Toybundance

You get 67 percent more toys for your time than five years ago.

Americans love toys. While we represent only 4.25 percent of the world’s population, we buy 34.3 percent of the toys sold on the planet. Global toy sales reached $95 billion in 2020 with the U.S. spending approximately $32.6 billion. American toy love is eight times higher than the global average.

Why do we buy so many toys? It could be we love the prices. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the price of toys and reports that since 2016 prices have decreased from an index value of 39.7 to 28.9, or 27.2 percent.

Since we buy things with money but pay for them with time, let’s use 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 our toys.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, blue-collar hourly wage rate increased by 21.5 percent from $21.72 per hour in 2016 to $26.40 in 2021. If the price of toys decreases by 27.3 percent at the same time wages increase by 21.5 percent, the time price of toys declines by 40.1 percent.

If you spend the same amount of time working to earn toy money in 2021 as you did in 2016, you get 67 percent more toys. Toy abundance is growing at a compound annual rate of around 10.8 percent a year. We get twice as many toys every 6.75 years for the same amount of time.

Enjoy buying and receiving toys this Christmas, and thank the millions of ingenious and entrepreneurial toy creators that make life so fun for the rest of us.

Excerpt from our forthcoming book, Superabundance.

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