https://x.com/NathanJRobinson/status/1800915894585147399
Krugman, despite being a neoliberal knows that food is an essential item. So likely he is propagandizing for Biden.
Look at personal savings rate.
Perhaps the most egregious part of this is that the graph shows dollar expenditures, not meals bought.
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.
Also, the other thing is to look at with this is people eating out generally, there could also be the phenomena of middle class people responding to increased prices by eating fast food more to substitute more expensive take out options.
Another factor is people could generally be living further from work now than 10 years ago due to higher rents. Meaning they're more likely to eat a meal near their office while having less time to cook, hence needing fast food.
This was kind of my first thought. I eat out more when I'm stressed because of the comfort of eating out and the lack of energy to cook for myself, even if it puts me in a worse economic situation. Sometimes you have to cope just to keep alive. Maybe we can coin the term "copeanomics" to describe increased sales of "luxury" items in times of increased societal instability.
Maybe we can coin the term "copeanomics"
There probably is already an industry term for it, because it's basically the fast food indutry's entire business model.
I have coworkers who purchase takeout food and/or coffee every single day despite their having literally no money (one coworker actually ran out of money one day and refused like five offers from me to buy him lunch) so I’ve been wondering about this. I make my own lunch and coffee and save immense amounts of money from doing so, but this may also be a form of privilege.
And don’t forget good ol’ fashioned doomspending. If you’ll never afford a house and aren’t even sure you’ll still be able to afford rent in the distant future, why bother saving that $12? Just go ahead and treat yourself to the overpriced burg while you still can.
I thought so too, but look at the y axis. These are inflation adjusted, to 2017 dollars
as people in the replies to Stancil (linked by Parsani below) mention, the CPI adjustment is based on overall inflation, not inflation of restaurant prices specifically, so it's still flawed IMO since I believe restaurant (especially fast food) price inflation significantly outpaces overall inflation.
Even adjusting for inflation, it's common to raise prices to increase revenue (consumer expenditures). There are business people all over the world right now drawing up graphs of how much total revenue they can generate at different price points, and low price/mass sales is not a good approach for many companies.
This is an important point, because prices are set largely by what people are willing to pay, not costs + whatever margin a company picks, for example. Tons of right-wing media pretends industry does rudimentary cost + margin pricing to push talking points like "if our business has to pay one cent more in taxes or wages that will ultimately be paid by consumers," which is preposterous theoretically and has been disproven by real data over and over.
not costs + whatever margin a company picks
Basically: sale price is determined by what company thinks maximizes overall profit, cost of product (including shrink) determines whether the product is carried at all. It's something I bring up in the shoplifting debate a lot, as people assume it increases price of individual items. Of course shrink plays a role when businesses make decisions, but why would a business charge you less than you're willing to pay for an item?
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
Also the guy who says the economy is doing great (if you ignore food and housing)
Beyond clownworld
Stancil is the fucking worst 
might as well eat out while you can, the climate is collapsing, the economy is struggling and constantly appears to be on the brink of recession (and in some sectors layoffs are already sweeping), oh and we're brushing up dangerously close to another pandemic with bird flu. What point is there in pinching pennies when you know you can't win?
Is Stancil grooming himself as Krugman’s protegé? It’s a decent grift: the guy has purportedly banked ~$5M, which is enough to retire on, if you can do without avocado toast.
Shut up, Wesley!
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.
Americans are bad at dystopian fiction because every time some nerd is like "imagine a terrible future where you pay money for air" a whole rogues gallery of lamprey-men think it sounds like a great idea.
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
I mean, they get called the high priests of capitalism for a reason
It seems that there's a swarm of midwit failsons competing to be the next krugman constantly backstabbing eachother and making eachother miserable. Most of them are just smart enough to know their field is bullshit but not smart enough to do anything else. I'd say it's a miserable existence but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still hang them all.
The ones who aren't smart enough become behavioural economists
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
The social cost of the pandemic will be felt for years if not decades. Incalculable. Our government says "here's a tenner and a bag of peanuts."
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?
Yes. It has nothing to do with Nobel. They just slapped the name on it because they wanted to add legitimacy to their bullshit. It's like getting a "Nobel prize" in Ouiji Boarding.
(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?
when did we get a biblically accurate brandon
about 3 years ago
Nobel economics prize: not a real Nobel. It's technically called The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, because economists are insufferable nerds and aren't comparable to real arts and sciences.
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.
Crassus Prize
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.
"Thou shalt not suffer an economist to live!" 
Fast food almost doubles in price and turnover goes up by 15%, surely this means that people are buying just as much fast food.
Ooof imagine getting bodied by a Willy Wonka cosplayer 
Michael Hudson always roasts this guy.
Does chained dollars account for the amount of people in the population? Because that seems pretty fucking important for these stats.
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?
The "Nobel Price" of Economics is not handed out by the nobel foundation - it's not a nobel price.
Paul Krugman doesn't know how to rotate xlabels in R plots 
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.
Most people are 🐑🐏
They're not thinking critically about what they buy, and they don't have enough brains to comprehend their hypocrisy. They're just saying things to say them, not to try to advance understanding.
It's depressing living in a society like the US and being surrounded by these people all day, every day.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
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Dunk posts in general go in the_dunk_tank, not here
Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from the_dunk_tank