Cheese, Rats, and Giffen Goods

timharford.com

39 points·background··7 comments

This part stood out to me:

> So it wasn’t quinine water in a Texas laboratory, or rice in Hunan, that made me think recently of Giffen goods. It was the alarming rise in the price of a cheese salad sandwich. The latest data from the UK show that sliced white bread has risen in price by 29 per cent over the past 12 months, with tomatoes up 16 per cent, butter up 30 per cent, cheddar cheese up 42 per cent and cucumber 55 per cent more expensive. (Headline inflation, meanwhile, is just over 10 per cent.)

Someone should track the cheapest options out there, or just generally discover what the poorest buy and how much inflation has hit them.

I'm sure it's not as simple as a list of the foods that the poorest people buy. (And there can be time vs. money substitutions as well.) But it seems like a representative market basket of foods typically consumed (which aren't necessarily always the cheapest) should be possible.

I want a representative market basket of foods that poor people buy.

> I am not claiming that cheddar cheese is essential to life; it just seems that way.

Watch it, Limey. We all know cheddar cheese is essential.

I was under the impression that potatoes during the great Irish potato famine acted as a Giffen good. I guess not.

According to Wikipedia, they were once considered an example of such but that was discredited by later research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good#:~:text=Potatoes%2....

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