Summary: Olive oil prices spiked in 2023 amid heat and drought in Spain, prompting widespread claims that climate change was driving the industry into crisis. Production has since rebounded and prices have fallen sharply, undercutting the hysteria, but no corrections have been issued. The episode illustrates how short-term agricultural disruptions are sometimes unreasonably framed as evidence of long-term climate catastrophe.

It’s the follow-up story that never gets written. An agricultural commodity experiences a period of below-average yields and rising prices, and it is reported as a climate change–induced crisis. Then, after another year or two, the trend reverses, but there are few, if any, attempts to correct the record.

Olive oil prices are a recent example. Spain, the world’s largest producer of olives for oil, experienced severe heat and drought in the summers of 2022 and 2023, contributing to much lower yields and major price spikes in 2023 and into 2024.

There were several news accounts at the time warning about a new reality in which human-induced warming would decimate olive yields. An August 2023 CNN story entitled “Olive Oil is in Trouble as Extreme Heat and Drought Push the Industry Into Crisis” was typical. Citing scientists and industry experts, the article told us that the episode “would have been virtually impossible without climate change.”

The story, and others like it, painted a bleak future for those making their living from olives and a new normal of higher olive oil prices for consumers. Beyond olives, CNN informed readers that “Experts warn of worse to come for food production, as the human-caused climate crisis increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather.”

However, toward the end of 2024, olive oil prices began falling sharply and remain well below their peak, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The two most recent crops in Spain and other olive-growing nations have yielded enough to increase olive oil production substantially. Overall, the olive oil industry appears to be most of the way back to normal—hardly a crisis.

That should have surprised no one, especially the self-described experts relied upon in the gloomy coverage. Yields for olives, as with virtually every other agricultural commodity, have experienced year-to-year fluctuations throughout recorded history. While climate change’s influence on olives is entirely possible, an off year or two proves nothing. Over the longer term, overall yields for food crops have increased severalfold, especially in recent decades, when climate change was supposedly a headwind. Improved agricultural methods—which depend on fossil fuels for energy and fertilizer—have swamped any adverse climate impacts, if such impacts exist.

It is also worth noting the substantial scientific evidence that the release of carbon dioxide, blamed for contributing to climate change, has benefits for plant growth and may well be a net positive for agriculture. This may also help explain why agricultural bad news rarely has staying power while long-term trends remain positive.

In any event, the media outlets that raised the olive oil alarms ought to publish follow-up stories reporting the good news and conceding that the climate change link is not nearly as clear-cut as the original coverage suggested. None have done so.

Maybe it’s because they are too busy writing about the chocolate crisis.

“Sugar prices have tumbled to their lowest level in more than five years as weight-loss drugs accelerate a drop in demand by pushing consumers to ditch sweet treats in favour of protein.

Raw cane sugar futures in New York dropped to less than 14 cents a pound on Wednesday, the lowest since October 2020 and less than half the level they hit in late 2023. Traders say the move reflects a sharper than forecast slowdown in consumption in the US and other wealthy economies, while demand in developing countries is growing at a slower pace than expected.

So-called GLP-1 weight-loss injections — which work by activating the glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor hormone that makes people feel fuller — have been a crucial driver of reducing cravings for sweet flavours. GLP-1s are the basis of medications including Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound.

‘The drop in consumption, or the speed of it, has taken the [sugar] industry unaware,’ said Gurdev Gill at broker Marex, adding that Mexico and the US have been the clearest examples, while demand data in Europe has also been ‘challenging’ for sugar prices.”

From Financial Times.

Summary: There have recently been widespread claims that Dickens’s working poor were better off than modern minimum-wage workers. Such comparisons rely on misleading inflation math and selective reading. The severe material deprivation of Victorian life—crowded housing, scarce possessions, and basic sanitation problems—dwarfs today’s standards. Modern Americans, even at the lower end of the income scale, enjoy far greater material comfort than the Cratchits ever did.

Christmas is often a time for nostalgia. We look back on our own childhood holidays. Songs and traditions from the past dominate the culture.

Nostalgia is not without its purposes. But it can also be misleading. Take those who view the material circumstances of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” as superior to our own.

Claims that an American today earning the minimum wage is worse off than the working poor of the 19th century have been popular since at least 2021. A recent post with thousands of likes reads:

Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/ hr. Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.

This is humbug.

Consider how harsh living conditions were for a Victorian earning 15 shillings a week.

Dickens writes that Mr. Cratchit lives with his wife and six children in a four-room house. It is rare for modern residents of developed nations to crowd eight people into four rooms.

It was common in the Victorian era. According to Britain’s National Archives, a typical home had no more than four rooms. Worse yet, it lacked running water and a toilet. Entire streets (or more) would share a few toilets and a pump with water that was often polluted.

The Cratchit household has few possessions. Their glassware consists of merely “two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.” For Christmas dinner, Mr. Cratchit wears “threadbare clothes” while his wife is “dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown.”

People used to turn clothing inside-out and alter the stitching to extend its lifespan. The practice predated the Victorian era, but continued into it. Eventually, clothes would become “napless, threadbare and tattered,” as the historian Emily Cockayne noted.

The Cratchits didn’t out-earn a modern American earning the minimum wage. Mr. Cratchit’s weekly salary of 15 shillings in 1843, the year “A Christmas Carol” was published, is equivalent to almost £122 in 2025. Converted to U.S. dollars, that’s about $160 a week, for an annual salary of $8,320.

The U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour or $15,080 per year for a full-time worker. That’s about half of what the meme claims Mr. Cratchit earned. Only 1% of U.S. workers earned the federal minimum wage or less last year. Most states set a higher minimum wage. The average worker earns considerably more. Clerks like Mr. Cratchit now earn an average annual salary of $49,210.

Mr. Cratchit couldn’t have purchased much of the modern “basket of goods” used in inflation calculations. Many of the basket’s items weren’t available in 1843. The U.K.’s Office of National Statistics recently added virtual reality headsets to it.

Another way to compare the relative situation of Mr. Cratchit and a minimum-wage worker today is to see how long it would take each of them to earn enough to buy something comparable. A BBC article notes that, according to an 1844 theatrical adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” it would have taken Mr. Cratchit a week’s wages to purchase the trappings of a Christmas feast: “seven shillings for the goose, five for the pudding, and three for the onions, sage and oranges.” Mr. Cratchit opts for a goose for the family’s Christmas meal. A turkey—then a costlier option—was too expensive.

The American Farm Bureau Federation found that the ingredients for a turkey-centered holiday meal serving 10 people cost $55.18 in 2025. At the federal minimum wage, someone would need to work seven hours and 37 minutes to afford that feast.

A minimum-wage worker could earn more than enough in a single workday to purchase a meal far more lavish than the modest Christmas dinner that cost Mr. Cratchit an entire week’s pay. And the amount of time a person needs to work to afford a holiday meal has fallen dramatically for the average blue-collar worker in recent years despite inflation. Wages have grown faster than food prices.

There has been substantial progress in living conditions since the 1840s. We’re much better off than the Cratchits were. In fact, most people today enjoy far greater material comfort than did even Dickens’s rich miser Ebenezer Scrooge.

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on 12/23/2025.

Summary: Despite widespread complaints about soaring grocery bills, Americans are spending far less of their working time to put food on the table than earlier generations did. Measured in time prices, long-term trends show food has grown more abundant thanks to rising wages. While household budgets face real pressures elsewhere, the idea of an unprecedented food-affordability crisis simply isn’t supported by the evidence.

With one big family-gathering meal out of the way and more soon to come (Christmas? New Year’s? Super Bowl?), let’s talk about food prices and the “affordability crisis” much in the news and in politicians’ rhetoric. Judging from polls, many Americans believe that the grocery prices are slipping out of reach. Inflation since 2021 left a mark on household budgets, but step back from the checkout line and look at the longer record. Measured the way people experience prices — through hours of work — food at home has become more affordable, not less.

Start with the relationship that matters: wages versus prices. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data on blue-collar pay and the consumer price index for “Food at Home,” we can compare wage growth with grocery inflation over multiple time horizons. Over the past year, blue-collar wages rose 3.8 percent while supermarket prices rose 2.7 percent. Over the past two years, wages increased 8.1 percent compared with a 4 percent rise for food. Over 10 years, wages rose 49.5 percent, prices 29.7 percent. Over 30 years, wages climbed 169 percent, prices 111 percent. Over 50 years, wages rose 558 percent, food prices 403 percent.

Put differently, wages grew about 40 percent faster than food prices over the past year, with often higher jumps in the other annual comparisons. The longer the period, the larger the cumulative advantage for workers.

The most useful way to express this advantage, as we argued in our 2022 book “Superabundance,” is not in dollars but in “time prices.” Americans buy goods with money, but pay for them with time. To calculate a time price, divide the dollar price of a good by the hourly wage. The result is the number of minutes a worker must spend on the job to earn that good.

Applying this measure to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual survey of the ingredients for a Thanksgiving meal serving 10 people — or any other similar holiday feast or special occasion, for that matter — reveals fascinating information about basic “affordability.”

In dollar terms, the Farm Bureau basket rose from $28.74 in 1986 to $55.18 in 2025, a 92 percent increase; over the same period, the blue-collar hourly wage rose from $8.92 to $31.33, a gain of 251 percent. Once you convert those figures into time prices, an even more reassuring picture emerges. In 1986, a blue-collar worker had to work 3.22 hours to buy that dinner for 10. By 2025, the same meal required 1.76 hours. The time price fell 45.3 percent. For the time increment required to buy that meal in 1986, a worker can now buy 1.83 of them — nearly doubling what the labor will buy. Food abundance for that worker rose 83 percent.

This reflects a broader pattern. U.S. consumers spent about 17 percent of disposable personal income on food in 1960; by 2019, that share had fallen to 9.5 percent, driven largely by more affordable food at home. Even after the inflation spike in recent years, Americans last year devoted 10.4 percent of disposable income to food, still roughly half the share common in the mid-20th century and lower than in most other countries. That is a textbook case of Engel’s law: As incomes rise, the share of income spent on food declines.

What produced these gains is not mysterious. Better seeds, fertilizers, machinery, transport, refrigeration, packaging, inventory management and data systems all raise agricultural productivity. Competition in retailing and global trade further push producers to deliver more nutrition for each hour of work on the demand side. The result shows up not only in fuller supermarket shelves but in long-run trends in wages, prices and time prices.

None of that denies the pressure that higher rents, insurance premiums or interest rates place on families. Nor does it imply that every household shares equally in the gains. Time prices capture the average worker, not the person between jobs or outside the labor force. Policy debates about safety nets, housing supply or tax burdens remain important.

But when political candidates and commentators claim that food has never been less affordable, the evidence does not support them. In terms of hours of work, the typical American must sacrifice less time than earlier generations to put groceries on the table. That’s worth celebrating in the holiday season.

This article was originally published in the Washington Post on 12/2/2025.