Calculating PMCIN

While Pie Making Capacity In Nation (PMCIN) is an interesting idea, it's still half-baked. Statistics can tell you anything if you torture them enough, and we could easily manipulate this measure to be essentially another version of gross domestic product (GDP) or to promote outright communism.

The key is the assumptions about what constitutes pie making capacity. Here, I will assume the maximum personal input estimate (PIE) is 1 per adult per week. Thus, the maximum PMCIN/wk, the default estimate, will be the population of the country.

The following is intended to be the minimum requirements for good pies. I know there's a technically savvy reader who's just itching to write scripts to grab these numbers and compute PMCIN on a daily basis.

Inedible contributions:
An oven and a counter top
Price: Average rent / 2 (assume 2 adults per household)
There's many sources for this, I'd like to average the first page of Craig's List "appartments/homes for rent" since that is the most open and accurate measurement tool.
(although gov't cost of living data is acceptable. Given that rent reflects actual cost of housing and mortgages are a mess, we'll only use rental prices for this statistic.)

Cooking implements:
Price: determined from an average of the 10 highest product rating results on Google Shopping, divided by 52, implying annual replacement
9" glass pie pan, 9 1/2" pie pan, 18" rolling pin, 1 set glass mixing bowls, 1 set measuring cups, 1 2cup glass measuring cup, 1 large cookie sheet, 1 set measuring spoons, pie bird,

Consumables:
Pie and Policy believes in seasonally appropriate cooking, and so will use a "basket" of three pies to determine the cost of a pie with seasonally appropriate filling. This also allows us to use in-season farmer's market costs, thus increasing PMCIN.

However, I will only use a basic crust, since the ingredients reflect the costs of making other types of crusts, and these don't tend to change with seasons. I'll also assume a double crust.
3 cups flour (.3lb, so 1/15th of a five lb bag)
1/2 cup unsalted butter (1 stick, divide package cost by 4)
1t salt (call it 1/60th of a 26oz package)
1T sugar (call it 1/100th of a 5lb package)

The rest, as I said, depends on the season and the farmer's market. I will start keeping a record of the cost of my fillings, and then annualize them. A good starting assumption, though, is roughly $6.oo/pie. That's at the high end, and I'll give more accurate numbers with future recipes.