The Gift of Flying Home for Christmas

The time price of airfares has fallen 38.1 percent in five years.

According to Kayak data the most popular travel day before Christmas is Wednesday, December 22, and the most popular travel day after Christmas is Tuesday, December 28. Fortunately we continue to enjoy the gift of decreasing airfares. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the price of airfares. They report that since 2016 prices have decreased from an index value of 270.9 to 203.8, or 24.8 percent.

Since we buy things with money but pay for them with time, we prefer to analyze the cost of airfares 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 an airplane ticket.

We can calculate the time prices using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They report that the nominal blue-collar hourly wage rate increased by 21.5 percent from $21.72 per hour in 2016 to $26.40 in 2021.

What took 12.47 hours to earn the money to buy an average airfare in 2016 only takes 7.72 hours today, declined 38.1 percent.

If you spent the same amount of time working today as 2016, you would get 61.6 percent more airfares. Flying abundance has been growing at a compound annual rate of around 10.7 percent a year. At this rate, we get twice as many flights every 7.22 years.

Excerpt from our forthcoming book, Superabundance.

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