Nineteenth Century Inequality Not As Bad As We Think
A proper interpretation of consumption data shows that the 1800s fostered an egalitarian shift in wealth distribution.
Joakim Book —
When prices change, how that impacts people depends crucially on which prices increase and what goods and services people are consuming. Across the western world, price inflation–the rate at which prices increase–has been relatively slow for over a decade. Central bankers have consistently undershot their inflation targets despite their careful implentation of complex monetary policy.
The supposed dearth of inflation might seem like small comfort–or a cruel joke–to the Californian hipster paying $15 for a smoothie bowl, the German renter whose rents are increasing at a stunning rate or the London young professional shoveling out £5 for an unimpressive lunch sandwich. The larger the diversity in consumption patterns, the less appropriate it is to aggregate price changes into a general price index such as CPI or PCE statistics.
One reason for the dissonance between official figures and real-world experience is the weight that statisticians place on various items when constructing a consumer price index (e.g. the Bank of England’s CPI; the ECB’s HICP; the Fed’s PCE). For instance, in the price index used by the European Central Bank, housing costs make up only 17% of the index, whereas the Federal Reserve places a 24% weight on housing expenses. That divergence turns a 25% increase in housing costs–with all other prices and consumption patterns held constant–into a 4.25% overall inflation in the Eurozone but a 6% inflation in the U.S.
While policymakers are aware of those data limitations and we have standardized statistical ways to adjust for quality improvements, these problems can still cause headaches. One illustrative example is the impact of iPhone prices on Sweden’s price index; Martin Enlund, FX strategist at Nordea, estimates that the quality adjustment of iPhones alone reduced the reported price increase by 0.1 percentage points every year for the last 5 years.
That minor detail has some implication for our modern world, considering that the Riksbank’s interest rate decisions have turned on such small margins before. Looking at these differences in consumption bundles and quality adjustments over longer historical periods, they quickly become astronomical. In a famous paper, Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus surveyed “lumens”–a unit for light–emitted by various sources throughout the centuries. Nordhaus estimated the price of light, the essential service its originators provide us with, to have fallen by 99.97% between 1800 and 1992.
Over decades or centuries, even small differences can result in very large adjustments when we evaluate past incomes. For instance, how much better is a computer as a calculating tool than an abacus? Is a keyboard and word processor ten, fifty or a hundred times better than quills, ink, and bulky, slowly decaying paper?
A recent study by Vincent Geloso and Peter Lindert makes a big deal out of consumption bundles. By disaggregating purchases by working classes and upper classes, they make a revolutionary discovery: beginning earlier than we used to believe, the poor’s standards of living improved faster than those of the rich. Contrary to the tired claim that capitalism involves the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer, it seems that during the 19th century the opposite was true.
The authors reach this conclusion by using different consumption bundles for two different income segments. People’s standards of living depend on what they themselves consume, not on what they could buy if they had the rich’s consumption patterns:
“[T]he contrasts that matter are contrasts in individuals’ abilities to buy what they care to buy, or need to buy, and not the (nominal) inequality in their ability to buy the same common bundle as some other class could buy.”
The components that drove this extraordinary reduction in cost of living, argue Geloso and Lindert, were falling prices of grain-based foods and a rise in the relative price of services that the poorer classes supplied (mostly wage rates for common labor).
The American rise in inequality over the nineteenth century, using both top-1% / bottom-99% and top-10% / bottom-40% metrics, is much less pronounced than previously believed. The authors conclude:
“[T]he ‘nineteenth-century’ period 1815–1914 brought a clearly egalitarian shift in the price structure for all four countries—England, Canada, the USA, and post-1850 Australia. The net change over these 100 years is unmistakable.”
A century before Paul Ehrlich would predict imminent starvation in the entire world (specifically in what he thought was a remarkably backwards India), the world surplus of grains had enriched the poor–even in the “dark Satanic mills” of Britain. The lower relative price of grains mitigated and partly reversed the economic inequality we tend to associate with the nineteenth century.
The exact bundles used to measure consumption matter greatly for understanding prosperity, today as well as in the past.
Thanksgiving Dinner Will Be 8.8 Percent Cheaper This Year
Be thankful for the increase in human knowledge that transforms atoms into valuable resources.
Gale L. Pooley —
Summary: There has been a remarkable decrease in the “time price” of a Thanksgiving dinner over the past 38 years, despite nominal cost increases. Thanks to rising wages and innovation, the time required for a blue-collar worker to afford the meal dropped significantly, making food much more abundant. Population growth and human knowledge drive resource abundance, allowing for greater prosperity and efficiency in providing for more people.
Since 1986, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) has conducted an annual price survey of food items that make up 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 remaining. 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.
So, what has happened to the price of a Thanksgiving Day dinner over the past 38 years? The AFBF reports that in nominal terms, the cost rose from $28.74 in 1986 to $58.08 in 2024. That’s an increase of 102.1 percent.
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 wage rate. That gives us the number of work hours required to earn enough money to feed those 10 guests.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the blue-collar hourly wage rate increased by 240.2 percent – from $8.96 per hour in October 1986 to $30.48 in October 2024.
Remember that when wages increase faster than prices, time prices decrease. Consequently, we can say that between 1986 and 2024 the time price of the Thanksgiving dinner for a blue-collar worker declined from 3.2 hours to 1.9 hours, or 40.6 percent.
That means that blue-collar workers can buy 1.68 Thanksgiving Day dinners in 2024 for the same number of hours it took to buy one dinner in 1986. We can also say that Thanksgiving dinner became 68 percent more abundant.
Here is a chart showing the time price trend for the Thanksgiving dinner over the past 38 years:
The lowest time price for the Thanksgiving dinner was 1.87 hours in 2020, but then COVID-19 policies struck, and the time price jumped to 2.29 hours in 2022.
In 2023, the time price of the Thanksgiving dinner came to 2.09 hours. This year, it came to 1.91 hours – a decline of 8.8 percent. For the time it took to buy Thanksgiving dinner last year, we get 9.6 percent more food this year.
Between 1986 and 2024, the US population rose from 240 million to 337 million – a 40.4 percent increase. Over the same period, the Thanksgiving dinner time price decreased by 40.6 percent. Each one percentage point increase in population corresponded to a one percentage point decrease in the time price.
To get a sense of the relationship between food prices and population growth, imagine providing a Thanksgiving Day dinner for everyone in the United States. If the whole of the United States had consisted of blue-collar workers in 1986, the total Thanksgiving dinner time price would have been 77 million hours. By 2024, the time price fell to 64.2 million hours – a decline of 12.8 million hours or 16.6 percent.
Given that the population of the United States increased by 40.4 percent between 1986 and 2024, we can confidently say that more people truly make resources much more abundant.
An earlier version of this article was published at Gale Winds on 11/21/2024.
The Typical US Worker Out-Earned Inflation by $1,400 a Year
“While higher costs for everything from milk to medicines have preoccupied U.S. consumers in the pandemic era, earnings have also risen enough, on average, to push up households’ purchasing power a bit. And blue-collar workers have been the biggest beneficiaries.
An analysis published in July by economists at the Treasury Department found that the median worker can afford the same representative basket of goods and services as they did in 2019 — plus have an additional $1,400 a year.”
“The median household net worth of older millennials, born in the 1980s, rose to $130,000 in 2022 from $60,000 in 2019, according to inflation-adjusted data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Median wealth more than quadrupled to $41,000 for Americans born in the 1990s, which includes the generation’s youngest members, born in 1996.
The turnaround has been so dramatic that millennials—mocked at times for being perpetually behind in building wealth, buying homes, getting married and having children—now find themselves ahead.
In early 2024, millennials and older members of Gen Z had, on average and adjusting for inflation, about 25% more wealth than Gen Xers and baby boomers did at a similar age, according to a St. Louis Fed analysis.”
