Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Food Price Trends

Matt Yglesias comments on a David Leonhardt article on housing costs; Leonhardt sees the issue as whether housing is a luxury or a utility.  If the former, then prices might rise; if the latter, prices will track other necessities.It's an interesting article which has also attracted comments from other bloggers.  One in particular was saying "housing" combined houses and land, and most of the appreciation was in land.  {UPdated: Kevin Drum comments.  One thing I haven't seen discussed is the increase in square footage for  housing over the period.]

But all that is a side issue to me, because there's an associated graph of the proportion of household income by category over the last  80 years.  Basically clothing and food had their peaks in 1947 or so, with a consistent decline in each to the present (a bit steeper for food than clothing).  Meanwhile health care costs have been rising steadily since 1947.  The changes in both food and health care are astonishing.

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