“Starting this year, Kia has narrowed its vehicle price gap with Chinese models in Europe to 15-20% from 20-25% previously depending on markets, Song said, according to ​a recording of the event obtained by Reuters.

The move highlights how Europe has become a key battleground between legacy ​automakers and Chinese electric vehicle firms such as BYD, as they pursue rapid overseas expansion amid ⁠flagging sales in China and effective exclusion from the U.S. market.”

From Reuters.

Summary: Paper has become dramatically more affordable over the last two centuries. Abundance comes not primarily from conservation or recycling but from improved knowledge and technology. The increasing efficiency of turning plentiful trees into paper is a good example of that.

In 1826, a ream of 500 sheets of paper cost about $5.00. With average wages near five cents an hour, the time price was 100 hours. Paper was precious because modern papermaking techniques had yet to be invented—we had yet to discover the knowledge needed to innovate the product.

Today, a ream of 500 much higher-quality sheets sells for $7.99 at Staples. With average wages around $36.86 an hour, the time price is just 13 minutes.

The time price of paper has fallen by 99.78 percent over the last 200 years. For the time required to earn the money for a single sheet in 1826, a worker today can obtain 461 sheets. Scarcity didn’t disappear because we conserved paper, but because we learned how to transform abundant trees into even more abundant paper.

What About Recycled Paper?

Many people assume that recycling paper saves resources. If that were true, why is recycled paper about 85 percent more expensive than virgin paper? The answer is that the United States has roughly 300 billion trees, while recycling itself consumes substantial energy, labor, and capital.

A useful question whenever someone warns that we’re “running out” of something is simple: If it’s so scarce, why is it so cheap?

Remember, abundance doesn’t come from good intentions; it comes from innovation. Over two thousand years, paper has migrated from papyrus to cotton and linen rags to wood pulp—each transition a triumph of human ingenuity over scarcity. What we consume is not trees or fibers, but knowledge encoded in matter. And the more we consume, the more we discover. That is why paper is plentiful, pencils are cheap, and light is abundant. Wealth is learning made visible, and abundance is the dividend of ideas.

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

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: We introduce the American Abundance Index, which measures living standards by how many hours Americans must work to afford a standard basket of goods, rather than by prices or wages alone. The index uses time prices to show that for most US workers, purchasing power has generally risen over the last two decades, even amid inflation and public pessimism.

The resilience of the American worker is one of the most underreported stories of the 2020s. From red tape to import taxes, successive governments have erected barriers to success. Yet America’s workers have persevered and figured out ways to prosper.

A new American Abundance Index illustrates this. The project from Human Progress, an arm of the Cato Institute, reveals the steady rise of the average worker’s purchasing power. The premise of the index is simple: how many hours do you need to work, compared to the month or year before, to be able to afford the “basket of goods,” which is a standard set of household items and services that comprise the Consumer Price Index used to calculate inflation.

The “time price” is how many hours of work it takes to purchase the basket of goods. The “abundance” is how much of the basket one hour of work can buy. The story told by the index is a very good one: since recordkeeping began, “abundance” for average private sector workers comes out to a net increase of 13.8 percent.

It increased the past year, too. The index shows the average private sector worker saw prices rise by 2.7 percent from December 2024 to December 2025, while their hourly wages grew by 3.8 percent. This means workers could work 1 percent less to buy the same basket of goods. Put differently, workers could afford 1 percent more stuff.

The reason for this is that earnings have continued to outpace inflation. So long as wages increase faster than inflation, the worker gets ahead. And it’s not just desk jobs that have enabled workers to purchase the same amount of goods and services for fewer hours worked. The gain for traditional “blue collar workers” is even higher: a historical net increase of 18.4 percent since 2006.

Despite workers significantly increasing their purchasing power over the past two decades, the past five years have taken a toll. The self-inflicted pain of printing vast sums of money during the pandemic sent the annualized inflation rate to over 9 percent in 2022, far outstripping raises. While inflation is now mostly under control, it has taken time for the gap between wages and inflation to settle, and workers are only now just catching up after their losses during those inflation-heavy years.

Americans continue to rank affordability as a top concern and do not believe the government is doing enough to address the cost of living. These frustrations are understandable. Prices are still rising while tariffs and uncertainty strangle businesses and push consumer confidence to a 12-year low. America’s growth and prosperity story has always been one of fits and starts, and workers are right to demand that government gets out of their way. But the new data make clear that 21st century Americans can still be content about how far they’ve come and optimistic about how far they’ve yet to go.

This article was originally published in the Washington Post on 2/6/2026.