Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)
orwell.ru
orwell.ru
In 1946, one pound was ~$4 [0], making 165.15 roughly $660. Using a US dollar inflation calculator [1], $660 in 1946 dollars is $8534 in 2018 dollars. Fudging a little, this works out to about $10 per book.
Later, he estimates his annual reading expense as 25 pounds, which works out to about $1300 annually. That's more than I spend on books+e-books+subscriptions, maybe by about double, but this is George Orwell we're talking about, I'd expect he'd be a better reader than I.
[0] http://www.miketodd.net/encyc/dollhist-graph.htm [1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
In Australia, at $56 for 40 grams of loose tobacco at Coles, the 170 grams or so he smoked would cost ~$240/week in 2018. If you added a pint at the pub per day at city prices that’s another $70/week.
That’s $16000/year and would buy you a lot of books.
(This comparison for amusement purposes only... sin taxes seem to have increased much faster than inflation!).
I think that's because back then, everyone smoke & drank, and rather more than we nowadays do, whereas now it's common to look down upon smokers in particular. They're a despised minority, so the ruling class see no problem increasing their taxes. After all, they're free to quite any time they like!
We call them "public health accommodations", now.
"NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."
Like now, most of that is nicknames and people didn’t use them in combinations. For reference, the actual currency was pounds, shillings and pence. Ratios of 1, 1/20, and 1/12 respectively.
In modern decimal London, 20 pounds is a pony and 100 is a ton. We still have the colorful shorthand.
That's a half-dollar
Unrelated to your post is two bits == quarter, if memory serves me it's by way if Spain.
Two bits, four bits, six bits a dollar.
Peso: "a weight" https://www.etymonline.com/word/peso
[1]https://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume3...
(As an aside, one of the great mistakes of standard measurements IMO is that we reduce all our fraction. the alternating 1/2,33/66,17/32,35/64,9/16, etc is awful. We could have just kept everything in 64ths and then just used the numerator.)
This is what normal people do with metric / decimal.
Everything's in thousands (/1000's) of a metre -- ie. millimetres, or mm.
When you can no longer differentiate the notches on your rule ... you're accurate enough.
I also find myself doing a fair amount of machining, and one of the things I have to remind myself is that I don’t need .001” accuracy in wood.
When I'm working with a chainsaw I'm 'accurate' to within several millimetres.
Through a tablesaw or bandsaw etc I'm closer to 1-2 millimetres accuracy.
It's rare I need to get to thickenesser levels of accuracy (0.5 millimetres, say) ... but I usually work with more forgiving softer timbers.
A friend of mine does some seriously precise metalwork - down to 'thousands of an inch' (he's English, but has lived in AU for some decades). It's beyond my realm, though the level of accuracy transcends measurement systems -- whether it's thousands of inches, or extra zeroes after the dot for fractions of a mm -- it's a matter of tooling, or, as I say, gradations on your rule!
Conversely, in metal, pretty much 100% of my projects are built to a plan, since they tend to be parts of machinery/tools/jigs that need to be the reference surfaces. Oh, the money i've spent on measuring equipment. yeesh.
Sure enough, first time I go to use one I discover it's in decimal feet. That, too, was a weird day. I'm in Canada, so it's not unusual for some things to be in feet/inches and some to be in meters/centimeters/etc. But my brain positively melted when it couldn't reconcile the incongruity of those tape measures.
Even weirder, I've made rulers that indicate pixels at the precise PPI density for MacBook pros, iPhones, etc, so that my graphic designer friend could hand sketch UI/UX elements to scale and see how they'd render.
Unfortunately it's a claim often made by people who are preemptively nostalgic for imperial measurements, while simultaneously addicted to base-10 number systems, but who can't quite get past the incompatibilities of the two combined.
Beyond that problem there seems to be an underlying belief that using decimal points, and/or accepting any kind of rounding, is some kind of unforgivable concession.
These correspond, roughly, to retail, wholesale, and financial (banking, government) commerce.
It's helpful to recognise that virtualy all names for money refer to either weight (penny, pound, shekel, drachma ...) or some impramateur of quality (royal, crown, mark, dollar, ...). Another set are based on divisions (denarius, dinar, dime, ...).
In the English system, the silver pound was 240 pennyweights, wth subdivisions corresponding;
Farthing: 1/4 penny, 1/960£
Happenny: 1/2 penny, 1/480£
Pence: 1/240£
Tuppence: 1/120£
Thruppence: 1/90£
Sixpence: 1/40£
Shilling (bob): 12d, 1/20£
Florin: 24d, 1/10£
Half crown: 30p, Florin 6d, 1/8£
10 Bob: 120p, 4 Half crowns, 1/2£
The guinea is the odd one out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currencies
Adam smith discusses English currencyy, at length (of course), and of the maintenance or divergence of values of copper, silver, and gold.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
“The economics of content” were very much a topic back then!
Aside:
“Eight pounds a year covers the cost of two daily papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and one or two monthly magazines.”
Folks read a lot of newspapers back then!
Well, there was no internet back then.
It wouldn't surprise me of we are actually consuming more (written) content in 2018 then we did in 1946.
As we are littered by content via our always-on lifestyles, we tend only to skim and read shallow stuff, or stuff that's gonna help us get by our current hurdles. That odd quick read on StackOverflow counts as that too.
Sitting down and actually grasping a full book is becoming a rare skill, because of this imposed-adhd lifestyle of ever-greater everything.
Nope. People are more literate today than 70 years ago. People are better educated today and have more schooling. On average, more people have read a full book than before.
Strange to think that people are nostalgic for an era were women ( half the population ) were discouraged from going to college and minorities were denied equal access to education. Even stranger that people think that people were better educated then.
It's statistically impossible for your version of the past to be true.
Our mobile phone literary is more akin to oral language in form and complexity than long form literature or technical writing.
There are tons of other dubious and dire socioeconomic "firsts" for this generation that would affect such scores. Sugar packed, nutritionally light, chemically flavored foodstuffs. Totally-Not-poverty. 60 hour work weeks across multiple jobs...
Proof by insistence? When you see the written reports the kids produce at my university you can only disagree violently. Two or three years in, and they still have no command of their own native language. If they read books or the daily paper you'd expect them to pick up proper usage by osmosis, but no, not here, not at this regional 4-year college.
Proof by statistics and facts. Hardly any women went to college back then. So that's about 50% of the population who were less educated. Thrown in minorities who were discouraged from getting an education, it's statistical fact.
Perhaps if you bothered to read my comment rather than jumping to complain about your students...
"Strange to think that people are nostalgic for an era were women ( half the population ) were discouraged from going to college and minorities were denied equal access to education."
> When you see the written reports the kids produce at my university you can only disagree violently.
Sure, the overall quality of the student body is lower because far more people attend college. But overall, the education level is higher collectively.
Also, instead of blaming technology, have you considered the quality of educators have declined markedly?
My brother, who teaches a college class or two as an adjunct, complains of undergraduate writing. On the other hand, I can say that I was a copy editor long ago, and there were many Ph.D.s back then who couldn't write a clear paragraph.
The noneducated got largely forgotten because they left little trace. Go to a retirement home and ask about what they did for a living and how much education they had - you will find a very high percentage without even a high school diploma - and that is the recent enough that they are still alive past.
Look at the internet - when it was just universities everyone was more technically knowledgeable but now that it is widespread and accessible there is a broader range. That doesn't mean that technical adeptness is going down.
Sorry to burst your bubble that "kids these days..."
And no, not everyone pick writing ability by osmosis. Some do, others don't. Speaking as someone who read a lot and wrote badly.
And also, past tended to have heavy censorship so sex and such were less in picture.
Interesting to see that the standards of internet journalism are not entirely new...
Book tokens?! Is this some kind of 40s cryptocurrency?
The article would be more enjoyable if converted to decimal currency and adjusted for inflation.
For example, today, I might think "Let me look up that quote in one of the books in my Kindle app. I know I highlighted it so I can just search those."
Back then, did people have their own mini card catalogs or notebooks with quote-book-page data?
Two Farthings = One Ha’penny. Two ha’pennies = One Penny. Three Pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalised currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.”
-- Good Omens, Pratchett & Gaiman
Since the divisibility argument is often trotted in defence of continued use of non-metric measurement systems, it seems odd it's more rarely used to defend non-decimal currencies, where it might actually be useful. Though the fact nobody uses meaningfully-non-decimal currencies any more is some evidence for arguing that this just isn't as useful as the convenience of the easy decimal numbers.
Still, however many currency sub-units you have, inflation makes the issue less pressing over time.
Now it's pounds and pence which work very much like dollars and cents. 100 pennies to the pound.
The biggest difference now is probably that Americans have cents, nickels, dimes, and quarters, where the British have pennies, two-pennies / two p (sometimes, but rarely these days, called tuppence), five p, ten p, twenty p, and fifty p.
To me that's easier to keep track of than remembering which one's the nickel and which is the dime.
The only term still in general use seems to be 'quid'.