Word: spend
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...wealthiest readers will have noticed by now that food costs have risen this year. In May grocery prices were 4.4% higher than they were the previous May. If 4.4% doesn't sound like much--you spend $104.40 now for a cartful that was $100 a year ago--it's a huge deal to food producers and to budget shoppers, who are making lots of casseroles. The Department of Agriculture anticipates that grocery prices won't significantly fall before January; if the USDA is right, you would have to go back to 1990 to find a bigger single-year increase...
...little historical perspective: despite the recent price run-up, Americans still spend less to feed themselves than any other people on the planet--probably less than any monetized society in history. Just 9.9¢ of each dollar we spend is for food, down from 23.4¢ in 1929. By comparison, 16% of household expenditures in Britain go to food; Brazilians spend 23%, Thais...
Americans don't spend much on food largely because we just don't want to. As a society gets richer, its people tend to use their extra income for things like recreation and education, not daily sustenance. This relationship between food and income--as you get rich, you spend proportionately less to eat--has held so strongly over so many generations that economists have given it a name: Engel's law (for Ernst Engel, a 19th century statistician). The foodie revolution that began in the '70s--arugula over iceberg, short ribs over brisket, etc.--has challenged Engel's law among...
...taxes as typical New York City liberalism. Both sides would say he lacked national security experience and explore his background, looking for business and personal vulnerabilities. Bloomberg would try to fight off the efforts to define him with hundreds of millions of dollars of television commercials, and would likely spend a similar amount trying to define the other candidates as out of touch and extreme...
...latter part of this century the father has been sidelined in a new, more disturbing way. Today he's often just plain absent. Rising divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births mean that more than 40% of all children born between 1970 and 1984 are likely to spend much of their childhood living in single-parent homes. In 1990, 25% were living with only their mothers, compared with 5% in 1960. Says David Blankenhorn, the founder of the Institute for American Values in New York City: "This trend of fatherlessness is the most socially consequential family trend of our generation...