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@ Kip Ashlynn Murray
2025-02-27 16:31:18
This was a really fascinating analysis! Thank you for being honest about the AI portion of the work, it's good work I just love to see citations.
One thing I would be curious to see included is labor of food preparation. Here we start the analysis with the 1950s basket of goods, and in the 1950s people still typically kept household help to do the cooking and cleaning. Or at the very least the domestic partner did this labor almost exclusively because it's a lot of work. A big part of the rise of processed foods was that domestic help became too expensive for most middle class families, then middle class women started entering the workforce in mass (women have always worked in lower classes it was only held as a standard to not work in the upper classes as there was a disdain for labor). Then there comes the issue of opportunity cost. If it takes me several hours to make a loaf of sourdough, and I could be making $X/hour in the workforce, then it becomes economically beneficial to the household to buy the processed loaf of bread and work instead of bake. (Especially if the negative health consequences of such processed foods are obscured.)
I suspect if we considered these factors into this CPI analysis we would see even larger increases in the cost of living/ decreases in the value of a dollar. Almost like we went off the rails in the 70s... Almost like there was a gold standard that we abandoned 🤔
Maybe I need to take my unemployed economist self and write up my own white paper on this subject!