Benchmarking is fun. You find two or more items, and you find some way to compare them to each other, to make sense of what seems to be incomprehensible relationships. You always need to answer the question: "compared to what?"
For example, The Economist has its Big Mac Index. It takes the price of a Big Mac in various countries around the world, compares the costs of them in their native country by normalizing them to a dollar figure, and then draws observations/conclusions about the relative strength of the countries' currencies.
Carpe Diem is a fairly widely-read economics blog, written by an economics professor in Michigan. He looks at the price of gasoline through the prism of how many minutes the average American worker must put in to buy a gallon of gasoline. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, he looks at Kansas City prices, even though he's in Flint. But regardless, his recent finding is that when you take into account the growth in US worker earnings the past several years, meager though they may be, and then you calculate in the actual retail price, we're getting down to an all-time low.
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