Monday, September 1, 2008

Food Prices Going Down


Do a Google search for "rising food prices" and you'll get 391,000 results, while a search for "falling real food prices" gets about 144 results, a ratio of 2,700:1. Maybe we get so focused on the most recent year or two of rising prices for products like eggs that we lose sight of the longer term, historical trends.

The chart above shows the real, inflation-adjusted prices of eggs (in 2008 dollars), annually back to 1890. The price we're paying today for eggs (in real dollars) is about 1/7 of the price 100 years ago, a decline of 85% compared to the price our grandparents, great-grandparents or great-great grandparents paid in the early 1900s.

And it's not just egg prices that have fallen over the last 100 years. Grocery prices in general fell in real price by 82% between 1919 and 2007, measured in the number of hours worked (9.5 to 1.7 hours, another way to adjust for inflation) to purchase a 12-item basket of groceries, according to the Dallas Fed.
Read it here.

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