Silent Like Sylvia

theatlantic:

Big Maconomics: How McDonald’s Explains the World

The Big Mac is a triumph of technology. 

For thousands of years, families devoted the majority of their lives to food. Their waking hours were spent growing and harvesting crops, and most of their income from growing and harvesting went right back into eating. Deep into the late pre-industrial era, unskilled laborers worked grueling hours in fields to earn an income that could often barely feed their family. As Gregory Clark explained in his book A Farewell to Alms, up until the 1700s, the English diet consisted, monotonously, of mostly bread and beer, won only after hours that would make a modern i-banker blush. Food output per person was so meager that “British farm laborers by 1863 had just reached the median consumption of [primitive] forager and subsistence societies.”

Today, food is faster. The Big Mac takes very little work for any one person. It is a product of as much automated manufacturing as human labor. Even U.S. food-prep workers, by some measures the poorest-paid major occupation in America, earn enough to buy more than two Big Macs — that’s 1,000+ calories — in just an hour of their work. […]

In additional to being a technological marvel, the Big Mac moonlights as an economic tool. Every year theEconomist calculates a Big Mac Index for the purpose of (being cheeky and) testing what currencies are overvalued compared to the U.S. The results are often illuminating. This year identified Switzerland and Brazil as particularly overvalued. The flight from euros is lifting the franc and the real’s appreciation has blunted Brazil’s export growth. So, the Big Mac isn’t just some dumb lump of something resembling meat. It’s an international barometer of economic activity.

And now, in a research paper released last week, Princeton’s Orley C. Ashenfelter has done something truly fascinating with the Big Mac. He used the world’s most famous sandwich to help us answer one of the trickiest questions in all of economics:  How do poor nations get rich?

Read more.

(via npr)