I am eight years in to a ten-year wager on the price of oil vs. Big Macs. The thesis is that, contrary to widespread perception, raw materials like petroleum are not becoming more and more scarce (and therefore expensive). It was inspired by Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource 2 and his famous bet on the price of raw materials. I would have preferred to bet inflation-adjusted dollars against oil, but my friend had some reservations about the stability of the dollar, so I picked Big Macs as a (not very good) substitute. This seems to be working out in my favor, as the Economist has recorded an increase of 49% in burger price ($3.06 to $4.56) while the CPI (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt) has only gone up 19% (196.8 to 233.546).