Brian Walsh
speaker
98 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 7 May
Brian Walsh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's probably one of the most established empirical regularities in all of economics, I'd say.
Well, that's really what's behind this whole thing.
So, you know, American farm productivity has just exploded over the past hundred years or so.
So, I mean, if you go back actually to like 1940, one American farmer would feed the equivalent of about 19 people.
You flash forwards today, that one farmer is feeding nearly 170 people, you know, and that's really what kind of, I think, drills down to the rest of the economy.
At the same time, of course, we're getting richer and that means we have more money to spend on other things beyond food.
Exactly.
There are, yeah.
I mean, in fact, the lower you go in terms of socioeconomic status, the lower you go in income, the more of that income does tend to get eaten up by food.
That's the case in the U.S.
It's also the case internationally.
So poorer countries, Nigeria, for instance, you spend nearly 60% of your income there.
on food.
So yeah, that average definitely hides a lot of variability.
And I don't want anyone to think that this means everyone has no trouble balancing their budget when it comes to food.
It's really more just the fact that on the whole, we're seeing a situation where we can devote more of our money to something else other than food, even with food prices feeling and actually going up.
Well, one thing I think it's a lot of it has to do with how people actually feel about prices, right?
Like, we're often not thinking when we're spending money, like, well, what percentage of this is coming out of my paycheck, right?
Like, we just look at the sticker price.
And, you know, food spikes really have grown.
Showing 61–80 of 98 · page 4 of 5
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