40 years of Burgernomics
Posted on Tue, 13 Oct 2026Forty years ago, The Economist needed a way to make a dry economic concept feel real to readers, so it turned to the price of a hamburger, something everyone already understood. This month marks four decades since the Big Mac Index debuted, and it has outlasted almost every other attempt to make the value of money easy to picture. A Number Everyone Understands Since 1986, The Economist has tracked the price of a Big Mac across dozens of countries, using it as a stand-in for cross-border purchasing power. If a burger costs more than a co
