Reply To: Bitcoin: does anyone get it??

[burton]

Prices are relative, yes, but some are more relative than others. I’d like to see a comparison that takes the median income of a person every ten years from 1958 to 2018, and works out how many minutes’ worth of pay it takes to buy a pint of beer, a pint of milk, a bottle of Bordeaux wine, a bottle of Champagne, a litre or petrol, a kilo of potatoes and a kilo of bananas. I think we’d see that the time it takes to earn each of those things will have fallen substantially, but that the Bordeaux, the Champagne and the bananas will have fallen the most.

I’d like to see that too! The closest I could get after 10 minutes of googling was the following:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160108042644/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/elmr/an-examination-of-falling-real-wages/2010-to-2013/art-an-examination-of-falling-real-wages.html?format=print

If I’m reading Figure 1 correctly, when the blue area (average weekly earnings growth) is above the red line (Retail Price Index), cost of living relative to earnings was lower than when it was below it – a relatively nice and comfortable position to be in. Since the financial crash, the blue area is consistently lower than the red line, indicative of a growing divergence between earnings and cost of living – with things getting more expensive relative to wages.