All human civilisation depends on falling prices
There was an odd item on the BBC this week, fretting about the proposed Sainsbury-Asda merger on the grounds that managers were promising a ten per cent fall in shop prices. A report was beamed in from a barn in Gloucestershire suggesting that such a fall, far from being a cause for celebration, would hurt small family farms.
I suspect that fear is misplaced. The savings would come largely from economies of scale and, in any case, supermarkets buy mainly from big agri-businesses, not family farms – despite the cosy names they sometimes use on own-brand products. Still, even if lower prices for consumers meant lower prices at the farm gate, would that be a bad thing overall?
We hear the same argument trotted out against leaving the Common Agricultural Policy: “cheap food” has become almost a swearword in some Remain circles. We heard it, too, in support of the Scottish Government’s minimum alcohol pricing.
Yet the story of human civilisation is, in a sense, the story of falling prices. Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute has compiled the figures, and they reveal an uncelebrated and largely unremarked miracle. A hundred years ago, it took the median worker an hour and 18 minutes to afford a pound of butter; now the time is ten minutes. In wage hours, the price of flour has fallen by 88 per cent, eggs by 92 per cent. It’s true, of course, that these efficiency savings were accompanied by a decline in the number of people employed on the land. Yet they were also accompanied by a rise in overall living standards, as former farmworkers found better paid jobs.
Does that strike you as cold-hearted? Am I putting too much emphasis on the price-tag? After all, there is more to life than disposable income. It would be an unusual person who found greater happiness in a large bank balance than in, say, a country walk, or a Beethoven symphony, or time with the children. But what do you suppose enables these pleasures? It’s because you can switch on the dishwasher instead of scrubbing away at the plates that you have time for the walk. It’s because you can drive to work instead of walking and taking two trams that
‘Today’s staples were yesterday’s luxuries, derided as symbols of a decadent and materialistic society’
you can listen to the symphony. It’s because you no longer have to work six days a week to feed the kids that you have time to play with them.
Today’s staples were yesterday’s luxuries, derided in their time as symbols of a decadent and materialistic society that had lost its soul. It’s what every generation thinks. And yet, as we have become more leisured, we have become more literate, less violent, better able to see things from each other’s perspective. Our expanding circle of understanding rests, rather unglamorously, on the increasing specialisation that pushes down the cost of living. Let’s try not to be so snotty about it.
The Gunpowder Plot was a cataclysm for Catholics, bringing about centuries of sectarianism. Even now, November 5 is one of the few dates the English remember.
Many Catholics were horrified when they heard what had happened – not just from revulsion at terrorism, but because they knew what would follow. More than two centuries were to pass before they were deemed, in the phrase of the time, to have “proved their loyalty”. So it is to the credit of the collateral descendants of Father John Gerard, a Jesuit, that they have made the BBC alter a documentary that unfairly portrayed him as having blessed Robert Catesby and his conspirators in advance.
When the same accusation was made in the drama Gunpowder, the BBC defended itself on the grounds that “Shakespeare’s plays are replete with examples of historical inaccuracy”. True. And yet, as this column often points out, he had uncannily apt words for every situation. Try these from Richard III, written a decade before the plot: “Catesby, thou art sworn as deeply to effect what we intend as closely to conceal what we impart.” No, I don’t know either. There is sorcery in Shakespeare. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion