The cost of living, two ways

A first-draft write-up — the data and charts are real; the words are a starting point to make your own.

Ask "what does the cost of living look like?" and you'll get two different, both-correct answers. One is a movie: how the price of a typical basket has risen year after year. The other is a snapshot: how expensive one country is compared with another, right now. The two views below take each in turn.

View 1 — How much more expensive, since 2000

The first view is the Consumer Price Index, the standard official measure of the cost of a fixed basket of goods and services. I've rebased every country to 100 in the year 2000, so the lines all start together and you can read off exactly how much prices have climbed: a value of 150 means the basket costs 50% more than it did in 2000.

Play it and the spread is the story. The UK and the US pull away hardest; Canada tracks close behind. France stays flattest of the big Europeans. And Japan barely moves for two decades — its famous era of near-zero inflation — before finally lifting at the very end. Same axis, very different rides.

View 2 — Who's expensive right now: the Big Mac test

Comparing price levels across countries is harder than it sounds — a dollar buys different amounts of "stuff" in different places. The cleanest open measures (the OECD's comparative price levels) are surprisingly awkward to get at, and the crowdsourced "cost of living index" sites aren't open data at all. So this view uses a proxy that's both rigorous enough and instantly intuitive: the price of a Big Mac, the same product built to the same spec everywhere, converted into US dollars.

It's a single good, not a whole basket — but it captures a lot: local wages, rent, ingredients and taxes all bake into that price. Watch Switzerland-adjacent Europe and the UK sit at the top, the US in the middle, and Japan fall to the cheapest of the group as the yen weakens — a burger that costs over $7 in London runs closer to $3 in Tokyo.

Prices rising over time and prices differing across borders are two different measurements. Conflating them is how "everything's so expensive" arguments go in circles.

The honest caveats

• CPI is an average. One national index hides enormous variation — your rent, your city, your basket may be moving very differently from the headline line.
• The Big Mac is a proxy, not gospel. It's a clever shorthand for price levels, but it's one product; it over-weights beef, labour and real estate and ignores everything else. Treat it as a conversation-starter, not a cost-of-living statistic.
• Germany, France and Italy share a line. The Big Mac source reports them jointly as the Euro area, so they appear individually in the inflation view but together in the burger view.
• There is no single open "cost of living index" API. The familiar city-by-city indices are proprietary and crowdsourced; the honest open equivalents are CPI (over time) and comparative price levels (across countries), which is exactly the pair shown here.