today. The United States has some of the lowest gasoline time prices on the planet.

Yes, we’ve had periods where the price has spiked, typically due to political turmoil, but time and again, innovation and markets have responded by creating greater abundance. Julian Simon predicted such would be the case, as long as politicians and bureaucrats don’t impose “solutions” that have counter-productive consequences.

Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974, to avoid impeachment for his crime of covering up the Watergate break-in. But to me, his darker crime wasn’t in a hotel—it was in every gas station in America. His Soviet-style controls left behind a nation of frustrated, unhappy customers and pump attendants who bore the real cost of his misguided policies.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.