“In the summer of 2024, a passage from J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy gained widespread attention on social media platforms, including X/​Twitter. Vance described his refrigerator from the 1980s, asserting that it preserved lettuce for weeks beyond the capabilities of contemporary models.

This was not just an offhanded comment by Vance, as he also said his takeaway from this anecdote is that ‘economics is fake.’ By ‘fake,’ he means that ‘we became less good at manufacturing in this country, too focused on low cost and not on durability.’ While Vance’s comment was in the context of antitrust policy and consumer choice, we can also interpret this within Vance and Trump’s broader policy agenda, which views international trade as, in many cases, a net harm to the US—including, in this case, for consumers (not just the alleged loss of manufacturing jobs). 

As we shall see, major appliances such as refrigerators have gotten both bigger and cheaper, though Vance would claim they are inferior in some other way (not preserving food as long).”

From Cato Institute.

Summary: Thanksgiving has never been more affordable. Though nominal prices have risen over the decades, nominal wages have risen much faster, meaning today’s workers spend far less time earning their holiday meal than previous generations did. Thanks to innovation, productivity, and economic freedom, abundance has grown even as the population has increased.

Since 1986, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) has conducted an annual price survey of food items found 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. 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.

What has happened to the price of a Thanksgiving Day dinner over the past 39 years? The AFBF reports that in nominal terms, the price rose 92 percent, from $28.74 in 1986 to $55.18 in 2025. However, 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 hourly wage rate. That gives us the number of work hours required to earn enough money to feed 10 guests.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the blue-collar hourly wage rate has increased 251.2 percent, from $8.92 per hour in 1986 to $31.33 per hour in 2025. Remarkably, hourly wages for entry-level workers have increased even faster—from $4.72 to $18.75 per hour, or 297.2 percent.

Remember that when wages increase faster than prices, time prices decrease. As the figure below shows, the blue-collar time price of a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people has dropped 45.3 percent, from 3.22 hours in 1986 to 1.76 hours today, the lowest time price on record. Today, an individual blue-collar worker enjoys a Thanksgiving dinner for the “time price” of 10.6 minutes compared with 19.3 minutes in 1986.

Given that the time price of a Thanksgiving dinner decreased by 45.3 percent, a blue collar worker now gets 83 percent more dinner for the same time it took him to earn the money to buy one dinner back in 1986.

Upskilling Workers

Most people don’t begin their careers as blue-collar workers and remain there for 40 years. Imagine starting as an entry-level worker in 1986 earning $4.72 per hour. If, over the past four decades, you have upskilled and advanced to the US average wage of $36.53 per hour, your nominal wages would have risen 673.9 percent. A Thanksgiving dinner for 10 that required 6.1 hours of work in 1986 now takes just 1.51 hours. The time price has fallen 75.2 percent. For the time it once took to buy a single Thanksgiving dinner, an upskilling worker can now buy 4.03 dinners. Personal abundance has risen by 303.1 percent. The table below summarizes the changes in prices and wage rates:

Population-Level Abundance

To see how food prices relate to population growth, imagine providing a Thanksgiving dinner for every person in the United States. In 1986, with a population of 240 million, feeding the nation at blue-collar wage rates would have required 77.5 million hours of work. By 2025, the population has grown 42.5 percent to 342 million—but over that same period, the time price of Thanksgiving dinners fell by 45.3 percent. As a result of those changes, feeding the entire country in 2025 would require only 60.4 million hours of blue-collar work. That’s 17.1 million fewer hours—a 22.1 percent decrease.

Malthus and Thanos would be confounded. And Paul Ehrlich? One suspects he’d rather not discuss it.

Thanksgiving is a great time to be grateful for the freedom to innovate and for all those who work so hard to transform scarcities into abundances.

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

“Scientists in China have solved a 140-year-old chemistry problem in a breakthrough that could

overturn traditional production methods and slash the cost of cancer treatments and other

expensive medicinal compounds…

The researchers proposed a straightforward alternative to the expensive, complex and dangerous method used by the chemical industry for more than a century to synthesise drugs and pesticides from a class of organic compounds called amines. According to the paper, the team’s approach overcomes the many issues that have plagued the classical method, including the risk of explosions, and it holds promise for making the production of important chemicals safer and more affordable.”

From South China Morning Post.

Summary: Some influential voices today romanticize feudalism, but the reality of feudalism was misery for nearly everyone. Life under that system meant hunger, disease, violence, and lives cut brutally short. By contrast, modern societies have lifted billions out of poverty and extended life far beyond what kings and queens once knew. Progress comes from freedom, innovation, and hard work, not a return to the rule of lords and monarchs.

On a recent podcast, Tucker Carlson praised feudalism as “so much better than what we have now” because a ruler is “vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.” This romantic view of medieval hierarchy ignores a brutal reality: For most people, feudalism meant grinding poverty, disease, and early death.

As Gale L. Pooley and I found in our 2022 book Superabundance, society in preindustrial Europe was bifurcated between a small minority of the very rich and the vast majority of the very poor. One 17^th-century observer estimated that the French population consisted of “10 percent rich, 50 percent very poor, 30 percent who were nearly beggars, and 10 percent who were actually beggars.” In 16^th-century Spain, the Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini wrote, “except for a few Grandees of the Kingdom who live with great sumptuousness … others live in great poverty.”

An account from 18^th-century Naples recorded beggars finding “nocturnal asylum in a few caves, stables or ruined houses” where “they are to be seen there lying like filthy animals, with no distinction of age or sex.” Children fared the worst. Paris, according to the French author Louis-Sébastien Mercier, had “7,000 to 8,000 abandoned children out of some 30,000 births around 1780.” These children were then taken—three at a time—to the poor house, with carriers often finding at least “one of them dead” upon arrival.

People were constantly hungry, and starvation was only ever a few bad harvests away. In 1800, even France, one of the world’s richest countries, had an average food supply of only 1,846 calories per person per day. In other words, the majority of the population was undernourished. (Given that the average person needs about 2,000 calories a day.) That, in the words of the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla, gave rise to “serious forms of avitaminosis,” or medical conditions resulting from vitamin deficiencies. There was also, he noted, a prevalence of intestinal worms, which is “a slow, disgusting, and debilitating disease that caused a vast amount of human misery and ill health.”

Sanitation was a nightmare. As the English historian Lawrence Stone wrote in his book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, “city ditches, now often filled with stagnant water, were commonly used as latrines; butchers killed animals in their shops and threw the offal of the carcasses into the streets; dead animals were left to decay and fester where they lay.” London had “poor holes” or “large, deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row by row.” The stench was overwhelming, for “great quantities of human excrement were cast into the streets.”

The French historian Fernand Braudel found that in 15^th-century England, “80 percent of private expenditure was on food, with 20 percent spent on bread alone.” An account of 16^th-century life in rural Lombardy noted that peasants lived on wheat alone: Their “expenses for clothing and other needs are practically non-existent.” Per Cipolla, “One of the main preoccupations of hospital administration was to ensure that the clothes of the deceased should not be usurped but should be given to lawful inheritors. During epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to take over their clothes.”

Prior to mechanized agriculture, there were no food surpluses to sustain idle hands, not even those of children. And working conditions were brutal. A 16^th-century ordinance in Lombardy found that supervisors in rice fields “bring together a large number of children and adolescents, against whom they practice barbarous cruelties … [They] do not provide these poor creatures with the necessary food and make them labor as slaves by beating them and treating them more harshly than galley slaves, so that many of the children die miserably in the farms and neighboring fields.”

Such violence pervaded daily life. Medieval homicide rates reached 150 murders per 100,000 people in 14^th-century Florence. In 15^th-century England, it hovered around 24 per 100,000. (In 2020, the Italian homicide rate was 0.48 per 100,000. It was 0.95 per 100,000 in England and Wales in 2024.) People resolved their disputes through physical violence because no effective legal system existed. The serfs—serfdom in Russia was abolished only in 1861—lived as property, bound to land they could never own, subject to masters who viewed them as assets rather than humans. And between 1500 and the first quarter of the 17^th century, Europe’s great powers were at war nearly 100 percent of the time.

Carlson’s nostalgia for feudalism is not unique on the MAGA right. The influential American blogger Curtis Yarvin, for example, attributes to monarchs such as France’s Louis XIV decisive and long-term leadership that modern democracies apparently lack. But less frequently mentioned is how, for example, that same Louis ruined his country during the War of the Spanish Succession. As Winston Churchill wrote in Marlborough: His Life and Times,

After more than sixty years of his reign, more than thirty years of which had been consumed in European war, the Great King saw his people face to face with actual famine. Their sufferings were extreme. In Paris the death-rate doubled. Even before Christmas the market-women had marched to Versailles to proclaim their misery. In the countryside the peasantry subsisted on herbs or roots or flocked in despair into the famishing towns. Brigandage was widespread. Bands of starving men, women, and children roamed about in desperation. Châteaux and convents were attacked; the market-place of Amiens was pillaged; credit failed. From every province and from every class rose the cry for bread and peace.

The Great Enrichment, a phrase coined by my Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey, of the past 200 years or so lifted billions from the misery that defined human existence for millennia. It was driven by market economies and limits on the rulers’ arbitrary power, not feudal hierarchy.

There are many plausible reasons for Carlson’s (and Yarvin’s) openness to giving pre-modern institutions such as feudalism and absolute monarchy a second look. One is a lack of appreciation for the reality of the daily existence of ordinary people whose lives, in the immortal words of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Another is their apparent conviction that the United States is, in the words of President Donald Trump, “a failed nation.” Except that we are nothing of the sort. The United States has plenty of problems, but the lives of ordinary Americans in 2025 are incomparably better than those of the kings and queens of the past. Our standard of living is, in fact, the envy of the world, which is the most parsimonious explanation for millions of people trying to get here.

Solving the problems that remain and will arise in the future will depend on careful evaluation of evidence, historical experience, reason, and hard work. Catastrophism does not help, for it rejects human agency by declaring that the future is already decided. Hunkering down under a protective shield of feudal hierarchy or placing our trust in a modern incarnation of Louis XIV is no guarantee of success. We tried it before, and the results were disastrous.

This article originally appeared in The Dispatch on August 26, 2025.