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“Home Alone” Grocery Shopping, but with Time Prices

Blog Post | Cost of Material Goods

“Home Alone” Grocery Shopping, but with Time Prices

Things can become more expensive and more affordable at the same time.

Gale Pooley —

This article was originally published at Gale Winds on 12/9/2023.

In the 1990 movie Home Alone, eight-year-old Kevin McCallister went grocery shopping. He bought a half gallon of milk, a half-gallon of orange juice, a TV dinner, bread, frozen mac and cheese, laundry detergent, cling wrap, toilet paper, a pack of toy soldiers, and dryer sheets. His bill came to $19.83.

Professor Christopher Clarke at Washington State University did an analysis of the items and estimated that today’s price would be about $40.60, or 104.7 percent higher. But we know that things can become more expensive and more affordable at the same time. How is this possible?

Because wages typically increase faster than prices. In the past 33 years, unskilled hourly wages have increased by 178.3 percent from $6.03 per hour to around $16.50. This means the time price of Kevin’s basket has fallen by 25.2 percent. For the time it took to earn the money to buy the basket in 1990, you get 1.337 baskets today. Grocery abundance has increased by 33.7 percent.

If you had been upskilling from an unskilled labor job in 1990 to a blue-collar job today, your wages increased 505.8 percent from $6.03 to $36.50 an hour. Your time price fell by 66.2 percent, giving you almost three times more (195.6 percent) for your hour of work.

Don’t forget to count the kids before taking off on Christmas vacation this year, and remember, life can become more abundant every day if people are free to innovate.

MSN | Wealth & Poverty

It Turns Out despite Avocado Toast, Millennial Wealth Is Booming

“A new report from the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, looked at how wealth changed for different age cohorts from 2019 to 2023 by analyzing data from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts.

The analysis found good news for the much-beleaguered millennial generation: Their wealth grew at a historic clip.

Per CAP’s analysis, from the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, the average wealth of households under 40 grew by 49% — a $85,000 increase, to $259,000 from $174,000. The analysis said that rate of rapid wealth growth had never happened before in the data series’ history, and it came after wealth growth remained relatively stagnant for young Americans prepandemic.

Here’s the whopper: Wealth gains were even higher for just millennials, who were 23 to 38 in 2019; their wealth doubled from the end of 2019 to 2023.”

From MSN.

The Economist | Wealth & Poverty

Generation Z Is Unprecedentedly Rich

“In America hourly pay growth among 16- to 24-year-olds recently hit 13% year on year, compared with 6% for workers aged 25 to 54. This was the highest ‘young person premium’ since reliable data began (see chart 3). In Britain, where youth pay is measured differently, the average hourly pay of people aged 18-21 rose by an astonishing 15% last year, outstripping pay rises among other age groups by an unusually wide margin. In New Zealand the average hourly pay of people aged 20-24 increased by 10%, compared with an average of 6%.

Strong wage growth boosts family incomes. A new paper by Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and Jeff Larrimore of the Federal Reserve assesses Americans’ household income by generation, after accounting for taxes, government transfers and inflation. Millennials were somewhat better off than Gen X—those born between 1965 and 1980—when they were the same age. Zoomers, however, are much better off than millennials were at the same age. The typical 25-year-old Gen Z-er has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above baby-boomers at the same age.”

From The Economist.

BusinessMirror | Poverty Rates

PHL Could Hit Single-Digit Poverty Years Ahead of Schedule

“Better labor market conditions and slower inflation in the country could turn the administration’s single-digit poverty incidence aspirations into a reality two years ahead of schedule.

This was according to the latest Macro Poverty Outlook for the Philippines, released by the World Bank on Monday. It estimated that poverty incidence in the country could decrease to 9.3 percent in 2026 from 12.2 percent this year and 17.8 percent in 2021.”

From BusinessMirror.