My recent foray into and through France was amazing. I drove about 2,048 kilometers on this trip, which equals about 1,273 miles. It is fair to say I saw a great deal of the countryside. As I watched the gas gauge and later pumped fuel, it occurred to me that we have far less to be troubled about in America.
Before I departed, I lamented the price of regular gas sneaking over $4.00 per gallon in Paradise. In the weeks since the Middle East conflict began, gas had crept from about $2.91 to just over $4.00. The increase was about $1.11, and that represented a change of 38%. It was frustrating.
The digital signs in France are far less depressing, with fuel listed between 1.98 and 2.20. It is also less patent in France also because there are fewer stations, and so the price of fuel is not as frequently in-your-face. No billboards are pushing the message either. Notably, one might expect dollar signs in the first sentence of this paragraph, but this was in France, and the currency there is Euros (€). The resulting exchange rates were illuminating.
But first, for a comparison, Yahoo Finance notes fuel in France rose after the Iran war began from €1.71 to €2.20, or €.49, an increase of about 29%. That is not as significant as the U.S. increase of 38%.
In that light, there may be room for some continental envy.
But there is room here for some additional math.
First, that €2.20 mentioned did not buy a gallon of fuel, but a litre ("liter" if you must). A litre is about a quarter gallon, .2642 of a gallon to be more precise. So the French price per gallon that I experienced was €8.34 (€2.20 x 3.79). That is an expensive gallon of gas.
And that is in Euros, not Dollars. Converting €8.34 (1.16 dollars to each Euro), makes €8.34 the equivalent of $9.67. The price of gas in France was more than double the U.S. price in Paradise (though the cost has continued upward here and was concurrently about $4.35). The price per gallon in France was close to TEN DOLLARS per gallon.
Time is critical. The price in France today has decreased to about €1.90, about a 14% decrease from May's €2.20. And gas in Paradise has decreased to about $3.49 from May's $4.35, about 20%. This further illustrates that U.S. prices are more elastic, more prone to fluctuation.
The impact of the high French fuel costs on traffic was negligible or less. The French roads, highways, expressways, and toll roads were busy. The drivers were pushing or exceeding the posted speed limits consistently. On the toll roads, there was no hesitation from the 130 kph (81 mph) posted limit, and traffic often flew by when I drove that speed.
This all illustrates that values for goods or services can be very different across jurisdictions. They can be subject to change and evolution. Costs and prices can be influenced by outside forces that are unrelated or only tangentially related to the ultimate product that is being discussed. Their propensities to increase or decrease are not static across jurisdictional lines either.
It is no different in workers' compensation. Across the country, jurisdictions are different in law, regulation, economy, and more. There are variations that persist and others that vacillate. While it may be that there are few true constants or predictabilities, there are certainly factors and considerations that are more or less steady within the confines of any particular system.
