Thursday, September 3, 2009

How has food spending changed since the 1800s?

Newspapers and magazines keep report that the cost of food is increasing and the cost of healthy food is much higher than the cost of junk food.  But our frame of reference is usually very short.

What if we compare our food spending trends since the late 1800s?

According to Robert Fogel, University of Chicago business professor and 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics winner,  "Between 1875 and 1995, the share of family income spent on food, clothing, and shelter declined from 87 percent to just 30 percent, despite the fact that we eat more food, own more clothes, and have better and larger homes today than we had in 1875. All of this has been made possible by the growth in the productivity of traditional commodities. In the last quarter of the 19th century, it took 1,700 hours of labor to purchase the annual food supply for a family. Today it requires just 260 hours, and it is likely that by 2040, a family’s food supply will be purchased with about 160 hours of labor."

Considering Americans work more than 2000 hours per year (assuming a 40+ hour work week), where does the rest of our income go?


4 comments:

  1. I would guess that the extra income goes towards things people didn't spend money on in the past. $20,000 cars for everyone, $120,000 tuition, and lots of junk from Walmart

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  2. I'd love to see what household budgets looked like throughout history...

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  3. Here's one that goes back to 1901: http://www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/report991.pdf

    Food spending percentages:
    1901: 42.5%
    1918: 39.2%
    1934: 33.6%
    1950: 29.7%
    1960: 24.3%
    1972: 19.3%
    1984: 15.0%
    1996: 13.8%
    2002: 13.1%
    (page 66 has a graph)

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  4. Wow, that's great info. Thanks! I'll have to incorporate it into a future post...

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