Time Pricing Mark Perry’s Latest Chart of the Century
Rising wages beat inflation, especially where markets are left free.
Gale L. Pooley —
Summary: Economist Mark Perry’s “Chart of the Century” reveals that many goods—from TVs to clothing—have become significantly more affordable since 2000, while heavily regulated sectors like healthcare and education have not done so well. Focusing on time prices rather than dollar amounts provides a clearer picture of improving living standards. Since 2000, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has increased by 89.9 percent, but average hourly wages have increased by 127.4 percent. On average, an hour of your time will buy 19.7 percent more goods and services now than it would have in 2000.
It’s time for our semiannual update of Professor Mark Perry’s chart showing the percentage change in nominal prices for various US consumer goods and services alongside changes in average hourly wages. Perry’s data come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Of the 14 products tracked, four have seen a drop in nominal prices—TVs, toys, computer software, and cell phone services. Another five have risen in dollar terms but are actually cheaper in time prices: clothing, household furnishings, new cars, food and beverages, and housing. What stands out most, though, is that the products becoming less abundant—medical care services, childcare, college textbooks, tuition, and hospital services—are also the ones most heavily influenced by government intervention, whether through subsidies, regulation, or restricted supply.
We’ve compared the nominal price change of each product to the change in nominal average hourly wages, from which we can show the change in the time prices—positive or negative. Next, we compare the time prices over time to measure changes in abundance. This bar chart illustrates these changes:
Also note that this chart does not include TVs. The time price of TVs decreased by over 99 percent. For the time it took to earn the money to buy one TV in 2000, you would get almost 120 TVs today. TV abundance increased by 11,868 percent. The horizontal scale on the chart would be 15.6 times wider if we included TVs; everything else would look tiny.
Over this 25-year period, overall inflation increased by 89.9 percent while average hourly income increased by 127.4 percent. Hourly income increased 19.7 percent faster than prices. This indicates a 16.5 percent decrease in overall time prices. You get 19.7 percent more today for the same amount of time 25 years ago.
That illustrates the fact that things can get simultaneously more expensive in money prices and more affordable in time prices. As long as hourly wages are increasing faster than the prices of goods and services, time prices are decreasing, which is another way of saying personal abundance is increasing.
Time prices are a better way to measure standards of living. To really understand our economy, we must think in hours and minutes, not dollars and cents. Time prices are the true prices.
Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.
Keeping Cool: The Air Conditioner That Changed America
The time price of air conditioning has fallen 98.6 percent since 1952. That ordinary luxury saves lives every summer.
Gale L. Pooley —
Summary: Air conditioning has transformed extreme heat from a major threat into a manageable challenge, helping save lives, improve productivity, and make hot climates far more livable. Since its invention in the early 20th century, advances in technology and rising prosperity have made cooling dramatically more affordable, with the time required to earn an air conditioner falling by nearly 99 percent since 1952. Differences in air-conditioning adoption help explain why heat-related mortality remains much higher in Europe than in the United States, underscoring the role of innovation, wealth, and energy policy in protecting human wellbeing.
Heatwaves have pushed temperatures to record highs across both Europe and the United States. Yet the human toll between these two locales was dramatically different, with Europe recording more than 10,000 excess deaths in June.
The United Nations estimates that the European continent accounted for approximately 175,000 heat-related deaths annually between 2000 and 2019. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, calculates that about 1,300 deaths per year in the US are due to extreme heat. (This translates to four heat-related deaths per million annually in the US and 235 heat-related deaths per million annually across Europe.)
Europe and the US differ in demographics, urban density, reporting methods, and climate patterns. Even so, the death rate due to heat in Europe is 59 times higher than in the US.
In the United Kingdom, only about five percent of homes have air conditioning. In the United States, roughly 93 percent do.
Research identifies 72°F and 45 percent humidity as optimal for maximizing office and mental productivity.
With sweltering temperatures once again gripping much of the world, it is worth appreciating air conditioning — the quiet invention that transforms dangerous heat into manageable discomfort, shields millions from heat-related suffering and death, boosts productivity, and makes once-hostile climates livable. It is a powerful reminder that wealth, innovation, and human ingenuity enable societies to adapt to nature’s extremes and protect human life.
To understand why the US heat death rate is 59 times lower than that of Europe, it helps to begin with a young engineer named Willis Carrier.
The Father of Air Conditioning
Willis H. Carrier was born outside of Buffalo, New York on November 26, 1876, the same day inventor Alexander Graham Bell successfully demonstrated his large box telephone between Boston and Salem, Massachusetts. Carrier was an only child and attended a one-room schoolhouse. When he was nine years old he struggled to grasp the concept of fractions. His mother helped him master the idea using a pot of apples and slicing them into portions. Carrier remembered this event fondly as “the most important thing that ever happened to me.”
Carrier was awarded a full scholarship to attend Cornell University. He majored in engineering, earning a Master’s degree in 1901. After graduation, Carrier accepted a job at the Buffalo Forge Company for $10 a week.
The Sackett & Wilhelms printing plant in Brooklyn, New York was losing money because the sweltering, humid summers caused sheets of paper to absorb moisture from the air. The paper would expand and warp, throwing off the alignment of colored inks on the printed page and ruining entire print runs. They asked the Buffalo Forge Company for help. Carrier was assigned to solve the problem.
He was not trying to cool people. He was trying to save knowledge.
Air conditioning began not as a luxury, but as a technology of information, productivity, and adaptation — a machine that transformed oppressive heat from an economic barrier into a manageable inconvenience.
Carrier’s breakthrough system, in July of 1902, controlled both temperature and humidity, stabilizing the paper and rescuing the precision of mass communication.
Carrier applied for a patent on his invention, an “Apparatus for Treating Air,” which became patent No. 808897 and was issued on January 2, 1906.
In 1915 Carrier and six other engineers formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation using their personal savings of $32,600. Carrier Global Corporation (NYSE: CARR), the parent company of the Carrier HVAC and refrigeration business, has a current market capitalization of approximately $56 billion. This valuation makes it one of the largest climate and energy solutions providers in the world.
“With his new company,” Alexander Hammond notes, Carrier began to expand the use of air conditioning units by supplying hotels, department stores, movie theaters and private homes. His units were even installed in the White House, the US Congress and Madison Square Garden.”
Another overlooked legacy of Carrier’s invention is the birth of the summer blockbuster. Before air conditioning, movie theaters dreaded the hot months — few people wanted to sit in a crowded, sweltering auditorium. That changed in 1925 when the Rivoli Theatre in Times Square installed one of Carrier’s new cooling systems. Crowds flocked in, many as eager for the cool air as for the feature presentation. Almost overnight, summer transformed from Hollywood’s off-season into its most profitable season. Air conditioning didn’t just cool theaters — it reshaped the economics of entertainment and helped create one of America’s most enduring cultural traditions.
When New York City organizers launched the 1939 World’s Fair under the motto “Building the World of Tomorrow,” they sought technologies that would advance human progress and improve everyday life. Few embodied that vision better than modern air conditioning. During the Fair’s first 100 days, nearly 1.3 million visitors toured the striking “Carrier Igloo of Tomorrow.”
Carrier Corp’s Igloo, image from New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Inside, guests learned how air conditioning worked, explored a modern refrigerated food store, and experienced Carrier’s latest self-contained cooling systems — getting a glimpse of a future that would soon make homes, offices, and entire cities more comfortable, productive, and livable.
In 1985, Willis H. Carrier was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 1998, Time magazine recognized him as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
By conquering heat and humidity with knowledge, Carrier enlarged the realm of human possibility. His invention transformed sweltering regions into thriving economies, extended human productivity, and brought comfort and prosperity to billions around the world.
One of the great triumphs of entrepreneurial capitalism is how quickly air conditioning traveled the familiar path from luxury to necessity. What began as an expensive convenience for a tiny elite became, within a generation, affordable to ordinary families. The market did not merely invent comfort — it democratized it.
In their report Time Well Spent: The Declining Real Cost of Living in America, Michael Cox and Richard Alm found that a 5,500-BTU air-conditioning unit cost about $350 in 1952. At the time, entry-level workers earned roughly 83 cents an hour, putting the time price at 422 hours.
Today, Walmart sells a far more efficient 6,000 BTU air-conditioning unit (with a remote control) for only $115. The current hourly wage for limited-service restaurant workers is around $19 an hour, putting the time price at six hours.
The time price has decreased by 98.6 percent. For the time it took US workers to earn the money to buy one unit in 1952, they get 70 today.
If air conditioning saves lives, why don’t more Europeans have it?
Europe’s electricity prices are typically much higher than the US, driven by higher taxes, network costs, renewable energy mandates, and energy import dependence. Customers in the US pay 17 to 19 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) compared to 25 to 32 cents in Europe. This means Europeans pay roughly 47 to 68 percent more per kWh than US customers.
Americans are also much richer than Europeans. According to World Bank data, American gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was $84,809 in 2024, while the European Union’s was 25 percent lower at $63,585. That $21,224 difference could buy a lot of comfortable cooling.
The European Union also prioritizes environmental targets over human comfort by imposing strict regulations for heating and cooling, making these amenities much more costly. The commission encourages citizens to use fans instead of air conditioning. Imagine the government doing that in Phoenix and Atlanta in July. Italy, Greece, and Spain even announced temperature limits in public spaces during the 2022 heatwave in an effort to meet these environmental objectives. Spain limited air conditioners to be set no lower than 80°F. No wonder European productivity is 38 percent lower than the US.
Historic preservation laws and strict landlord rules frequently ban exterior window units to maintain aesthetic uniformity.
While air conditioning ownership increases households’ electricity consumption, it may be a small price to pay for comfort and avoiding death.
The problem is not the climate but the policy mindset. Too many European regulators approach energy and technology through the ideological lens of scarcity rather than creative innovation and human flourishing. One reason such policies persist is that the officials who design them are largely insulated from the consequences of their decisions and rarely experience their costs directly. Instead, those costs are borne by millions of ordinary citizens.
Air conditioning is not ultimately a story about cooling. It is a story about knowledge. It transformed oppressive heat into comfort, inhospitable regions into thriving communities, and summer misery into year-round productivity. Coal, copper, and electricity become valuable only after humans discover how to harness them. The history of air conditioning is the history of knowledge triumphing over nature’s constraints.
The ultimate resource is neither energy nor matter. It is the infinite capacity of human beings to learn, create, and discover.
This article appeared in The Daily Economy on 7/13/2026.
US Broadband Delivers Faster Speeds and Lower Prices
“USTelecom’s 2026 Broadband Pricing Index (BPI) is an annual analysis of U.S. residential broadband pricing and performance. The report finds that broadband internet has delivered a consistent trend of falling real prices and dramatically faster speeds for eleven consecutive years, which stands apart from nearly every other category of household spending.”
Kia CEO Signals Price Cuts in Europe to Compete with China
“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.”
Ice Blocks to Electrons: The Rise of Refrigeration Abundance
Workers today get 214 refrigerators for the time price of one in 1925.
Gale L. Pooley —
Summary: A century ago, people used large ice blocks and wooden cabinets to keep food cold. Today, electric refrigeration is more affordable, easy, and reliable thanks to technological innovation. The shift from ice blocks to electrons shows how human ingenuity can transform necessities from costly burdens into everyday conveniences.
In 1925, households kept food cool with iceboxes—wooden insulated cabinets chilled by a block of ice. Depending on size and quality, they typically cost between $15 and $50. With entry-level workers earning about $0.25 an hour, a $35 icebox carried a time price of 140 hours.
Today, a 4.4-cubic-foot mini fridge at Walmart sells for about $184. Entry-level workers in limited-service restaurants earn roughly $18.75 an hour, bringing the time price down to just 9.8 hours.
For the time it took a worker in 1925 to earn the money for one icebox, a worker today can buy 14.3 mini fridges.
The 1925 icebox didn’t actually come with any ice. The price of a 100-pound block of ice in 1925 was typically $0.25, and that could double during “ice famines” caused by mild winters. At $0.25 an hour, a 100-pound block of ice would cost one hour and would generally last for three to seven days. If the ice block lasted five days that would be a time price of 12 minutes a day.
The Walmart mini fridge requires 269 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, or 0.74 kWh per day. Residential electricity runs around $0.12 per kWh, so a year’s supply of electricity for cooling will cost $32.28, or 1.72 hours for entry-level workers. Spread out over the year, it would require 17 seconds a day.
For the time it took a worker in 1925 to earn the money to buy ice cooling for a day, workers today get 43 days of electric cooling.
Electric refrigerators entered American homes in 1927 when General Electric introduced the iconic “Monitor Top,” named for its resemblance to the USS Monitor, a Civil War ironclad warship. The unit sold for $525. With entry-level workers earning $0.25 an hour, the time price came to an extraordinary 2,100 hours. Today, the Walmart mini fridge costs 9.8 hours of work. The time price has fallen 99.53 percent. For the time it took a worker in 1927 to earn enough money for one electric refrigerator, a worker today can buy 214 mini fridges—a stunning increase of 21,300 percent in refrigeration abundance, compounding at 5.62 percent a year.
The US population has tripled from 116 million in 1925 to 348 million today. For every 1 percent increase in population, personal refrigerator abundance has increased 106 percent (21,300% ÷ 200% = 106%).
Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.
