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 rich socialite) made a satirically high estimate for the price of a banana because she had never bought her own groceries. 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. | |
− | The three extrapolations use (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 | + | The comic is a wry observation that the irony of this sitcom line will "probably" be anachronistically meaningless in a century or so, presenting three predictions of banana prices over the next 250 years that each extrapolating from the current price using different long-term inflation rates. The three extrapolations use (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. |
The caption’s claim that banana prices could exceed $10 in a century are based on the fastest rising extrapolation, the one for “general inflation.” This extrapolation predicts a banana’s price to rise from 30 cents to $10 in approximately 115 years. This 115-year increase corresponds to an average long-term inflation rate of about 3.2%, close to the historic US average. | The caption’s claim that banana prices could exceed $10 in a century are based on the fastest rising extrapolation, the one for “general inflation.” This extrapolation predicts a banana’s price to rise from 30 cents to $10 in approximately 115 years. This 115-year increase corresponds to an average long-term inflation rate of about 3.2%, close to the historic US average. | ||
− | The reference to "BLS/St. Louis | + | 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 ''Fed''}}, widely respected sources of 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 by over 80%. So the Bluthian speaker is statistically illiterate and is presuming far more accuracy from a multi-century prediction than is warranted. Just as Lucille was very wrong about a $10 banana (a price threshold), so, too, is the Bluthian speaker of the title text very wrong about the 10% error (a proportional change). This is a meta-joke about the false precision of extrapolations. Randall is using the voice of Lucille Bluth to acknowledge the high uncertainty of these extrapolations. |
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− | + | Any economic extrapolation into the distant future is at most an educated guess, with an expected error far in excess of 10%. (A rare example of a domain in which 75-year predictions are highly accurate is national demographic age charts, since the number of babies born this year in a given country is causal of the number of 75-year-olds alive in 75 years.) | |
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+ | The other joke of the title text is have the Bluthian speaker ignorantly call these “linear extrapolations.” They are actually ''exponential'', since a linear extrapolation on a graph with a logarithmic scale is actually an exponential extrapolation. The graph is log-linear, with price as a logarithmic scale on the vertical (left) axis, which makes it possible to visualize the exponential growth extrapolation as a straight line. | ||
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 include [[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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