Saturday, January 8, 2011

What is Cornucopia? Boudreaux vs. DeLong

My definition is similar to David Henderson's with a small change. His:
Comparing the prices charged in the Montgomery Ward catalog with prices today--both expressed as a multiple of the average hourly wage--provides an index of how much our productivity in making the goods consumed back in 1895 has multiplied.

We can go a little farther. Compare the entropy of the total wage channel to the total oil channel. In the oil channel we compute both wholesale and retail prices, assume that captures the complete channel. With wage entropy we assume people are earning money all along the distribution chain. Are both channels coherent to each other.

A cheap way to compare both channels is to compare median and mean gas prices at the pump over a  time window.

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