Egg Prices Vs. Consumer Price Index Since 1980

[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry...

But, politics in the US are completely dominated by lawyers, everything is about rhetorics and scoring talking points. But problems like that require an engineering mindset.

Wow, today I learned that in some countries, the supermarkets keep their eggs in the refrigerator! Apparently there is a protective coat on eggs that sometimes gets washed away, and when it is, you need to store the egg in a cold environment otherwise bacteria gets in. In other places, eggs aren't washed (that much at least) so the protective coat is still there, so we store our eggs on normal room temperature shelves.

That might be easy for you when you're working at Microsoft and making $500,000 a year, but that's a significant amount of money for a lot of people in the United States. And eggs aren't some fancy item. They're eggs.

"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost?"

Externalities are costs/benefits to someone uninvolved with the chicken/egg transaction (noise or free insect control affecting your neighbor are negative and positive cases).

The math checks out if:

1) You build your coop and enclosure basically out of junk or otherwise for near-free (good luck with the, ah, “spouse test” on that);

2) You lean heavily on kitchen waste for food;

3) You place no value on the time spent on anything chicken-related;

4) You butcher and eat each chicken after ~3 years when their rate of laying drops off (you stop wasting food and space on an unproductive layer, and gain “free” chicken meat);

5) You raise more than you eat and sell the excess (ten chickens aren’t much more effort than four chickens, and the extra may cover feed and replacement costs for the flock);

So yeah it doesn’t really work out, just buy $5-$8/dozen backyard chicken eggs from someone else who’s bad at math or has different priorities (loves the smell of chicken shit, maybe?), you’ll come out ahead. Or get them from the grocery store if you don’t care much about the chickens’ diet and conditions.

One of my huskies got out and did $70-80 worth of damage to my neighbor's flock: two laying hens.

This doesn't pass the sniff tests. There are plenty of other goods with equal or greater concentration that don't see wild swings like this, cars and CPUs, for instance.