28-05-2025
Comparing apples and oranges. And also small caged mammals
Cod-liver oil (1947-51), mercifully, passed away swiftly. Liver (1947-98) lasted a little longer. Avocados didn't arrive until 1993—but have thrived since then.
To read the contents list of the basket of goods, updated this week by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), is an intriguing experience. For economists it offers a sober measure of consumer-price inflation. For everyone else it is a births-and-deaths column for British consumerism, announcing the arrival of some objects and acting, for others, as their epitaph.
Thus this week the list noted the arrival of 'men's sliders" and the demise of newspaper advertisements. It has previously recorded the demise of linoleum (in 1980), of corsets (1970) and of oil lamps (1947). Its very name is a relic: that word 'basket" sounding like something that might have hung from the arm of a British housewife as she went to the shops in her mackintosh (1947-52) to buy Brussels sprouts (1947-2006). Sometimes, it is an enigma: in the 2000s a 'small caged mammal" appeared, unexpectedly, in the ONS's calculations.
The basket itself, in its modern form, was born in 1947. The political mood was tense. British families, who had paid a high price—in some cases the ultimate one—for the war were angry at the high prices they had to pay for everything else in the peace. The era of macroeconomic theory had begun (Britain's first official national accounts were published in 1941). Now Britain's beancounters needed microeconomic data, on things like the price of beans (canned beans: 1947-), to apply those theories. And that meant shoe-leather reporting (shoe repairs: 1947-2003).
It still does: every month the ONS's 280 price collectors set out to shops in around 140 places across Britain to collect 180,000 prices of hundreds of goods and services (they also look online). Those prices are then gathered into categories (thus 'small caged mammal" goes to make up a larger category on 'pets"). Then changes in price are calculated, to enable the government to know about inflation, and at least something about the price of eggs (1947-).
As well as about many other, more unappetising things. The 1947 list, at the height of rationing, shows a nation surviving on Brussels sprouts, margarine and the ominously oblique 'compound cooking fat". This, Evelyn Waugh later wrote, was 'a bleak period of present privation" and, he added, even more bleakly, 'of soya beans". Rationed food was 'unbelievably dreary", says Max Hastings, a historian.
It did not fill stomachs but did, oddly, fill books. In the 'hungry novels" of wartime and post-war Britain, British novelists with poor diets and rich imaginations allowed their characters to gorge on the foods which they could not. In 'Brideshead Revisited" Sebastian Flyte eats strawberries and sips Château Peyraguey beneath a spreading summer elm. It 'isn't a wine you've ever tasted," he says. Given that 'Brideshead" was published in 1945, and 'table wine" didn't appear until 1980, this was probably true.
The ONS records offer a picture not merely of national consumerism but of national character; few novelists draw in such detail. The writer Julian Barnes once said that to build a character you must 'start with the shoes". And the basket does give you Britons' footwear—from men's leather Oxfords (1947) to plimsolls (1947-87) to the casually late arrival of the trainer (1987). But it also gives detail on Britons' underwear (which in 1962 included a 'girdle"); its nightwear ('winceyette" in 1947) and on where Britons spend their time (climbing walls have replaced bingo halls).
The basket is at once detailed—and doomed. Britain's economists are not quite comparing apples and oranges: both apples (1947-) and oranges (1947-) have been in since the beginning, so each can be compared with themselves. But it is all but impossible to equate the value of a 'rubber-roller table mangle" (1947-52) with a tumble drier (1993-); or of a telegram (1956-80) with a mobile phone (2005-). Using price indices over long periods is, says Diane Coyle, a professor of economics at Cambridge, 'a bit of a mug's game".
The introduction of wholly new products in medicine is particularly problematic for prices. Gouty King George IV 'lived like a king", says William Nordhaus, an economist, but 'was a miserable man because his feet were killing him". Today, a pill could cure him; yet such changes are 'simply…not captured" by indices.
It is not only the lists' items that have changed but their length. Early lists are not just nasty (that cod-liver oil) and occasionally brutish (1952 offers 'home-killed mutton and lamb"). They are also short: the 1947 basket has only 200 items. The current one has 750. This is typical: one study found that in the early 1970s Americans could choose between five types of running shoe. By the late 1990s they had 285. 'The real privilege of our lives today is that we have choice," says Sir Max. Choice in everything, from whether or not to fight in a war, to whether to spend your money on avocados, or climbing walls or even, should you wish, on small caged mammals.
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