Editing 2892: Banana Prices
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==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
− | + | {{incomplete|Created by a MANDALORIAN BANANA ARMORER - Please change this comment when editing this page.}} | |
− | + | [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw ‘It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?'] is a line from an {{w|Arrested Development}} episode (Season 1, Episode 6, "Charity Drive", 2003) that became a well-known meme used to mock out-of-touch elites. The character who spoke this line (Lucille Bluth, a wealthy socialite) made a satirically high estimate for the price of a banana because she had never bought her own groceries. The implication is that she sees $10 as a trivially small amount of money, and has trouble conceiving of anything that costs less. According to the graph, the banana price at the time of that episode was actually just under 25 cents, and the price at the time of this comic’s publication (2024) is around 30 cents. | |
− | + | It's common for fictional works to avoid mentioning actual prices or amounts of money. One of the reasons for this is that presenting an actual amount risks the work becoming dated by inflation. A price that's presented as surprisingly high can lose its impact as the value of money changes, making it difficult for a punchline or a dramatic moment to land. In this case, however, the number is so exaggerated (being around 40 times higher than the actual price of a banana), that it's unlikely for inflation to impact the joke in the immediate future. Twenty years after the episode first aired, the joke works just as well as it did. Randall attempts to put specific values on this, extrapolating when bananas are likely to sell for $10 apiece using three different models: (1) the general inflation rate (a value dominated by the cost of housing), (2) the inflation rate for fresh fruit, and (3) 45 years of historic banana prices. Those models present the joke becoming reality around 2140, 2170 and 2250, respectively. Hence, even under the most aggressive of these models, we can expect the joke to make sense for another century (under the slowest model, it appears closer to two centuries). | |
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The reference to "BLS/St. Louis FRED" refers to The {{w|Bureau of Labor Statistics}} and {{w|St. Louis Fed Financial Stress Index|St Louis FRED}}, widely respected sources of economic data. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains the FRED database; FRED stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data. | The reference to "BLS/St. Louis FRED" refers to The {{w|Bureau of Labor Statistics}} and {{w|St. Louis Fed Financial Stress Index|St Louis FRED}}, widely respected sources of economic data. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains the FRED database; FRED stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data. | ||
− | The title text continues the ignorant tone of Lucille Bluth to | + | The title text continues the ignorant tone of Lucille Bluth to satirically guess an error less than 10%. The humor is that the three predictions themselves (from 115 years to 220 years) differ wildly, which emphasizes the point that any economic extrapolation into the distant future is at most an educated guess, with an expected error far in excess of 10%. Expecting such small errors in such speculative projections is just as clueless as expecting individual bananas to cost so much. |
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It’s not typical to plot commodity prices on a log-scale, but maybe Randall did this to allow himself to make this subtle “linear extrapolation” joke. | It’s not typical to plot commodity prices on a log-scale, but maybe Randall did this to allow himself to make this subtle “linear extrapolation” joke. | ||
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* '''Log scales''' and their peculiarities are a recurring xkcd theme, and this is the second comic in a row to play with logarithms (the prior one being [[2891: Log Cabin]]). | * '''Log scales''' and their peculiarities are a recurring xkcd theme, and this is the second comic in a row to play with logarithms (the prior one being [[2891: Log Cabin]]). | ||
* It's also the second comic in the last four to involve '''predictions across centuries''' (i.e. [[2889: Greenhouse Effect]]). | * It's also the second comic in the last four to involve '''predictions across centuries''' (i.e. [[2889: Greenhouse Effect]]). | ||
− | * ''' | + | * Another '''extrapolation''' comic includes [[605: Extrapolating]]. And this comic looks a lot like [[1007: Sustainable]]. |
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==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
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[[Category:Fiction]] | [[Category:Fiction]] | ||
[[Category:Extrapolation]] | [[Category:Extrapolation]] | ||
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