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Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

bloomberg.com

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Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#131

Post by dijit »

xyst wrote: post #118

Rising food costs. Rising housing costs. Rising unemployment and stagnating wages. Another crash coming in the next couple of years?

Are you kidding. There will be an insane recession, if not a depression.

Capitalist economies have a short boom bust cycle and a long one. Short ones cause recessions every 10-20 years. Long ones cause depressions every 100~ years.

It was clearly stated that Covid (if nothing else) could easily cause a recession, with other factors played in as well then it could easily trigger a depression.

Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#132

Post by ceejayoz »

chii wrote: post #130
pmlnr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boot…

So why did't the poorer man buy the more expensive boots using a loan, and then pay it off over the life time of the boots? That would've prevented him from spending hundred dollars on bad boots over and over again. So i argue that it's poor planning.

To be clear, your question is "why don't poor people just get loans"?

Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#133

Post by yorwba »

j4yav wrote: post #109
octodog wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The snark in this comment is completely unnecessary. It is better for everyone if you make your point in a more constructive manner.

I didn’t really read it as snark. It has historically been pretty shocking here to find a top comment so confidently wrong and just seemingly totally made up (farmers going bankrupt just like the Great Depression.. because food prices are going up?), and it’s fair to directly call it out. It wasn’t done in any particularly mean way as best I can tell.

> It has historically been pretty shocking here to find a top comment so confidently wrong

You should not be shocked by that, because every comment starts out as the top comment, votes only affect how quickly it drops. If you come back a few days later and the top comment is still confidently wrong, maybe you can be shocked then.

Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#134

Post by gambiting »

dijit wrote: post #131
xyst wrote: post #118

Rising food costs. Rising housing costs. Rising unemployment and stagnating wages. Another crash coming in the next couple of years?

Are you kidding. There will be an insane recession, if not a depression. Capitalist economies have a short boom bust cycle and a long one. Short ones cause recessions every 10-20 years. Long ones cause depressions every 100~ years. It was clearly stated that Covid (if nothing else) could easily cause a recession, with other factors played in as well then it could easily trigger a depression.

Can you explain the difference between those, for those of us who are not well versed in economics terms?

Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#135

Post by kypro »

rapnie wrote: post #70
dbetteridge wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like. I'll pay you minimum wage, but charge you exorbitant amounts for board and lodging and you have no choice because it's the middle of nowhere. Or for the extra dodgy types, cash payments below minimum wage because they know international workers are less likely to know their rights and be aware of what the minimum wage is.

The first happens in The Netherlands on large scale, since they deregulated job agencies. There are 1,000's of shady ones, where administratively all is fine and dandy, but in practice foreign labour is paid far below minimum wage + they are often threatened to not speak up, passport taken, etc. This, btw, happens all across the EU is my impression. Modern-day slavery very much alive globally even!

The problem here is more of a supply / demand thing which you can't simply ignore that because the issue will never go away so long as the incentives for it exist.

If farmers paid good wages they wouldn't need to rely on foreign labour and food prices would go up. This is a workable solution, but is is what people living in western countries want?

We have the same issue here in the UK with the NHS.. We pay NHS workers terrible wages so we need to import foreign labour because wages aren't high enough to attract domestic workers. In one sense it's great because we get better health care than we would otherwise afford and foreigners have an opportunity to get better pay in the UK (even if it's bad by UK standards).

I've found many people here get angry about what we pay NHS workers while also getting angry about NHS waiting times. If we wanted to we could increase wages which would either require resource cuts and lower output or higher taxes for the same level of care. It would also mean we wouldn't need to depend on foreign labour, but who benefits from this? By paying more foreigners now have less opportunity to move to the UK and British citizens have sub-par / higher cost health care.

Presumably, it's the same with agricultural workers. Sure you can pay more, but who benefits from it? The root "problem" is that labour is extremely cheap outside of developed countries. Developed countries can cut themselves off from that labour supply if they like, but I have no idea what the economic incentive (or benefit) of doing so is for either the workers or the citizens. Call it modern-day slavery if you like but these are consensual working relationships, which presumably wouldn't take place if they didn't benefit both the worker and the employer.

So long as labour remains cheap outside of the developed world a trade off will always exist – paying more will just mean higher prices for citizens and fewer opportunities for those living in the poorest parts of the world, but on the up side you can say you pay a fairer wage by your own national standards.

Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#136

Post by jeofken »

chii wrote: post #125
aww_dang wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only they could print productivity to match.

That's what automation is - it's one of the leading causes of increased productivity in the last half century.

Money printing became decoupled from anything real in 1971.

See here what happened to the correlation between productivity and labour income after this https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#138

Post by luxuryballs »

dijit wrote: post #131
xyst wrote: post #118

Rising food costs. Rising housing costs. Rising unemployment and stagnating wages. Another crash coming in the next couple of years?

Are you kidding. There will be an insane recession, if not a depression. Capitalist economies have a short boom bust cycle and a long one. Short ones cause recessions every 10-20 years. Long ones cause depressions every 100~ years. It was clearly stated that Covid (if nothing else) could easily cause a recession, with other factors played in as well then it could easily trigger a depression.

These boom bust cycles are caused by fiat money, inflationary debt/spending, government stimulus and over regulation that causes false market signals and creates bubbles, it’s not a capitalism problem, capitalism would be the solution.

Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#139

Post by meepmorp »

imtringued wrote: post #59
baybal2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year we had: 1. Biblical scale locust infestation in much of Africa, and Asia 2. Floods in East Asia 3. Early winter in Russia, Ukraine, and North China 4. Failed, and missed sowing of grains in much of above regions 5. Shipping disruptions, and resulting food spoilage, and waste 6. Granaries busted, and people burning through many months worth of grain, and flour in much of third world due to initial COVID pani…

That aljazeera link doesn't sit right with me. I mean, just look at that first picture. It's a small child sitting in a sandy place with a stainless steel bowl with porridge like food inside. There is no civilization in sight. Maybe some village houses, which represent the bare minimum shelter needed. So now you get to ask yourself, should I feel pity or should I recognize that this child is not living in an environm…

No civilization in sight? There are actual houses in the background of that photo.

Re: Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

#140

Post by mnw21cam »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #81
z92 wrote: post #5

I don't get how food consumption can increase in a pandemic. Should be constant in or outside a pandemic situation. Possibly somewhere crops are getting rotten because of newly imposed export restrictions, or for some other things.

Food consumption changes: Pre-pandemic, a good amount of meals would be eaten out of the house. School lunches, breakfast on the way to work, lunch break at the work cafeteria or a fast food place (sure, some folks bring lunch, but many places don't offer a break room that is adequate). All of this - and things like toilet paper - shifts to consumer goods instead of bulk goods, which takes different equipment and pro…

In the UK, last year we had a terrible shortage of bread flour in the supermarkets.

Actually, what we had was a sudden reduction in the amount of flour being used by bakeries, and an increase in the amount of flour being used at home. There wasn't a shortage of flour - there was a shortage of small bags to put it in for selling at a supermarket. The industry was all set up for selling a decent proportion of flour in really large bags.

Likewise, for simple goods like vegetables, dairy, and beer, some suppliers have suddenly had their customers disappear, because they normally sold to restaurants, pubs, and caterers, where other suppliers have not been able to keep up with demand, because they sold to supermarkets. The obvious solution is for the suppliers who previously sold to caterers to sell to supermarkets instead, but it takes a while for these contracts and logistics to be sorted out.

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