Good news! The average worker has gone from spending about 25% of their paycheck on food in 1930[1] to about 11% today[2]. This is during a time period where the average worker has decreased their total hours[3]. This is confounded by more people entering the workforce, but the earliest data I can find suggests that we've gone from 58% of the population in the workforce in 1950 to 63% today[4].
[1] https://flatworldknowledge.lardbucket.org/books/beginning-ec... (Note that "Food" is "food as a percentage of income", and "eating out" is "eating out as a percentage of food" which makes the chart look weird. This means that the 11% number below includes the cost of the private taxi for your burrito.)
I'm more concerned about the graph attributed to flatworldknowledge.lardbucket.org. I've lived on the internet long enough to know a shitposter when I see one and that's a whale of a URL that every fiber of my body says never to click. I know it is a logical fallacy to dismiss an entire argument simply by association with a crank, but that's my gut reaction to that post.
... I didn't even notice the name. That site is an archive of a collection of textbooks that were Creative Commons-licensed before 2012, dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Evidently https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/beginning-economic-an... goes to the same place.
wait, are you saying they actually don't or is this some form of sarcasm? because the link clearly shows, to me at least, that they document the methods publicly
[1] https://flatworldknowledge.lardbucket.org/books/beginning-ec... (Note that "Food" is "food as a percentage of income", and "eating out" is "eating out as a percentage of food" which makes the chart look weird. This means that the 11% number below includes the cost of the private taxi for your burrito.)
[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/02/27/price-food-us-inflation-dat...
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18H2H
[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART