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Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers · Money & Markets · October 2026
On a Halloween episode about inflation, Vanek Smith follows a semi-truck full of costumes and candy headed to a Spirit Halloween pop-up and lists every place petroleum shows up. Her point is how far a sharp rise in oil prices reaches into ordinary prices.
I, so it is Halloween season and, you know, we all, these spirit of Halloween stores open everywhere. Do you guys have spirit of Halloween stores that open up in like it's like the temporary pop-up costume shop?
In Ann Arbor, we do, yes. Yeah. In Australia, no. Oh,
in Australia. Yeah. Well, you've been spared. I do kind of love Spirit of Halloween. It's a fascinating place. But so I was thinking of if you have a truck, a semi-truck full of costumes and candy headed to a spirit of Halloween. So all the places you'd find plastic. Are you ready? I think there's more, but here we go. So there's plastic, obviously, in the truck, right? The dashboard, all the plastic and the seats. There's in the, in the gas tank, there's oil in the in the gas tank. There's synthetic rubber tires driving on an asphalt road, oil oil. Let's say it's hauling wax lips. Those are paraffin wax made of oil, masks, pretty much all oil. The wrappers on the candy, oil. The dye in the candy, oil. The shiny coating on the candy, sometimes oil. The clothes the driver is wearing, three quarters of the fiber that are used to make clothes is oil. The contact lenses he's wearing, oil. The sunglasses he's wearing to keep the sun out of his eyes, oil. The vitamins and aspirin he is taking to continue driving. I don't know why I gendered it, still petrochemicals. The shampoo he used, oil. The water bottle he's drinking out of, oil. The sandwich he is eating comes from wheat fertilized with fossil fuels. It is just, when you start looking into it, the fact that oil is going up by 115% is really alarming. It is everywhere. Petrochemicals, fossil fuels, everywhere.
That was extraordinary. You are literally the greatest Halloween economics reporter in the history of economics. I will
take that, I think, might be true. I actually think that might be true. But one thing I wanted to ask about too is, is the new, I feel like that's sort of the devil that we know, the energy price devil that we know. But I feel like we've got data center issues coming too. Those are sort of…
There's one more place actually that we're seeing the data center build out in the cost of living. And that's actually the price of personal computers, which the most reliable fact for the last 30 years has been every year computers get better and faster and cheaper. They either get cheaper or you…