K-12 Tax & $pending climate: “Always compare prices to hourly wages to understand the true change in living standards”
To examine the data from a different perspective, we calculated the change in the time prices of these 14 items relative to the change in the average hourly wage rate. We then calculated the abundance multiplier—a value indicating how many units you could buy today for the time it took to earn money to buy one unit in 2000. If there were no change, the abundance multiplier would equal one. A value below one indicates decreasing abundance, while a value above one reflects increasing abundance. We also calculated the percentage change in abundance for each item.
