PRICE RISES AND TIME SLIPPING

You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip slidin' away. ~ Paul Simon   

Is it time to travel? Seems so. Many more people have travelled to eat green bean casserole with distant relatives and friends. AAA expected more than 53 million people will travel during this Thanksgiving holiday, the highest single-year increase since 2005. We’re clearly more on the move than last year.

Perhaps high-flying sojourners are attempting to escape increasingly tumultuous, rising prices in their localities. The media and others have been proclaiming inflation as a big, but non-transitory issue facing President Biden.

Indeed, prices facing consumers are elevating. The year-over-year Consumer Price Index (CPI) for October increased 6.2%, the highest in 30 years. Gasoline prices rose 49.6%, the second-highest increase of any CPI item. Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs’ prices increased 11.9%, that you’ve already witnessed at your grocery’s check-out. Amazon’s prices on more than 20,000 popular items increased 7.5% in October from a year ago.

Are these price surges connected with the president’s increasingly dire poll numbers? Maybe, although it’s by no means conclusive. Time may tell.

Unfortunately, every president including Mr. Biden has few direct means of quickly controlling rising prices of final goods and services. President Biden’s statements that his newly-signed $1.2T of infrastructure expenditures will reduce inflation may be true ultimately, but only after all the bridges, highways, power lines and Amtrak have been revitalized eight years from now. Large-scale infrastructure projects take considerable time to start, and a long time to be completed. Needed infrastructure improvements will not reduce inflation between now and the mid-term elections.

We economists maintain, with fingers crossed behind our backs, that prices are simply a consequence of how market supply and market demand are interacting. When consumer demand increases more than supply, as seems to be happening for a while, prices will rise, as they have been. Alas, economic models are far less definitive about the duration of upward price pressures.

Even as the Federal Reserve and the president maintain such price increases are merely “transitory,” monthly consumer price increases have averaged 8% since April. October’s annualized monthly increase is 10.8%. No wonder inflation is becoming a beyond-transitory issue for the administration.

To show that he’s doing something, the president has ordered that 50 million barrels be sold from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to increase the domestic supply of oil products. He also requested that OPEC increase its production. Nice try Joe, but such efforts at best may have some momentary political benefit, but no substantive market effect for lowering gas prices or inflationary pressures. OPEC predictably declined his request. Fifty million barrels represents just 2 ½ days of total US oil consumption; and a mere 8% of the Reserve (that at some point will need to be replaced at likely higher-per-barrel prices).  

Interestingly, although transportation expenditures’ costs rose 4.5% over the past year, airline fares taxied downward at 4.6%. Maybe these declines, in addition to the public’s strong, pent-up desires to share turkey and tofurkey, spurred the rush into cramped airplane seats.

Nevertheless, a small number of travelers aren’t flying or driving. Nope, they’re following time-slips.

If you aren’t familiar with time-slips, they refer to fleeting, temporal anomalies experienced by individuals. A sort of accidental, serendipitous time travel. Such time crossings are not extended adventures such as Mark Twain described in his pioneering 1889 time-travel novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I enjoyed reading this book last year.

Twain’s popular book portrays Yankee engineer Hank Morgan as he somehow finds himself, after being hit on his head, transported from late 19th-century New England into non-new England during the reign of King Arthur in the 6th-century. The original frontispiece from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is shown below, where a mounted, armored knight with a lance is charging Mr. Morgan up a tree. It describes the considerable period and many adventures that Mr. Morgan experienced in Camelot. His ventures allowed Mark Twain to comment on then-contemporary American society and as well as parody the idea of chivalry and the legend of King Arthur’s Camelot.

Source: Wikipedia

Time travel didn’t stop in the late 1800s. Modern tales of people who have experienced transitory time-slips (time-slippers?) describe them as short excursions back in time at the spot where the person happens to be right before the slippage. Some time-slippers travel far rearward in history, others not so far.

Buckle up for the several time-slip accounts. In July 1996, Frank, an off-duty policeman, walked down a street in central Liverpool, Merseyside, England to shop at Dillon’s Bookshop. As he walked, he noticed the street was now cobbled. It hadn’t been before he started; pedestrians were now wearing clothes appropriate for 40 or so years prior, not 1996 contemporary. He crossed the cobbled street and noticed instead of Dillon’s was a store named Cripps, selling handbags and women’s shoes. Frank saw a woman dressed in 1990s clothes enter Cripps looking perplexed. Suddenly, the whole scene revered back to 1996 and the cobblestones and Cripps disappeared. Frank asked the woman if she’d seen the same strange, time-warped things; she said yes. Frank later found out that a women’s haberdashery called Cripps operated on the Dillon’s bookstore site in the 1950s.

Another time-slipper vividly saw medieval boats sailing on a British river next to the ancient castle he was visiting in Wales, and then suddenly the boats vanished as he returned to the present-day. Two young women were walking up a densely-wooded local hill in northwest England during the summer on a trail they had hiked on many times before. On this hike they saw for the first time an old-fashioned, rough-stone cottage amid the trees that reminded them of a dwelling “from the Middle Ages.” There was smoke wafting out of the chimney and the door began to open as they came closer. They promptly fled down the hill and haven’t seen the ancient cottage ever again on this trail.

These time-slip recountings offer a however brief alternative to our usual linear sense of time. Also, they perhaps bear the idea that time is more than a one-way throughfare to the hereafter.

Perhaps President Biden would wish to time-slip himself back to 1965, when inflation was a trifling 1.6%. And when the Dems enjoyed impressively formidable control of both the House and Senate after Lyndon Johnson’s giant victory over Barry Goldwater. The Dems margin in the 1965 House was +155 representatives; in the Senate it was a 36-senator, filibuster-proof majority margin. Those were the days, sort of.

Here’s to slipping through time as easily and interestingly as possible.