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DIAMOND-WATER PARADOX: The perplexing observation that water, which is more useful than diamonds, has a lower price. If price is related to utility, how can this occur? This paradox was first proposed by classical economists in the 19th century and was subsequently used as a stepping stone for developing the notion of marginal utility and the role it plays in the demand price of a good. The paradox is magically cleared up with an understanding of marginal utility and total utility. People are willing to pay a higher price for goods with greater marginal utility. As such, water which is plentiful has enormous total utility, but a low price because of a low marginal utility. Diamonds, however, have less total utility because they are less plentiful, but a high price because of a high marginal utility.
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                           CONSUMER PRICE INDEX FOR URBAN WAGE EARNERS AND CLERICAL WORKERS: An index of prices of goods and services typically purchased by urban wage earners and clerical workers. This carries the official abbreviation CPI-W to distinguish it from its more famous sister index CPI-U, which is the standard Consumer Price Index for All Urban Workers, (commonly abbreviated simply as CPI). Like the standard CPI, the CPI-W is compiled and published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), using price data obtained from an elaborate survey of 25,000 retail outlets and quantity data generated by the Consumer Expenditures Survey. The CPI-W is a continuation of the original CPI developed early in the 1900s to provide cost-of-living adjustment information to wage-earning workers (which is why the Bureau of LABOR Statistics oversees consumer PRICE indexes). Because the original CPI (now CPI-W) was based on goods and services purchased by wage-earning workers, it was replaced by the newer CPI-U in 1978 to provide a broader, more comprehensive measure of the economy's price level. In particular, the newer CPI-U includes the prices of goods and services purchased by about 80 percent of the non-institutionalized population while the older CPI-W includes about only 32 percent.While the CPI-U is the broader, and presumably more accurate, measure of the macroeconomy's price level, the CPI-W is not a bad measure. The two indexes do tend to move in tandem. For example, the more comprehensive CPI-U for December 2003 is 184.3 while the narrower CPI-W has a value of 179.9. Over two decades (from the 1982-84 base period to 2003), the two indexes differed by only 4.4 index points (or 2.5 percent); not perfect, but not too bad, either.
Recommended Citation:CONSUMER PRICE INDEX FOR URBAN WAGE EARNERS AND CLERICAL WORKERS, AmosWEB Encyclonomic WEB*pedia, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2024. [Accessed: May 12, 2024].
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YELLOW CHIPPEROON
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Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time strolling around a discount warehouse buying club wanting to buy either a T-shirt commemorating yesterday or a pair of handcrafted oven mitts. Be on the lookout for cardboard boxes.
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A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court!
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"The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss. " -- Thomas Carlyle, Historian
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CPI-U
Consumer Price Index-All Urban Consumers
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