Summary: The dollar price of a traditional Fourth of July cookout has increased since 2016, but rising wages have more than offset those higher prices. As a result, Americans spend less time working to earn this year’s Independence Day meal than they did a decade ago. Measured in time rather than dollars, the data show that abundance has continued to grow as the population has increased.

Every year, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates the cost of a traditional Independence Day cookout. The basket includes summer cookout staples such as cheeseburgers, chicken breasts, pork chops, potato chips, pork and beans, fresh strawberries, homemade potato salad ingredients, fresh-squeezed lemonade ingredients, chocolate chip cookies, and ice cream.

Since 2016, the dollar cost of this basket has risen 30.3 percent, from $56.67 to $73.82. At first glance, that suggests celebrating the Fourth of July has become significantly more expensive.

But money prices tell only half of the story. The real question is not how many dollars the meal costs, but how much time people must work to earn those dollars. Since 2016, blue-collar worker hourly earnings increased 50.4 percent, from $21.48 to $32.31 per hour.

Because wages rose faster than prices, the time price of the cookout actually fell 13.4 percent—from 2.64 hours of work in 2016 to just 2.28 hours today, a savings of 21 minutes.

Another way to measure progress is to ask: How much more does the same hour of work buy? We call this the abundance multiplier. Compared with 2016, the same amount of work today buys 15.5 percent more.

America added 22 million people between 2016 and today, a population increase of 6.8 percent. Yet abundance didn’t merely keep pace with population—it grew 2.28 times as fast. Every 1 percent increase in people produced a 2.28 percent increase in cookout abundance. That’s the signature of superabundance: on average, every additional person contributes more than they consume. Even though there are 22 million more of us, we’ll actually spend 7.5 percent less time working as a country to pay for our celebration compared with 2016.

Americans may spend more dollars, but they spend less of their lives earning this year’s Independence Day feast.

Government money printing during the COVID-19 pandemic did cause a temporary spike, but we have returned to the long-term trend of decreasing time prices and increasing abundance.

This year saw a slight reversal. Compared with the record-low time price in 2025, food prices increased 4.1 percent while blue-collar hourly earnings rose 3.5 percent. As a result, the time price of the cookout edged up by just 0.5 percent—less than one minute of additional work. Even after that small increase, the Independence Day cookout remains substantially more affordable in time than it was a decade ago.

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

“The Washington Post recently ran a fun, data-filled article on berry consumption and parenting. Lots of good tidbits in the article, including that Americans eat a lot more berries than in the recent past, and that a lot of the availability is thanks to foreign trade and imports. But despite being somewhat light-hearted, the article does seem very negative, especially in the title and introduction, about how parents are spending a lot of money on berries…

Relative to median wages, berries of all kinds are now more affordable than a decade ago. Parents may still feel squeezed by all the berries their kids are eating, but in terms of affordability and share of the family budget, there is probably no need for a Berry Panic.”

From Economist Writing Every Day.

Summary: Big Mac prices across countries can be better understood by measuring them in terms of time rather than money—specifically, how long people must work to afford one. Comparing time prices reveals meaningful differences in wages and productivity that aren’t obvious from currency values alone.

McDonald’s operates in over 100 countries worldwide. Since 1986, The Economist magazine has published the Big Mac Index, built on the theory of purchasing power parity (PPP)—the idea that exchange rates should equalize the price of an identical basket of goods across countries. The following shows the dollar price of a Big Mac in each country, sorted by price:

But we can go one step further.

Instead of comparing currencies, we can compare time.

We start with the nominal price of a Big Mac in each country, converted to U.S. dollars, and then compare it to average hourly earnings. Since average hourly earnings data are not available for all countries, GDP per capita divided by annual hours worked serves as a reasonable proxy for relative wages between countries.

This transforms the question from “What does it cost?” to “How long do you have to work to get it?” A Big Mac can be more expensive in money but less expensive in time, depending on where you live.

A Big Mac in Taiwan costs only $2.38, compared to $7.99 in Switzerland, but after adjusting for hourly earnings, the time prices are very similar. In Pakistan, a Big Mac costs $3.77, but hourly earnings are $0.86, putting the time price at 4.4 hours. In Denmark, the price is $5.49, but hourly earnings are $57.60, so the time price is under six minutes. For the time it takes a worker in Pakistan to earn enough to buy one Big Mac, workers in Denmark can buy more than 46.

The Big Mac doesn’t just measure currencies; it measures the spread of knowledge.

What looks like inequality in dollars is often a difference in productivity, learning, and institutional capacity. The real divide is not between rich countries and poor countries—it is between places where knowledge compounds and places where it is constrained.

When a sandwich falls from four hours of work to four minutes, something profound has happened—not to the burger, but to the growth and sharing of knowledge.

The story of abundance is not written in dollars. It is written in time.

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

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.