The average working woman in 2023 earns enough money to buy a Barbie doll every 33 minutes. In 1959, it took nearly two hours.
The Barbie movie has been this summer’s biggest blockbuster, racing towards $1 billion in global ticket sales and reigniting age-old debates about what Barbie, the famous doll, means to American culture, the patriarchy, and feminism.
But this Barbie is an economist too. And she can also illustrate how average Americans are significantly more prosperous today than they were a few generations ago—despite the arguments made by populists on both the right and left.
Thanks to Jeremy Horpedahl, an economist at the University of Central Arkansas, we have what you might call the Barbie Price Index, which shows that the amount of work necessary to buy a single new Barbie has fallen quite a bit since the doll was introduced. Today, the average American woman has to work about 30 minutes to afford a Barbie. That’s down from nearly two hours in 1959.
“Another way of thinking about it: with the same amount of work, a working mother today could buy her daughter 3-4 times as many Barbies as her counterpart in 1959,” Horpedahl notes at Economists Writing Every Day, an economics blog.
On one hand, the decline in the Barbie Price Index shows how much women’s wages have grown in the past six-and-half decades.
