By Caleb S. Fuller in Walmart — 30 Jan 2025

Our Cart Runneth Over

My intrepid "Mere Economics" co-author is a slayer of Walmart myths. Here are just a few of his papers:

This research formed a natural backdrop for the opening chapter of Mere Economics: Lessons for and from the Ordinary Business of Life. With our publisher's permission, here's a sneak peek from Chapter 1.

Joan of Arc, Beethoven, and the Sun King Walk into a Walmart

Have you ever felt like the fate of the world was riding on one assignment?

In the 1989 comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, high school students Bill S. Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted Logan (Keanu Reeves) didn’t know it, but the fate of the world was riding on their report. Their mission: to describe how historical figures would think of life in 1980s San Dimas, California. Their problem: they were terrible students without a clue. If they failed, Ted would be sent to an Alaskan military school, and their band Wyld Stallyns would never make the music that created a future utopia.

Fortunately, a time traveler from 2688 arrived to help. Bill and Ted traveled through history, picking up Billy the Kid, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Abraham Lincoln. These befuddled icons visited a water park, ice cream parlor, bowling alley, and mall before appearing as part of Bill and Ted’s report. The future was saved.

If we got this assignment, we would take this crew to a Walmart Supercenter. We can’t take them, of course, but we can take you. This chapter will document the “facts of flourishing” and set the stage for subsequent chapters. So, let’s grab a cart and go shopping.

In our opinion, Walmart is the poster child for what legendary twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter called the “capitalist achievement” of improving goods at falling prices. The largest private employer in history welcomes any and all into a brightly lit, air-conditioned palace stocked from floor to ceiling with food, clothing, office supplies, garden implements, electronics, books, exotic fruits, furniture, sporting goods, and much more that even our ancestors’ rulers could not have imagined. Save money, live better.

The goods don’t tell the whole story, however. The mega-store is remarkable for its clientele. Walmart is a palace open to the peasantry. Walmart wonders are not only available to powdered lords, Party members, or ostentatiously coiffed Capitol residents. Walmart’s customers are overwhelmingly ordinary people of underwhelmingly modest means. At Walmart, they can exchange the fruit of a few hours’ labor for a shopping-cart-sized cornucopia.

A 1979 episode of the game show The Price Is Right displayed a microwave oven with a retail price of $499—roughly $2,000 in today’s money. Today, you can get a much better microwave from Walmart, Target, or Amazon for under $100. You don’t even have to go to the store. With a few flicks of your thumb, a microwave will arrive on your porch tomorrow. If this is the much-maligned “late-stage capitalism,” then sign us up.

The difference between “then” and “now” is astounding. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) described our ancestors’ lives in the hypothetical stateless “state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The Hobbesian jungle features “a war of all against all,” where people’s rights to their possessions and persons are not secure. Hobbes got much wrong. For one, his governments often make life nastier (chapter 12), and people have sometimes escaped Hobbesian horrors without the creation of a state. Still, Hobbes's adjectives are colorful and analytically useful for describing our ancestor's plight. Things started changing mightily in Northwest Europe about two and half centuries ago, with the improvements having since gone global. The data tell a compelling story about lives that are no longer solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short but connected, rich, clean, peaceful, and long.

Solitary?

We haven’t “filled and subdued” the earth yet, but life with eight billion neighbors is less solitary.[8] Our ancestors knew very few people and rarely ventured beyond their villages. Jesus didn’t go far. The five-day walk from Jerusalem to Nazareth is a two-hour car ride today, and travel time from one side of the world to the other is measured in hours rather than months. You can converse with people from every tribe and tongue and nation online in real time.

Poor?

But we must be much poorer with all these new people, right? Estimates from Great Britain going back eight centuries suggest things didn’t change much for eons, but then average income per person in the United Kingdom has increased about thirty-fold since the 1700s. Two weeks’ income now equals a year’s worth in the not-too-distant past. Global historical estimates of per capita gross domestic product since 1820 show where the action is. The increases in western Europe and its overseas offshoots (the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have been most remarkable—so remarkable that they obscure the not-much-less remarkable growth in the rest of the world. Even in Sub Saharan Africa, per capita income has roughly tripled.

Spreading prosperity has not been confined to a few islands in Northwest Europe. About four in five people worldwide lived in extreme poverty 200 years ago, and the fifth guy was poor by today's standards. Today, it’s about one in ten in a population eight times larger. The actual number of people—not just the share of the population—living in extreme poverty has declined in our lifetimes. Between 1950 and 2019—a period shorter than US life expectancy—average inflation-adjusted per-person US income quadrupled, from $15,183 to $62,589. Methuselah saw less economic progress in his 969 years than moderns see in a decade.

Worldwide, people put in fewer hours for these higher incomes. Industrial workers in Western European countries and the United States used to work an astonishing average of more than 3,000 hours annually. Now? In hard-working Germany, the 2017 average was 1,354 hours. The upshot: more time for friendship, spiritual pursuits, family, and leisure. Whether we use our new time for these noble pursuits is a separate question.

Time cost—the amount of time the average person must work to afford something—has plummeted worldwide. An American worker buying a twenty-five-inch color TV in 1980 would have required, on average, 68 hours of work. A much better TV in 2022 took 4.4 hours. Similar jaw-droppers exist for washers, dryers, ovens, clothing, tools, exercise equipment, and food. In India, the time cost of daily rice fell from 7 hours in 1960 to less than 1 hour today. In Indiana, it has fallen from 1 hour to 7.5 minutes. Notice too that the gains going to the relatively poor (Indians, 6 hours) are far larger in absolute terms than those accruing to the relatively wealthy (Indianans, 52 minutes).

These massive gains mean today’s American or European has three first-world problems: obesity (too much food, not too little), clutter (too many possessions, not too few), and packed calendars (too many opportunities to connect, not unending stretches of isolation). What’s more, these gains are spreading around the world. If he were writing it today, Ronald Sider would have to title his book Rich Christians in an Age of Obesity.

Superabundance is everywhere.[17] You may see a homeless person with a smartphone in your local park. In housing projects, clotheslines are unused and many units have DirecTV. We wouldn’t care as much about the “Great Enrichment” if it only helped the wealthy, but the Walmart-shopping poor have gained the most. Truly, our cart runneth over.

Nasty?

Life today is cleaner than it has ever been. Garbage trucks and indoor plumbing whisk waste away. We bathe regularly instead of mucking about in our own filth for months at a time, and our closets overflow with clean clothes. We use clean tools and clean electricity or natural gas to cook in cleaner kitchens than our ancestors could have imagined. While we might try to avoid Walmart bathrooms whenever possible, that is only because our standards have changed. Data on safely managed drinking water sources, safely managed sanitation, and hand-washing facilities show steady improvements over the last two decades.

Brutish?

Homicide rates in European countries have fallen steadily over the last millennium, and despite the popular view that the world has never been more dangerous, the world’s homicide rate has fallen in our lifetimes. Today, we get our brutal thrills vicariously through spectator sports, and worldwide, you’re less likely than ever to die at someone else’s hands. Journalists took to the internet with articles lamenting football’s violence after the Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin nearly died on the field on January 2, 2023. But we’ll take football’s vicarious war over actual war every time.

Short?

Again, no. Today’s poor countries feature longer life expectancies than rich countries did on the eve of industrialization. Boxer George Foreman named each of his five sons “George,” and people laughed at the quirk. Parents in the Middle Ages named each of their five sons “John” because only one or two would reach adulthood. No one was laughing.

Life expectancy at birth in England and France in 1800 was about 40 years, half of what it is today in the United States, England, and Japan. Even in low-income countries like Nigeria, life expectancy is over 60. Economics Nobel laureate Angus Deaton writes, “A white, middle-class girl born in affluent America today has a 50–50 chance of making it to 100. This is a remarkable change from the situation of her great grandmother, born in 1910, say, who had a life expectancy at birth of 54 years.” Global average life expectancy rose from 52.6 to 72.4 years between 1960 and 2017. Child mortality has also plummeted worldwide. Statistician Hans Rosling notes that in 1960, 242 out of every 1,000 children born in Saudi Arabia would die a child. In the blink of an eye—thirty-three years—that figure dropped to 35 out of 1,000, roughly an 85 percent decrease in a single generation. Of course, all people of goodwill want the number to be zero, but wanting something and effecting something are not the same.

Life today is far, far better than life has ever been, and this is true for almost everyone. If you don’t believe us, go to the website Our World in Data and refute us. We will be in your debt.

Whereas the average American takes Walmart for granted, France’s so-called Sun King, Louis XIV (1638–1715), would have been dumbstruck by what Walmart offers. He had legions of servants and lived in the magnificent Palace of Versailles. Enviable? Not after you consider what he didn’t have: antibiotics, lightbulbs, painkillers, airplanes, modern toilet paper, modern dentistry, endless consumer goods, and the internet. “Kings and queens lived under conditions that were better than average,” observes philosopher Dan Moller, “but ones that we would nevertheless view as unbearable by contemporary standards.”

Yet, importantly, we’re not primarily interested in royals like Louis the Sun King. No. We want to know how billions of descendants of ground-scratching peasants, slaves, and factory girls can pick from 142,000 items at a Walmart Supercenter or 400 million units in inventory from Walmart.com. We want to know how we all came to live better than the Sun King. That is “the capitalist achievement.” As the economist Joseph Schumpeter put it:

There are no doubt some things available to the modern workman that Louis XIV himself would have been delighted to have yet was unable to have—modern dentistry for instance. On the whole, however, a budget on that level had little that really mattered to gain from capitalist achievement. Even speed of traveling may be assumed to have been a minor consideration for so very dignified a gentleman. Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars, and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

Progress continues. Schumpeter wrote in the dark years of World War II, arguably Western civilization’s nadir, but the wealth-explosion was obvious even then. “Good Things in Life Up a Gazillion Percent” is a headline you haven’t seen but should have.