Do you agree with the statement "Food is at least as expensive in America in 2014 as it was in 1974"? If so I have some really great news for you, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Do you agree with the statement "Food is at least as expensive in America in 2014 as it was in 1974"?
No; that wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making was that, as a responder to you noted, food has not fallen in price the way other things like electronics have. Granted, there isn't a Moore's Law for food the way there is for computers, as someone noted downthread; but still, it doesn't seem like food has fallen in price as much as it should have given the increases in productivity that have taken place. I think a key reason for this is that the government messes with food prices in ways that it does not mess with prices in other sectors of the economy.
But another point that could be made is that, if food has fallen significantly in price (which, as several posters now have quoted numbers to show, it has), why do we still hear so much about people having trouble making ends meet at the low end of the income scale? In other words, is the problem Altman is talking about a real problem, or just a perceived problem?
Do you agree with the statement "For a few hundred dollars today, you can buy orders of magnitude more [food] than existed in the entire world [in 1974]"?
I kid, of course - and I'm actually interested in hearing the parent poster's response - but clearly food hasn't fallen in the same way that electronics have.
