8 ms·

Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation

36 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

ansgarellen 3y ago
[dead]
hnbad 3y ago
It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) for the price hikes but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again. Meanwhile overall wages don't seem to track inflation. It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because of the increased cost of living, not the other way around.
- bhpm 3y ago
  It’s so weird to me that the labor story seems to leave out that 1m people died in the pandemic and also the largest generation in history is retiring.
  - runsWphotons 3y ago
    The people who died would have mostly been retired or lower productivity. Shouldnt impact labor costs much. Age pyramid definitely would though.
    - bhpm 3y ago
      > Johnson took excess deaths and COVID deaths by age and applied labor force participation rates by age. And he got 300,000 workers who died as a result of COVID. Add that to the long-haul workers, and we’ve lost 1.9 million workers — or 18% of currently unfilled jobs. Note: most of those long-haulers have recovered, but I suspect that a great many of those didn’t recover back to their original job. That means during the time they were disabled, they had to be replaced, possibly at a higher wage. https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-has-been-lost-covid-19/ https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-...
      - runsWphotons 3y ago
        I am pretty dubious of this based on the age distribution of deaths (most were over 65 and 50-65 is the only bracket with large numbers who werent below retirement age--average is 61) but thank you for providing a counter argument with data.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      Long COVID would, though. And if people who would mostly have been retired or lower productivity are more likely to die and children don't contribute to the labor force in most of the US, long COVID would affect working age people primarily, no?
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        [flagged]
        hnbad 3y ago
        [flagged]
        bhpm 3y ago
        Does it occur more often in those cohorts, or are those cohorts more likely to be in contact with medical professionals who will take them seriously? https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/black-hispanic-people-may-be-more-likely-have-long-covid-not-be-diagnosed https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/black-hispanic-people-ma...
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        That data come from surveying people directly, not data aggregated through medical professionals. So no, your supposition is incorrect. Transgender people really do report a 4x higher rate of severe long covid symptoms as "cisgendered" people. That's according to their own answers to surveys, not according to doctors. If you think the result is anomalous, then explain why transgender sufferers of severe long covid are more likely to respond to surveys than any other sufferer of severe long covid. Response to hnbad's flagged response: "people who believe long COVID is a thing are more likely to seek out a long COVID diagnosis whereas those believing it's not a thing are more likely to "push through" and remain undiagnosed even when their condition may be severe and debilitating." Real and earnest "severe and debilitating" afflictions aren't something you can successfully "push through" and remain productive with. If you can push through them, and evidently most of the working class can, then at the very least it's certainly not as severe and debilitating as advertised. Some people may earnestly have some mild lingering fatigue issues, as is the case after any viral infection, but that's about it. However that doesn't make severe disabling long covid, the sort that would actually hurt the economy, a hoax. There is a difference between a hoax and delusion. A hoax is a falsehood promulgated by somebody who knows it isn't true. Long covid is a hysteria promulgated by people who earnestly believe it is true, to their own detriment.
  - killingtime74 3y ago
    1m is worldwide right? I see excess deaths for US for the entire pandemic is around 470k. The US population grew 1.5 million just from July '22 to July '23. This is apparently above trend. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/19/texas-2023-population-growth-census/ https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/19/texas-2023-populatio... Ref: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
    - skygazer 3y ago
      I think it was over a million just in the US just based on reported cause on death certificates. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - tekla 3y ago
      I'm going to guess you didn't read your own sources > The raw death count gives us a sense of scale: for example, the US suffered roughly 470,000 excess deaths in 2020, compared to 352,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that year. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home Total Deaths 1,159,864 That roughly tracks.
      - killingtime74 3y ago
        However that two years of excess mortality is still less than one year of population growth. How do you answer that
        dehugger 3y ago
        Babies don't work in grocery stores.
        3y ago
  - vondur 3y ago
    I was under the assumption that the majority of people dying were at the 50+ age range. So not as many people that were employed.
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      Outside of software developers (more specifically, software developers in the Bay Area), most people work waaaaay past 50. At least 10 more years, and more than a few are probably going 15-20.
  - elijah_moham 3y ago
    [flagged]
- tmaly 3y ago
  Just because someone writes an article and cites increased labor costs, doesn't make it true. There are a lot of other factors that are driving prices.
- enragedcacti 3y ago
  > It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again. I don't really have a strong opinion on the veracity, but I think the guy being interviewed is trying to provide an explanation for why restaurants specifically have 4x more MoM inflation than groceries. I don't think he's making an overall claim about the cause of recent inflation. As far as the relationship between increased labor costs and low unemployment, lower unemployment gives workers more opportunities to vote with their feet and gives unionized workers more bargaining power.
- ajross 3y ago
  > It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because of the increased cost of living, not the other way around. This is backwards. No business increases wages because employees ask for it. Employees always ask for higher wages. Wages go up when you can't find workers for lower wages.
xnx 3y ago
This soft landing will be viewed as one of the greatest economic achievements in history.
- JaceLightning 3y ago
  if there is a soft landing... the recession is penciled in for Q3 2024 currently based on yield curve inversions.
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    And unlike the last eight predicted recessions, this predicted recession might actually happen! On account of it still being in the future.
    - jerf 3y ago
      Yield curve inversions are not excitable attention-seeking pundits, but an emergent measure of the market as a whole. They are also not 100% accurate... but they're fairly accurate. There are also sensible reasons to believe they are indeed causally connected to some reasonable degree, so it's not throwing chicken livers and reading the future either. It's best not to conflate actual measures being tentatively interpreted on the basis of a century of history with some guy with a camera and a YouTube channel. They're not even the same category of thing, as pondering that for a moment will show.
      - ajross 3y ago
        > It's best not to conflate actual measures being tentatively interpreted on the basis of a century of history with some guy with a camera and a YouTube channel The commenter upthread "penciled in" a recession for Q3 of next year and cited your favorite metric. I think that's closer to a TikTok hit than a "tentatively interpreted" bit of pop economics. But to treat with your actual point: it still sounds like bunk to me. I had to dig, but FRED does indeed have a chart for this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y) and sure, if you squint, it looks like it predicts. Except that the time between an inversion and the predicted recession is all over the map. It looks like the 1988 recession took two years (!) to actually arrive, while the 1980 recession jumped the gun. And 2008 seems to refute the theory, because the inversion had corrected itself almost a year before the financial crisis (which pretty clearly had nothing to do with bond rates anyway). Also the magnitude of the inversion doesn't seem to have any correlation with the recession, the inversion swung way lower in the late 70's than it did any other time, but that recession was actually pretty mild. And the inversion of 2006 was barely an inversion at all. Yeah, this is wrong. No serious economics seem to be pushing this. We have an inversion right now because the Fed has been swinging its hammer like crazy and the market is responding to the fact that they think rates are going to drop rapidly RSN (which is a higher risk for longer term bonds, obviously). That explanation makes a ton more sense than some handwaving about a "predictive metric".
JaceLightning 3y ago
You know, they use food prices to calculate inflation...
- jwtorres 3y ago
  They also use fuel, rent, and a bunch of other things. So I think it's valid to compare the two.
EricDeb 3y ago
It's really housing that needs the fix and I dont think they have a solution to that one
- swells34 3y ago
  There is a bill in the works right now to keep mutual funds and similar from just scooping up every house they can for rent, I imagine there are very few actions that could make more of a difference.
  - minkiebun 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jamestimmins 3y ago
    Housing costs are driven by local supply issues vastly more than big national buyers. They're just swooping in because the massive undersupply has made them a good asset to own in the past 15 years.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    Building more housing. Building a lot more housing would make a much larger difference. In terms of specific government actions, that's upzoning all residential areas and approving plans by default with chance for challenges if they fit within established (reasonable) requirements.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    Are the mutual funds immune from supply & demand economics or are they just taking advantage of a shortage that means real estate prices go inexorably up? Maybe we could just increase supply and then the mutual funds won't be so interested in buying up the supply. Although I don't know how that's bad to begin with -- it's not like everyone wants to own their own home.
throwawayqe 3y ago
[flagged]
elijah_moham 3y ago
[flagged]

36 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

[dead]

It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) for the price hikes but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again. Meanwhile overall wages don't seem to track inflation. It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because of the increased cost of living, not the other way around.

bhpm 3y ago
It’s so weird to me that the labor story seems to leave out that 1m people died in the pandemic and also the largest generation in history is retiring.
- runsWphotons 3y ago
  The people who died would have mostly been retired or lower productivity. Shouldnt impact labor costs much. Age pyramid definitely would though.
  - bhpm 3y ago
    > Johnson took excess deaths and COVID deaths by age and applied labor force participation rates by age. And he got 300,000 workers who died as a result of COVID. Add that to the long-haul workers, and we’ve lost 1.9 million workers — or 18% of currently unfilled jobs. Note: most of those long-haulers have recovered, but I suspect that a great many of those didn’t recover back to their original job. That means during the time they were disabled, they had to be replaced, possibly at a higher wage. https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-has-been-lost-covid-19/ https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/how-much-labor-force-...
    - runsWphotons 3y ago
      I am pretty dubious of this based on the age distribution of deaths (most were over 65 and 50-65 is the only bracket with large numbers who werent below retirement age--average is 61) but thank you for providing a counter argument with data.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Long COVID would, though. And if people who would mostly have been retired or lower productivity are more likely to die and children don't contribute to the labor force in most of the US, long COVID would affect working age people primarily, no?
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - hnbad 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - bhpm 3y ago
        Does it occur more often in those cohorts, or are those cohorts more likely to be in contact with medical professionals who will take them seriously? https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/black-hispanic-people-may-be-more-likely-have-long-covid-not-be-diagnosed https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/black-hispanic-people-ma...
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        That data come from surveying people directly, not data aggregated through medical professionals. So no, your supposition is incorrect. Transgender people really do report a 4x higher rate of severe long covid symptoms as "cisgendered" people. That's according to their own answers to surveys, not according to doctors. If you think the result is anomalous, then explain why transgender sufferers of severe long covid are more likely to respond to surveys than any other sufferer of severe long covid. Response to hnbad's flagged response: "people who believe long COVID is a thing are more likely to seek out a long COVID diagnosis whereas those believing it's not a thing are more likely to "push through" and remain undiagnosed even when their condition may be severe and debilitating." Real and earnest "severe and debilitating" afflictions aren't something you can successfully "push through" and remain productive with. If you can push through them, and evidently most of the working class can, then at the very least it's certainly not as severe and debilitating as advertised. Some people may earnestly have some mild lingering fatigue issues, as is the case after any viral infection, but that's about it. However that doesn't make severe disabling long covid, the sort that would actually hurt the economy, a hoax. There is a difference between a hoax and delusion. A hoax is a falsehood promulgated by somebody who knows it isn't true. Long covid is a hysteria promulgated by people who earnestly believe it is true, to their own detriment.
- killingtime74 3y ago
  1m is worldwide right? I see excess deaths for US for the entire pandemic is around 470k. The US population grew 1.5 million just from July '22 to July '23. This is apparently above trend. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/19/texas-2023-population-growth-census/ https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/19/texas-2023-populatio... Ref: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
  - skygazer 3y ago
    I think it was over a million just in the US just based on reported cause on death certificates. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - tekla 3y ago
    I'm going to guess you didn't read your own sources > The raw death count gives us a sense of scale: for example, the US suffered roughly 470,000 excess deaths in 2020, compared to 352,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that year. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home Total Deaths 1,159,864 That roughly tracks.
    - killingtime74 3y ago
      However that two years of excess mortality is still less than one year of population growth. How do you answer that
      - dehugger 3y ago
        Babies don't work in grocery stores.
        3y ago
- vondur 3y ago
  I was under the assumption that the majority of people dying were at the 50+ age range. So not as many people that were employed.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    Outside of software developers (more specifically, software developers in the Bay Area), most people work waaaaay past 50. At least 10 more years, and more than a few are probably going 15-20.
- elijah_moham 3y ago
  [flagged]
tmaly 3y ago
Just because someone writes an article and cites increased labor costs, doesn't make it true. There are a lot of other factors that are driving prices.
enragedcacti 3y ago
> It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again. I don't really have a strong opinion on the veracity, but I think the guy being interviewed is trying to provide an explanation for why restaurants specifically have 4x more MoM inflation than groceries. I don't think he's making an overall claim about the cause of recent inflation. As far as the relationship between increased labor costs and low unemployment, lower unemployment gives workers more opportunities to vote with their feet and gives unionized workers more bargaining power.
ajross 3y ago
> It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because of the increased cost of living, not the other way around. This is backwards. No business increases wages because employees ask for it. Employees always ask for higher wages. Wages go up when you can't find workers for lower wages.

xnx 3y ago

This soft landing will be viewed as one of the greatest economic achievements in history.

JaceLightning 3y ago
if there is a soft landing... the recession is penciled in for Q3 2024 currently based on yield curve inversions.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  And unlike the last eight predicted recessions, this predicted recession might actually happen! On account of it still being in the future.
  - jerf 3y ago
    Yield curve inversions are not excitable attention-seeking pundits, but an emergent measure of the market as a whole. They are also not 100% accurate... but they're fairly accurate. There are also sensible reasons to believe they are indeed causally connected to some reasonable degree, so it's not throwing chicken livers and reading the future either. It's best not to conflate actual measures being tentatively interpreted on the basis of a century of history with some guy with a camera and a YouTube channel. They're not even the same category of thing, as pondering that for a moment will show.
    - ajross 3y ago
      > It's best not to conflate actual measures being tentatively interpreted on the basis of a century of history with some guy with a camera and a YouTube channel The commenter upthread "penciled in" a recession for Q3 of next year and cited your favorite metric. I think that's closer to a TikTok hit than a "tentatively interpreted" bit of pop economics. But to treat with your actual point: it still sounds like bunk to me. I had to dig, but FRED does indeed have a chart for this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y) and sure, if you squint, it looks like it predicts. Except that the time between an inversion and the predicted recession is all over the map. It looks like the 1988 recession took two years (!) to actually arrive, while the 1980 recession jumped the gun. And 2008 seems to refute the theory, because the inversion had corrected itself almost a year before the financial crisis (which pretty clearly had nothing to do with bond rates anyway). Also the magnitude of the inversion doesn't seem to have any correlation with the recession, the inversion swung way lower in the late 70's than it did any other time, but that recession was actually pretty mild. And the inversion of 2006 was barely an inversion at all. Yeah, this is wrong. No serious economics seem to be pushing this. We have an inversion right now because the Fed has been swinging its hammer like crazy and the market is responding to the fact that they think rates are going to drop rapidly RSN (which is a higher risk for longer term bonds, obviously). That explanation makes a ton more sense than some handwaving about a "predictive metric".

JaceLightning 3y ago

You know, they use food prices to calculate inflation...

jwtorres 3y ago
They also use fuel, rent, and a bunch of other things. So I think it's valid to compare the two.

EricDeb 3y ago

It's really housing that needs the fix and I dont think they have a solution to that one

swells34 3y ago
There is a bill in the works right now to keep mutual funds and similar from just scooping up every house they can for rent, I imagine there are very few actions that could make more of a difference.
- minkiebun 3y ago
  [dead]
- jamestimmins 3y ago
  Housing costs are driven by local supply issues vastly more than big national buyers. They're just swooping in because the massive undersupply has made them a good asset to own in the past 15 years.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  Building more housing. Building a lot more housing would make a much larger difference. In terms of specific government actions, that's upzoning all residential areas and approving plans by default with chance for challenges if they fit within established (reasonable) requirements.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Are the mutual funds immune from supply & demand economics or are they just taking advantage of a shortage that means real estate prices go inexorably up? Maybe we could just increase supply and then the mutual funds won't be so interested in buying up the supply. Although I don't know how that's bad to begin with -- it's not like everyone wants to own their own home.

throwawayqe 3y ago

[flagged]

elijah_moham 3y ago

[flagged]