ThePizza Principle, or thePizza-Subway Connection, inNew York City, is a humorous but generally historically accurate "economic law" proposed by native New Yorker Eric M. Bram.[1] He noted, as reported byThe New York Times in 1980, that from the early 1960s "the price of a slice ofpizza has matched, with uncanny precision, the cost of aNew York subway ride."[1]
In 1985, the latewriter,historian, andfilm criticGeorge Fasel learned of the correlation and wrote about it in an op-ed forThe New York Times.[2] The term "Pizza Connection" referring to thisphenomenon was coined in 2002 byNew York Times columnistClyde Haberman, who commented on the two earlier publications of the theory in theTimes, and predicted a rise in subway fare.[3][4]
In May 2003,The New Yorker magazine proclaimed the validity of the Pizza Connection (now called thepizza principle) in accurately predicting the rise of the subway (andbus) fare to $2.00 the week before.[5] They also quoted Mr. Bram (by then apatent attorney[6]) as warning that since theNew York City Transit Authority had announced the discontinuation of thesubway token itself[7] in favor of the variable-fare costMetroCard (also used on the buses at that point), the direct correlation between the cost of an off-the-street slice of cheese pizza and the cost of a subway token might not continue to hold.
In 2005,[8] and again in 2007,[9] 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.[10] 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 held true.[11] 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.[12][13][14][15] In 2019,The Wall Street Journal noted that, due to a combination of a decrease in the fare bonus for a subway ride rather than an increase in the overall fare ($2.75 at the time) and the increased variability of the cost of pizza in New York City, the Pizza Principle may no longer be accurate.[16] Inflation after theCOVID-19 pandemic, plus a decision by the MTA to freeze fares, led to some evidence of a divergence in 2022.[17]
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