Food

Perhaps the most egregious part of this is that the graph shows dollar expenditures, not meals bought.

• A store in 2014 sells 1000 hamburgers at $5 each = $5000 in expenditures
• Same store in 2024 sells 800 hamburgers at $10 each = $8000 in expenditures

It's common for companies to raise prices to increase revenue, even if raising prices results in fewer people buying your product. This shit is taught in high school economics. Absolutely nothing here shows anything about how many people can afford fast food.

Krugman may be one of the most willfully ignorant economists alive today.

Lol, coward has his replies limited so he doesn't get dunked on

Edit: lol deranged https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1800796843103990008

ugh. Food has become so expensive I can barely afford it

The_market_understander has logged on

And yet here you are eating. Very strange indeed.

Really cool how every necessity in the US is treated just like a stock: another speculative asset and the idea of making something to fulfill a purpose is just…alien to the American mind. Even if you profit from selling something people need and fulfilling that need.

I was thinking about winning the extremely scientific and intellectually rigorous Nobel Prize in Economics, but everytime I sit down to write Rich and Powerful People Are Rich and Powerful Because They Are Supposed to Be I have diarrhea.

Being an economist seems like the easiest job in world. Don't get me wrong, you're gonna need to give up your soul, but the actual work? Prices this, trickle down that, boots straps a bit, and boom pay cheque

You complain about more expensive food, yet you continue to spend too much money on it

We just want to survive

giving americans 2 small checks during covid has broken economists' brains

Holy fucking shit what an amazing willing misunderstanding of a graph

That’s not a graph of meals eaten at fast food, it’s money spent. That graph says exactly what he’s trying to disprove!!! That is a graph that says “people are spending more money on fast food” which is very easily explained by “the cost of fast food has increased”!

This isn’t even pissing on my head and telling me it’s raining, this is pissing on my head and telling me it’s a sunny day in the middle of a drought!

Isn't the Nobel in economics a scented banana sticker from a bank that helped tank the global economy in 2008?

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(5) When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. (6) Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!” --the revelation of st. john, ch. 6

a literally biblical famine is when food is so expensive that you have to work all day just to afford one day's worth of food for yourself, or one day's worth of less nutritious food for yourself and a small family

if food is too expensive, then why are you spending literally all of your money on it?

thanks Paul Krugman you're right I will never pay for food again it's stealing time

reminder that the "NOBel Prize in Economics" isn't even a real Nobel, is looked upon with disdain by the Nobels, was established to legitimize capitalist economics to the masses, and wasn't even presented along with the others for a while. so their highest award isn't even telling the truth about itself. you know how i know they didn't have to do all that if economics was a legitimate science? because their is no mathematics Nobel prize, and instead of inventing one, calling it the same name, and then arguing their way into the ceremony, there's just a different scandinavian prize established for math called the Abel prize. (The Fields Medal varies significantly in its criterion from other culminatory prizes in other fields and is not comparable to the Nobel despite being about equally prestigious.)

Dissolve his Nobel in aqua regia and make him drink it.

Congrats on normalizing to 2017 dollars, however the graph starts at a misleading 260 billion, not zero. I was always told it's considered bad form not to include the little squiggly break lines to show that on bar graphs.

So if the amount spent went from roughly 340 billion to 380 billion, ~10% increase, but the cost/quantity*quality of that food (which is difficult to calculate because of shrinkflation, shittier quality generally, and different items being on the menu) has easily gone up 25% at an absolutely uncontroversial low end, that proves the opposite, that people are eating fast food less than pre-covid.

After the revolution I want his nobel prize taken and awarded to me.

Fast food almost doubles in price and turnover goes up by 15%, surely this means that people are buying just as much fast food.

"Thou shalt not suffer an economist to live!"

Ooof imagine getting bodied by a Willy Wonka cosplayer

Does chained dollars account for the amount of people in the population? Because that seems pretty fucking important for these stats.

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Isn't "people buying things they can't afford" one of the most common mantras of mainstream economics? And now a nobel prize laureate tells us it don't happen?

Paul Krugman doesn't know how to rotate xlabels in R plots

The "Nobel Price" of Economics is not handed out by the nobel foundation - it's not a nobel price.

Fast food is not a necessity like housing is. He's got a point, I've noticed the same thing. I've seen nearly universal agreement everytime it comes up that McDonald's is overpriced shit and you can get a better burger for less anywhere else.

Know what I've never seen? A closed McDonald's.

It would be one thing if he was making the argument for food in general but if it's specifically fast food, yea people do keep complaining about it and then choosing to continue buying it for no apparent reason. Kinda like how gamers have been complaining about vidya going to shit for a decade while pre ordering every single aaa title.

And like with gaming i just stopped buying them but it gets pretty frustrating to listen to people complain about how overpriced and bullshit something is then keep voluntarily buying it.

And I'm sure like with gaming when I say if you think it's overpriced bulllshit stop buying it I'll be told not to tell people what to do with their money.

Maybe it's just my rural privellage of not having a fast food place within 30 miles of me but yea, I don't understand why not eating fast food is such a ridiculous proposal. Let these billion dollar companies who abuse every living being that comes in contact with their supply chain from cows to farmers to workers die out.