https://x.com/NathanJRobinson/status/1800915894585147399
Krugman, despite being a neoliberal knows that food is an essential item. So likely he is propagandizing for Biden.
Look at personal savings rate.
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Perhaps the most egregious part of this is that the graph shows dollar expenditures, not meals bought.
- A store in 2014 sells 1000 hamburgers at $5 each = $5000 in expenditures
- Same store in 2024 sells 800 hamburgers at $10 each = $8000 in expenditures
It’s common for companies to raise prices to increase revenue, even if raising prices results in fewer people buying your product. This shit is taught in high school economics. Absolutely nothing here shows anything about how many people can afford fast food.
Also, the other thing is to look at with this is people eating out generally, there could also be the phenomena of middle class people responding to increased prices by eating fast food more to substitute more expensive take out options.
Another factor is people could generally be living further from work now than 10 years ago due to higher rents. Meaning they’re more likely to eat a meal near their office while having less time to cook, hence needing fast food.
This was kind of my first thought. I eat out more when I’m stressed because of the comfort of eating out and the lack of energy to cook for myself, even if it puts me in a worse economic situation. Sometimes you have to cope just to keep alive. Maybe we can coin the term “copeanomics” to describe increased sales of “luxury” items in times of increased societal instability.
Maybe we can coin the term “copeanomics”
There probably is already an industry term for it, because it’s basically the fast food indutry’s entire business model.
I have coworkers who purchase takeout food and/or coffee every single day despite their having literally no money (one coworker actually ran out of money one day and refused like five offers from me to buy him lunch) so I’ve been wondering about this. I make my own lunch and coffee and save immense amounts of money from doing so, but this may also be a form of privilege.
And don’t forget good ol’ fashioned doomspending. If you’ll never afford a house and aren’t even sure you’ll still be able to afford rent in the distant future, why bother saving that $12? Just go ahead and treat yourself to the overpriced burg while you still can.
I thought so too, but look at the y axis. These are inflation adjusted, to 2017 dollars
as people in the replies to Stancil (linked by Parsani below) mention, the CPI adjustment is based on overall inflation, not inflation of restaurant prices specifically, so it’s still flawed IMO since I believe restaurant (especially fast food) price inflation significantly outpaces overall inflation.
Even adjusting for inflation, it’s common to raise prices to increase revenue (consumer expenditures). There are business people all over the world right now drawing up graphs of how much total revenue they can generate at different price points, and low price/mass sales is not a good approach for many companies.
This is an important point, because prices are set largely by what people are willing to pay, not costs + whatever margin a company picks, for example. Tons of right-wing media pretends industry does rudimentary cost + margin pricing to push talking points like “if our business has to pay one cent more in taxes or wages that will ultimately be paid by consumers,” which is preposterous theoretically and has been disproven by real data over and over.
not costs + whatever margin a company picks
Basically: sale price is determined by what company thinks maximizes overall profit, cost of product (including shrink) determines whether the product is carried at all. It’s something I bring up in the shoplifting debate a lot, as people assume it increases price of individual items. Of course shrink plays a role when businesses make decisions, but why would a business charge you less than you’re willing to pay for an item?
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Krugman may be one of the most willfully ignorant economists alive today.
Lol, coward has his replies limited so he doesn’t get dunked on
Edit: lol deranged https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1800796843103990008
Also the guy who says the economy is doing great (if you ignore food and housing)
Beyond clownworld
Stancil is the fucking worst
might as well eat out while you can, the climate is collapsing, the economy is struggling and constantly appears to be on the brink of recession (and in some sectors layoffs are already sweeping), oh and we’re brushing up dangerously close to another pandemic with bird flu. What point is there in pinching pennies when you know you can’t win?
Is Stancil grooming himself as Krugman’s protegé? It’s a decent grift: the guy has purportedly banked ~$5M, which is enough to retire on, if you can do without avocado toast.
stancil is running for some bullshit in minnesota I guess. Aiming low. But yeah if I had to guess his fallback plan after politics is Takes
Shut up, Wesley!
ugh. Food has become so expensive I can barely afford itThe_market_understander has logged on
And yet here you are eating. Very strange indeed.Really cool how every necessity in the US is treated just like a stock: another speculative asset and the idea of making something to fulfill a purpose is just…alien to the American mind. Even if you profit from selling something people need and fulfilling that need.
Americans are bad at dystopian fiction because every time some nerd is like “imagine a terrible future where you pay money for air” a whole rogues gallery of lamprey-men think it sounds like a great idea.
Kropotkin asserted that if capitalists could privatize air to breath and sell it they would. Seemed a bit hyperbolic 100 years ago, and here we are
I was thinking about winning the extremely scientific and intellectually rigorous Nobel Prize in Economics, but everytime I sit down to write Rich and Powerful People Are Rich and Powerful Because They Are Supposed to Be I have diarrhea.
You complain about more expensive food, yet you continue to spend too much money on it
We just want to survive
giving americans 2 small checks during covid has broken economists’ brains
The social cost of the pandemic will be felt for years if not decades. Incalculable. Our government says “here’s a tenner and a bag of peanuts.”
Holy fucking shit what an amazing willing misunderstanding of a graph
That’s not a graph of meals eaten at fast food, it’s money spent. That graph says exactly what he’s trying to disprove!!! That is a graph that says “people are spending more money on fast food” which is very easily explained by “the cost of fast food has increased”!
This isn’t even pissing on my head and telling me it’s raining, this is pissing on my head and telling me it’s a sunny day in the middle of a drought!
Isn’t the Nobel in economics a scented banana sticker from a bank that helped tank the global economy in 2008?
Yes. It has nothing to do with Nobel. They just slapped the name on it because they wanted to add legitimacy to their bullshit. It’s like getting a “Nobel prize” in Ouiji Boarding.
Nobel economics prize: not a real Nobel. It’s technically called The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, because economists are insufferable nerds and aren’t comparable to real arts and sciences.
(5) When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. (6) Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!” --the revelation of st. john, ch. 6
a literally biblical famine is when food is so expensive that you have to work all day just to afford one day’s worth of food for yourself, or one day’s worth of less nutritious food for yourself and a small family
if food is too expensive, then why are you spending literally all of your money on it?when did we get a biblically accurate brandon
about 3 years ago
thanks Paul Krugman you’re right I will never pay for food again it’s stealing time
reminder that the “NOBel Prize in Economics” isn’t even a real Nobel, is looked upon with disdain by the Nobels, was established to legitimize capitalist economics to the masses, and wasn’t even presented along with the others for a while. so their highest award isn’t even telling the truth about itself. you know how i know they didn’t have to do all that if economics was a legitimate science? because their is no mathematics Nobel prize, and instead of inventing one, calling it the same name, and then arguing their way into the ceremony, there’s just a different scandinavian prize established for math called the Abel prize. (The Fields Medal varies significantly in its criterion from other culminatory prizes in other fields and is not comparable to the Nobel despite being about equally prestigious.)
Dissolve his Nobel in aqua regia and make him drink it.
Crassus Prize
Congrats on normalizing to 2017 dollars, however the graph starts at a misleading 260 billion, not zero. I was always told it’s considered bad form not to include the little squiggly break lines to show that on bar graphs.
So if the amount spent went from roughly 340 billion to 380 billion, ~10% increase, but the cost/quantity*quality of that food (which is difficult to calculate because of shrinkflation, shittier quality generally, and different items being on the menu) has easily gone up 25% at an absolutely uncontroversial low end, that proves the opposite, that people are eating fast food less than pre-covid.
After the revolution I want his nobel prize taken and awarded to me.
