Thanksgiving will be 13 Percent More Abundant This Year

Be thankful for the increase in knowledge that transforms atoms into valuable resources.

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Professor Jeremy Horpendahl has provided updated numbers on the percentage changes in four products essential to enjoying our Thanksgiving holiday. The products include a turkey dinner, gasoline, airfare, and wine. The Farm Bureau reports the prices on a typical thanksgiving dinner. The Energy Information Administration reports gasoline prices and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the price of airfare, wine and wage rates.

Remember it’s not how expensive things are, it’s how affordable they are that counts. To measure affordability we must compare prices to wages. This is what time prices do for us. A time price is simply the money price divided by hourly income. While the money prices of our four essential items has decreased from 0.8 percent to 13 percent, hourly income has increased by 4.4 percent. This means personal abundance has increased by 5.2 to 20 percent.

Dividing the percentage change in the money prices by the percentage change in wages will reveal the percentage change in the time price. Personal abundance is how much more you now enjoy for the same amount of time relative to last year. We get 13 percent more Thanksgiving this year for the same amount of time it took last year.

Click for data sources: Turkey dinner, Gas, Airfare, Wine, and Wages.

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.