Home Alone With Pizzabundance

Unskilled workers get 3.8 pizzas today for the time price of one in 1990. Upskilling workers get 8.4.

In the 1990 holiday classic “Home Alone” the family orders 10 pizzas and the bill comes to $122.50 (plus tip). Unskilled workers at the time were earning around $6.03 an hour. This would put the time price at 20.3 hours, or about 2 hours and two minutes per pizza.

Jadrian Wooten and Chris Clarke over at Monday Morning Economist did a price check on how much 10 classic cheese and pepperoni pizzas cost at a Little Caesars near the McCallister’s home today. It comes to only $91.98 (plus tip). The nominal price actually shrunk. Unskilled workers are earning closer to $17.17 an hour today. This would put the time price at 5.35 hours, or about 32 minutes per pizza. The time price has fallen by 73.6 percent. This means that for the time it took to earn the money to buy one pizza in 1990 you get 3.8 pizzas today. That’s a 280 percent increase in personal pizza abundance. Since 1990 the U.S. population has increased by 36.3 percent from 248 million to 340 million. Each one percent increase in population corresponded to a 7.71 percent increase in pizza abundance.

If you started your first job in 1990 and went from being an unskilled worker to a blue collar worker in 2024 your hourly compensation (wages and benefits) increased from $6.03 an hour to $38 an hour. Your personal pizza abundance went from one pizza to 8.4 pizzas. Enjoy the party.

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We explain and give hundreds of examples why more people with freedom means much more resource abundances for everyone in our book, Superabundance, available at Amazon.

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