I’ve been noticing food shrinkflation a lot here in Belgium lately. Smaller soda cans, biscuit packet counts going down, 125g becoming 115g etc.

And honestly, to choose between the same size package getting more expensive vs less of it… I’ll take the latter. It’s reducing consumption. Which is great as a whole, but also selfishly if I’m buying a pack of crisps and I get to eat less of it … great.

Not so great on essentials obviously but those aren’t really hit by shrinkflation as much as snacks, etc.

Okay, that’s it. I do want to stress that I don’t like paying more for the same shit, but on a practical level, if I do, I much rather get less for the same price than have to spend more and be stuck getting the same quantity.

Especially if it’s junk food… I’ve even found myself disliking the old soda can sizes when I come across them. Having gotten used to the new ones, the old ones are straight up too much.

There's a couple of other words that describe what I'm talking about - neoliberalism, lassez-faire capitalism, and in a more general sense, the Chicago school of economics - but I chose market fundamentalism because it seemed to best describe precisely what I'm talking about. I mean the belief that the market is capable of self-regulation and that governmental intervention will cause damage to the economy.

I'm asking this because there's still a lot about economics that I don't know about and so I was hoping someone with a background in the subject who would be able to better answer the question. But I realize it's probably also a political question. I wonder if it's more of an issue of our politicians pressing these views than economists and academics.

Personally, with my life's experience, it seems almost obviously wrong. I've lived through several market downturns and even a crash, and looking through history it seems like every market crash can be attributed to the market failing to correct itself.

Everywhere I turn everything is more expensive.

I'm spending less and less every month on non-necessities, buying more basic foods, never eating out, spending less on entertainment, etc but everything else just keeps going up and up.

Electricity just went up 12%, my gas bill is up 20%, rent has gone up 10% year after year, water is somehow 30% more expensive than it used to be, my groceries are more expensive than ever even though I'm buying in bulk and not buying anything fancy, I've stopped eating luxuries I used to enjoy like steak and fancy cheese because they've just gotten outrageous.

I have a good job that pays decently but my raises have been less than 3% a year and I feel like I'm getting squeezed out of everything I once had. There's no light at the end of the tunnel is there?

I've started to notice this narrative in my news feeds. The argument is high wage growth is contributing to stubborn inflation. So cooling wage growth is seen as positive. It'll help central banks pause the hike cycle sooner.

My knee jerk reaction is if wage growth is contributing to inflation it's minuscule; just enough to print the headline. I can't help but feel this narrative is a way to distract from the earlier price gouging narrative and to help employers scapegoat out of raises.

But I'll admit, I haven't looked into this topic deeply. So I'm happy to be schooled.

Child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago.

Legislators offer fatuous justifications for such incursions into long-settled practice. Working, they tell us, will get kids off their computers or video games or away from the TV. Or it will strip the government of the power to dictate what children can and can’t do, leaving parents in control — a claim already transformed into fantasy by efforts to strip away protective legislation and permit 14-year-old kids to work without formal parental permission.

In 2014, the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank, published “A Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions,” arguing that such laws stifled opportunity for poor — and especially Black — children. The Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank funded by a range of wealthy conservative donors including the DeVos family, has spearheaded efforts to weaken child-labor laws, and Americans for Prosperity, the billionaire Koch brothers’ foundation, has joined in.

https://tomdispatch.com/caution-children-at-work/#:~:text=The%20Covid%2D19%20pandemic%20of,distinct%20sign%20of%20social%20pathology.

Here is a Robert Frost poem related to the subject of the article. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out

I'm GenX and I worked as a teen, but my earliest jobs were babysitting, not industrial labor.