More dolls means better living why American abundance matters

President Trump downplayed the significance of potentially empty store shelves at his Wednesday Cabinet meeting. He said of goods from China that might go missing in the trade war, “much of it we don’t need.”Then, he elaborated the point: “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”At that moment, Trump surely made history: He must be the first president in history to say publicly that his policies will deprive American children of toys.The American Girl Disney Princess Cinderella Doll may be collateral damage in a trade fight that is supposed to reduce our strategic dependence on China.What Trump was ultimately dismissing is abundance, which is one of the marvels of our system.Fewer choices at a greater cost — whether of dolls or other goods — simply means a lower standard of living. The Human Progress project at the Cato Institute calculated “the time price” of various goods, or how long someone had to work to buy them, from 2000 to 2024.The time price of toys dropped by more than 88% over the period.In other words, the work that it took to afford to buy one toy a quarter-century ago would buy almost nine toys today. This is important, not because we want children to have nine times as many toys as they did in 2000, but the reduced time devoted to buying a toy can be used to buy something else (clothes, sports equipment, art supplies), or to work less. This same dynamic holds across the board.

Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute looked at the time price of 11 basic household goods from the 1950s to 2013.“The typical factory worker in 1959,” he writes, “would have had to work from January 1 until the middle of June to earn enough (pre-tax) income to purchase those 11 appliances, a worker in 1973 would have had to work from the first of the year until the second week of April, and today’s factory worker would ...