Doug Henwood Talks

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

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