Barbie Abundance

Today you get 7.15 Barbies for the time price of one in 1959

Barbie was introduced on March 9, 1959 at the New York Toy Fair. Over 300,000 were sold in the first year. In the last 63 years over a billion have been sold. The first Barbie was priced at $3.00. In 1959 unskilled workers were earning $1.16 an hour. This would put the time price at 2 hours and 35 minutes. Today you can pick up one at Walmart for $5.97. Now unskilled workers are earning closer to $16.50 an hour, putting the time price at 22 minutes. This would indicate an 86 percent decrease in the time price. For the time it took to earn the money to buy one Barbie in 1959, you get 7.15 Barbies today. Barbie abundance has increased 615 percent. Barbie abundance has been growing around 3.17 percent a year.

Barbie was invented by Ruth Handler. She and her husband Elliot co-founded Mattel in 1945 and she served as president from 1945 to 1975. She was born in 1916 in Denver, Colorado to Polish-Jewish immigrants Jacob and Ida Moskowitz. Ruth got the idea to do Barbie as she watched her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed giving them adult roles.

America has been a place where everyone can imagine and create and innovate. Immigrants and their children have made great contributions to our culture of entrepreneurship and free-market capitalism.

You can look at all the changes Barbie has gone through over the last 63 years here.

We describe the process of transforming scarcities into abundances in our new book, Superabundance, available at Amazon. Jordan Peterson calls it a “profoundly optimistic book.” There has never been a better time to create more life.

Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.