On Mar 6, 2007, at 5:38 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> But the secular tendency is there, it is the tendency to reduce
> costs. This
> was shown by Cox and Alm, who estimated how long you would have to
> work to
> earn enough to buy some basic consumer goods:
>
> Year 1920 1930
> 1940
> 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 Latest*
> Half gallon of Milk 37mins 31
> 21 16
> 13 10 8.7 8 7
> Three-pound chicken 2hrs27mins 2:01 1:24
> 1:11
> 33 22 18 14 14
> 100 kilowatt hrs electricity 13hrs36mins 11:03 5:52 2hrs
> 1:09 39mins 45 43 38
> 3min coast-to-coast call 30hrs 3mins 16:29 6:07
> 1:44
> 1hr 24mins 11 4 2
James, that Cox & Alm research is some of the shoddiest ever to come out of the Federal Reserve System, most of which is very high quality. (E.g., Peter Gottschalk completely destroyed their arguments on mobility.) These are extremely misleading examples, since they're specifically chose to prove their point. These are all commodities of the most ordinary sort. Services are an enitrely different story - medical care, college tuition - as is housing; do the exercise on those and the numbers would look very different. Same with the average household's total yearly expenses. You can't reconcile a falling real hourly wage with this picture of endless uplift you & these Texas reactionaries are promoting.
Doug