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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

The Bank of England has an inflation calculator which goes back to 1210: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

According to that site, £ 1 in 1330 would be £ 1056.57 in 2018. So the 1330 penny would be worth about £ 4.40375 today. That thatcher would make about £ 13.21 a day, and the tunic would cost £ 158.54, or about $205 in a currency we're more familiar with. For that to be "two weeks' wages" implies a yearly wage of about £ 3800, or $4900. (Of course as the linked site points out, that sort of income calculation doesn't account for non-monetary sources of consumption, which were non-negligible back then.)

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The fundamental issue with applying an inflation adjustment over long periods of time, is that societies are so different, that the typical basket of goods purchased is very different and less certain.

I like to hold something constant as a reference point, but you have to think about what, because for instance, if you're choosing between gold, silver, bread, beer, chicken, or beef, then you have to consider that they may have changed price dramatically relative to each other so which one you use makes a big difference.

I guess an inflation calculator is good if you really know what people bought, but it seems like information would be sparse enough that might mislead you. And like others have said, buying things with money, let alone documenting it, would have been far less prevalent.

We need the price of a big mac in c1350 is what you're saying?

Well, that's an interesting question. It would have been nearly impossible to make anything resembling a Big Mac in 1350, even if you were a king. And now you can get one for what, $4?

https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2011/12/impractical-cheesebur...

We can price out foodstuffs based on macro and micro-nutrients. This is in fact what many measures of inflation and consumer prices were doing especially from the early 20th century through the 1950s or 1960s.

Subsequently the CPI "market basket" approach dominated.

The fact that meat, especially beef, was a rarity in most diets, makes the Big Mac example not particularly germane.

I believe it's Adam Smith who noted that whilst the price of corn ("grain") is highly variable year-to-year, owing to fluctuations in crop yields, it was remarkably constant century to century.

The Green Revolution changed this, of course, though by some arguments, that relies strongly on unaccounted costs.

Yes, of course some relative prices have changed dramatically! If you choose to hold constant the price of a customary work-week of semi-skilled labor, you get something quite close to dsr_'s calculation where the tunic costs as much as $1,500. But given that the goal of all economic activity, including labor, is consumption, the least bad choice would seem to be choosing some sort of indexing based on an average consumption basket - which is essentially what an "inflation calculator" does.

My point was that using an inflation calculator defers to someone's idea of what a basket was, and that may obscure the lack of data, so it might be better to study a few different things that people used both then and now and come up with your own reference point.

I'm not saying there's any alternative, ultimately, to the concept of an average consumption basket, just that methods of determining it might be different. When you have really limited data, you can look at it more closely, and you probably need to, to leverage the context because it's not going to be an unbiased sample.

> using an inflation calculator defers to someone's idea of what a basket was

In this case that someone is Greg Clark (Professor of Economics at UC Davis). The link goes direct to a .xlsx which reveals the "basket" and all the figures - it's a mixture of several (presumably average) wages and a "cost of living".

This is probably the research paper (2009) http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Macroa...

> or about $205 in a currency we're more familiar with

A currency you're more familiar with. Many of us are familiar with multiple currencies, including GBP, EUR, and, yes, USD.

To whit – you're comparing decimal GBP to predecimal pounds, shillings and pence. You might as well compare drachma.

For reference, 1 Euro = 340.75 drachma.

Well, at a particular (final) point in time. Not over 1,000 years of usage.

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