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.

Summary: Comparing nominal price changes to changes in average hourly wages from 2000 to 2025, we can see that many goods with rising dollar prices have become more affordable in time prices.

Professor Mark Perry from the American Enterprise Institute recently posted an updated version of his “Chart of the Century,” featuring price and wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The chart tracks 14 items over the 25-year period from January 2000 to December 2025. It also includes the overall inflation rate and changes in average hourly wages.

To examine the data from a different perspective, we calculated the change in the time prices of these 14 items relative to the change in the average hourly wage rate. We then calculated the abundance multiplier—a value indicating how many units you could buy today for the time it took to earn money to buy one unit in 2000. If there were no change, the abundance multiplier would equal one. A value below one indicates decreasing abundance, while a value above one reflects increasing abundance. We also calculated the percentage change in abundance for each item.

This analysis illustrates that things can become more expensive in dollar terms while simultaneously becoming more affordable in time prices. For instance, while the general Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 92.6 percent, average hourly wages increased by 131.1 percent. As such, time prices fell by 16.7 percent. For the time it took to earn enough money to purchase one CPI basket in January 2000, a consumer could purchase 1.2 baskets in December 2025—an abundance increase of 20 percent.

Notably, categories such as housing, food and beverages, new cars, household furnishings, and clothing all increased in money prices; however, after adjusting for rising wages, they all became more affordable in time-price terms. Although 10 of the 14 items rose in nominal prices over the 25-year period, only five had higher time prices when accounting for the 131.1 percent increase in hourly wages.

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

Summary: The bicycle, once a costly luxury, has become a symbol of how innovation transforms scarcity into abundance. What began as a marvel of mechanics in the 19th century is now affordable to nearly everyone, thanks to rising productivity and human ingenuity. Over time, free markets and technological progress have multiplied access to tools of freedom and mobility.

In 1885, John Kemp Starley invented the modern bicycle with two wheels of the same size and a rear wheel connected and driven by a chain. Interest in the new innovation exploded. By the 1890s, Europe and the United States were in the midst of a bike craze. A New York Times article from 1896 gushed that “the bicycle promises a splendid extension of personal power and freedom, scarcely inferior to what wings would give.” Long before their first flight in 1903, the Wright brothers were mastering gears, chains, and balance as talented bicycle mechanics and designers.

In 1910, you could buy a basic bicycle for $11.95 from the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. catalog. This sounds like a low price until you realize that entry-level, unskilled wages were $0.11 an hour. This means that it would have taken 108.6 hours to earn the money to buy one bicycle. Today, you can buy a basic bike at Walmart for $98, and entry-level limited food service workers wages are $18.75 per hour, indicating a time price of 5.2 hours. The time price has fallen 95.19 percent. For the time required to earn the money to buy one bicycle in 1910, you get 20.9 today. Personal bicycle abundance has increased 1,990 percent.

This astonishing increase in bicycle abundance occurred while the global population increased 369 percent, from 1.75 billion to 8.2 billion. Every 1 percent increase in population corresponded to a 5.4 percent increase in personal bicycle abundance. It’s as if all the new people brought their own bicycle as well as extra bicycles to share with everyone else.

When human beings are free to innovate, they turn scarcities into abundances.

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