Drills on Sale: Buy One, Get 17 Free

Since 1946, the time price of a basic drill has fallen 94.6 percent.

Black & Decker was founded in 1910 and innovated the one-person drill in 1914. Their inspiration was a Colt pistol with a hand grip and trigger. In 1946 they introduced the first 1/4 -inch home utility drill. It sold for $16.95. In 1961 they introduced their first cordless drill. “It was a great advance,” Mr. Decker said, “but people weren't prepared to pay $100 for it.” In 1971 NASA's Apollo 15 mission drilled core samples on the moon with a Black and Decker cordless drill.

Today you can pick up a Black and Decker cordless drill at Home Depot or Amazon for $26.51. The nominal money price has increased by 56.4 percent.

Since we buy things with money, but pay for them with time, we prefer to analyze the cost of drills using Time Prices. To calculate the Time Price we divide the nominal price by the nominal wage rate. That will give us the number of hours of work required to earn enough money to buy a drill. We can then compare the time prices over time to see if abundance has increased or decreased.

According to the Measuringworth.com, blue-collar hourly compensation (wages and benefits) increased from $1.13 per hour in 1946 to $32.54 in 2021. While the money price increased by 56.4 percent, hourly compensation increased by 2,779.6 percent. As long as hourly compensation increases faster than the money price, the time price will be decreasing. What took 15 hours of time to buy a drill now takes around 49 minutes. The time price has dropped by 94.6 percent.

If you spend the same amount of time working to earn the money to buy a drill in 2021 as you did in 1946, you will get 18.41 drills. Drill abundance and the holes they can create and the screws they can install have become 1,741.2 percent more abundant.

Maybe a member of your family would like to receive a drill this Christmas. You can thank Black and Decker and all of the other drill innovators and entrepreneurs that have made these handy tools so affordable.

Excerpt from our forthcoming book, Superabundance.

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