BREAKING NEWS! SecretNYC has uncovered a conspiracy with ties so deep and so dark, you’ll think Watergate was a kid’s game. Sit down and hold on: the pizza industry is in cahoots with the NYC Subway! The wheels of steel that move New York are pulled along by the cheesy, mozzarella strings of the pizza industry…. OK, just kidding.
There’s no secret conspiracy, but there’s a definite connection between the cost of a subway ride and the price of a pizza slice. You’ll never see the pizza the same way again.
The Pizza Principle, also known as the Pizza-Subway Connection is a more or less historically accurate “economic law” proposed by Eric M. Bram. He noted in 1980 that from the early 1960s “the price of a slice of pizza has matched, with uncanny precision, the cost of a New York subway ride.” In 1985 George Fasel learned of the correlation and wrote about it in an op-ed for The New York Times. But let’s get to the center of this bad boy: is it true?
In May 2003, The New Yorker magazine proclaimed the validity of the Pizza Connection in accurately predicting the rise of the subway fare to $2.00 the week before. In 2005, and again in 2007, Haberman noted the price of a slice was again rising, and, citing the Pizza Connection, worried that the subway/bus fare might soon rise again. The fare did indeed rise to $2.25 in June 2009, and again in 2013 to $2.50. In 2014 Jared Lander, a professional statistician and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, conducted a study of pizza slice prices within New York City and concluded that the Pizza Principle still holds true. Other New York City news organizations occasionally confirm the ability of the Pizza Principle to predict increases in the cost of a single-ride subway/bus fare in the city. So yeah, it’s true. Get out and spread the news.
We’ve got a few theories about why the correlation exists. As pizza gets more expensive, there’s less reasons to outside, cause pizza is the only reason to get out, so more people just wanna spend their lives underground, hence increasing demand. Another theory: as the price of the slice rises, the subway ticket naturally follows, since the NY subway engine runs on pepperoni pizzas. What’s your theory? Tell us below so get can get to the bottom of this mystery!
Featured image post [mentalfloss]