Thanksgiving Abundance

Since 1986 the time price of a Thanksgiving dinner for ten has dropped 37 percent from 3.22 hours to 2.03 hours. During this same time population increased by 38.8 percent.

Since 1986, the American Farm Bureau Federation has conducted an annual price survey of food items found in a typical Thanksgiving Day dinner. The items on this shopping list are designed to serve a group of 10 people, with leftovers. The list includes a 16 pound turkey, a 30 ounce pumpkin pie mix, one gallon of milk, one pound vegetable tray, 12 bread rolls, two pie shells, one pound of green peas, 12 ounces of fresh cranberries, one-half pint of whipping cream, 14 ounces of cubed stuffing, three pounds of sweet potatoes and several miscellaneous ingredients. So what has happened to the price of a Thanksgiving Day dinner over time? 

They report that in nominal terms, the cost rose from $28.74 in 1986 to $53.31 in 2021 or 85.5 percent. Since we buy things with money but pay for them with time, we prefer to analyze the cost of a Thanksgiving Day dinner using Time Prices. To calculate the Time Price we divide the nominal price of the meal by the nominal wage rate. That will give us the number of hours of work required to earn enough money to feed the 10 guests. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, blue-collar hourly wage rate increased by 194.3 percent from $8.92 per hour in 1986 to $26.26 in 2021. Remember, as long as wages are increasing faster than prices, time prices are decreasing. The Time Price of the dinner for a blue-collar worker declined 37 percent from 3.22 hours in 1986 to 2.03 hours in 2021. As such, blue-collar workers could buy 15.8 Thanksgiving Day dinners in 2021 for the same length of time of work it took to buy 10 in 1986. Thanksgiving has become 58 percent more abundant. Here is the time price trend for a dinner for 10 over the last 35 years:

Note that 2020 was the lowest time price on record. 2021 has been an odd year due to COVID lockdowns restricting supply chains, stimulus spending by the federal government, and large increases in the money supply by the FED. The 2021 money price showed a 13.7 percent increase from the 2020 price of $46.90. But hourly income increased by 6.4 percent, so the time price increased 6.8 percent. We note since last Thanksgiving the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index has increased 22 percent and the Case-Shiller housing price index has increased 20 percent. If you invested in the stock market or the housing market over the last year, Thanksgiving is much cheaper for your family.

Imagine providing a Thanksgiving Day dinner for everyone in the United States. That will give you a sense of the relationship between food prices and population growth. The U.S. population rose 38.8 percent from 240 million in 1986 to 333 million in 2021. What happened to the total Thanksgiving Day dinner bill over that 35-year period? If the whole of the United States consisted of blue-collar workers in 1986, the total Thanksgiving dinner time price would have been 77.29 million hours. By 2021 this total time price had fallen to 67.7 million hours. The total Thanksgiving Day dinner bill in the United States fell 12.5 percent, at the same time population increased by 38.8 percent. We call this superabundance. More people are making things much more abundant.

With every hungry mouth, comes a pair of hands and a creative mind capable of invention and ingenuity and innovation. So, on this Thanksgiving Day, let us be thankful for all the American entrepreneurs who enrich our lives with a cornucopia of plentiful and tasty food.

Excerpt from our forthcoming book, Superabundance.

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