Generally, it seems that perspective is often lost on people. For example, sure enough, gasoline prices have gone up. Paying $4 at the pump for a gallon of joyride fuel hurts especially when one considers that it was so much cheaper only so very recently.

But it helps to see the bigger picture.

Robert Bryce puts gasoline prices into a broader perspective. Gasoline is only slightly more expensive than in 1922, despite obvious increases in demand and cost of production. And, considering the overall cost of car ownership, the percentage that fuel costs make up has actually decreased since the 1970s. Further, compared to what other countries’ citizens pay at the pump, Americans get off easy. In European countries, prices per gallon are often as much as double. Consider also that

Gasoline is…cheap compared with other essential fuels. A Starbucks venti latte costs the equivalent of $23 per gallon while Budweiser beer runs $11 per gallon.

Nevertheless, it must also be said that many such price hikes are often attributable to government intervention, in this case, refusal to tap into U.S. oil and gas reserves due to environmentalist concerns and the nature of OPEC, an organization dominated by non-free market countries. Other examples to think of are sugar and corn. Laws protecting sugar producers in the United States against foreign competition drove up the price of sugar, and laws passed to increase the amount ethanol added to gasoline are now driving up corn prices.

Also ignoring the larger perspective, a Wall Street Journal columnist complains about the apparent downturn in the economy and drastically proclaims that:

[w]hat has overtaken America’s working people is not a natural disaster like “globalization,” and not even some kind of societal atavism in which countries regress mysteriously to their 19th-century selves. This is a man-made catastrophe, a result that proceeded directly from the deliberate beatdown of organized labor and the wrecking of the liberal state.
It is, in other words, a political disaster, with tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest behind.

Please! A classic example of leftist hyperbole concealing the real facts in order to push for redistribution of wealth. Luckily, there are some sane voices, such as this one in U.S. News:

Since 1982, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economy has suffered two recessions—in 1990-91 and in 2001—for a total of 16 months. By contrast, in the previous 25 years, the economy suffered six economic downturns for a painful total of 67 months. And since August 1982, when it bottomed at 776, the Dow has risen almost 1,700 percent. That ascent reflects an economy that has more than doubled from $5.2 trillion in 1982, adjusted for inflation, to $12 trillion today. Not bad at all.

Indeed. Longevity, health, innovation, prosperity and wealth in the 21st century compared to a hundred, fifty, even twenty years ago. Not bad at all.