Friday, January 22, 2021

The Poor Are Getting Poorer? No, They're Not

According to the rhetoric from Democrats, the poor are getting poorer. The problem, as usual, is that this ignores the facts. Source: https://www.humanprogress.org/the-simon-abundance-index-2020/ 


The time price denotes the amount of time that a person has to work in order to earn enough money to buy something. To calculate the time price, the nominal money price is divided by nominal hourly income. (We got the former from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the latter by combining the World Bank’s GDP figures with Conference Board’s estimate of annual hours worked.) The average time price of 50 commodities fell by 74.2 percent. That means that for the same length of time that a person needed to work to earn enough money to buy one unit in our basket of 50 commodities in 1980, he or she could buy 3.87 units in 2019. In other words, the average person saw his or her level of abundance rise by 287.4 percent.

Figure 1: Time Price Toolkit (1980-2019)





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