A New Way to Understand American Abundance

Our index measures how long you have to work to buy what you used to buy.

Americans are told, daily, that they are getting poorer. The left points to “record” prices and concludes that capitalism has failed. The right points to the same prices and concludes that America is in irreversible decline. Both sides lean on a familiar statistical trick: they talk about prices or pay in isolation, then invite readers to fill in the rest with anxiety.

There is a simpler and truer way to judge living standards. Ask one question: How long do you have to work to buy what you used to buy?

That is the idea behind the new American Abundance Index, a tool that translates economic health into units normal people understand: hours of work. It uses standard government statistics, comparing inflation (the Consumer Price Index) with hourly earnings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The output is not a partisan narrative. It is a measure of purchasing power that speaks plain English.

The index tracks two measures. Time Price represents how many work-hours are needed to purchase the standard CPI basket of goods and services. Abundance is the inverse. It represents how much of that basket one hour of work can buy.

When time prices fall, abundance rises. When time prices rise, abundance falls.

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The American Abundance Index starts in March 2006, when the relevant earnings series become available, and updates monthly following BLS releases. It reports month-over-month, year-over-year, five-year, ten-year, and since-start changes so readers can separate short-term noise from long-term reality.

That distinction matters because the loudest arguments about living standards are usually built on selective time windows.

Recent numbers illustrate the point. For the average private-sector worker, December 2025 saw a tiny monthly decline in CPI and a larger rise in average hourly earnings. The result was a decline in time prices and a rise in abundance for that month. Over the year from December 2024 to December 2025, CPI rose 2.68 percent while hourly earnings rose 3.76 percent. Time prices fell 1.04 percent, and abundance rose 1.05 percent.

Zoom out further. Since March 2006, time prices for the BLS basket have fallen 12.16 percent and abundance has risen 13.84 percent. The index translates those findings into an intuitive claim: over that period, the average private-sector worker gained the equivalent of roughly 1.1 extra hours of purchasing power for every eight hours worked.

The product is not just one headline series. It includes separate views for all private-sector workers and for blue-collar workers. It also includes “upskilling” scenarios that reflect a basic fact of labor markets that both ideological camps often ignore: people do not stay in the same job, at the same wage, for decades. Many workers move from entry-level roles into higher-paying roles as they gain skills. A living-standards tool should help readers see what that typical path implies for purchasing power over time, rather than freezing workers in place for rhetorical effect.

So how does this fit into today’s abundance argument, and the misuse of statistics by left and right?

The left’s favorite move is to spotlight prices, preferably the most salient and emotionally charged ones, then treat the price level as the full story. But prices are only half the equation. Wages and work-hours are the other half. If pay rises faster than prices, the public is not “getting poorer” in any meaningful aggregate sense, even if the public is angry, and even if some groups are falling behind.

The right’s favorite move is different but no less misleading. It treats every inflation episode, every housing squeeze, and every bout of consumer pessimism as proof of national decline. It cherry-picks peaks, ignores recoveries, and sometimes talks as if today’s worker has no mobility and no capacity to adapt. That is how you turn real problems into a permanent story of collapse.

The American Abundance Index does not settle policy debates. It disciplines them. It forces advocates to answer the question that matters to households: How many minutes of my life does this cost, and how has that changed? If your preferred policy raises time prices, you are making people poorer, whatever your rhetoric. If it lowers time prices, you are making people richer, even if it offends someone’s ideology.

The index is also candid about limits. It focuses on averages, may not capture individual experiences, and is most meaningful over longer periods than a single month. That is not a weakness. It is a reminder that serious measurement should separate broad trends from personal hardship, and that anecdotes are not statistics.

If journalists and politicians want fewer mirages and more reality, they should start here: stop counting dollars. Start counting hours.