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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

Comparisons beyond 100 years or so are largely meaningless. You're right about purchasing power, and that leads to your last point which is that what could actually be bought was so fundamentally different that attempting to do so is almost always going to mislead the public and be irresponsible. But it's one of those things that reporters and journalists can't help themselves from doing.

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Is 100yrs that hard? I recently watched "The Little Giant" (1933) where the main character claims to have over a million dollars and is kind of retiring. I found it fun to look up what that million dollars would be worth today. According to one site it is $18 million. He went to a hotel in Santa Barbara where he was paying $45 a night for a giant suite. That comes out to over $800 a night which sounds like it might be in the correct ballpark. He gave is girlfriend who he was breaking up with a check for $25k which came out to about $500k in todays terms it seems. He rented a 20 bedroom 12 bathroom mansion for $1450 a month which is apparently $25k today. Sounds reasonable for a 20 bedroom mansion?

Those all seem like reasonable numbers.

PS: not recommending the movie. It was cute but not great.

I think the answer to this is basically that the further you go back, the harder the comparisons become - or at least you have to think much harder about why you're comparing things.

Over a few years, it's pretty easy to talk about the amount of money to maintain a certain standard of living. Some things cost more, some less and it averages out to a comparative number.

How do I compare my outgoings on a mobile phone to the 1980s/60s/40s? Should I? How do I compare international travel to a time before commercial flight? Before powered flight at all? Should I compare year round access to exotic fruits - something that would require royal wealth if even possible depending on how far back you want to go.

It doesn't mean we can't do it though, just that the comparisons come with more and more caveats and more ways of working it out make sense in different contexts.

One I think is quite interesting is "how many human hours can I direct with this sum?" or even "what portion of human output can I control?". It doesn't tell you what your salary would be in the 1200s but I think it's an interesting framing for looking at how the world has changed.

>I think the answer to this is basically that the further you go back, the harder the comparisons become

That's clearly true although I suspect it's rather non-linear depending upon the metric you're trying to compare.

Healthcare is certainly one big thing that money can only buy to some degree over time. Go back to the early twentieth century and a very wealthy person can largely be as comfortable as today. The fact that they don't have kitchen appliances, TV, and so forth doesn't really matter a lot. But they can't get polio vaccine or many medical treatments that are pretty routine today.

It has footage of Santa Barbara from the 30s? I'd love to check it out - was born and raised there and worked at the Hotel Santa Barbara briefly which is the only hotel old enough to fit this bill!

The whole nature of what property and ownership means tends to shift with large enough time frames. It wasn't that long ago that in many places it was difficult to be wealthy without being a noble. A mansion tended to come with tenant farmers and feudal obligations.

How do you meaningfully compare a hotel or mansion in 1933 to one today though? The reasons you'd travel would be very different, and so would the experience of the hotel. Those 20 bedrooms would presumably have blankets rather than duvets; the variety of food you get in a budget hotel today would have been virtually unimaginable then. The very concept of a girlfriend back then is hard to compare to what a girlfriend means now. Etc.

The food is a good example - you could buy handmade quilts at a surprisingly cheap rate, but you could not buy fresh Lychee from Asia at any price. You could buy an encyclopedia, but couldn't buy a single Google search. A Roman emperor could wear a handcrafted sword of the finest exotic steel, but could not get a single AK-47 in his army.

$800 is more in the good 5 star room than opulent suite territory tho, given the location

Well... That's less than 100 years ago so....

This isn’t some threshold below which results are meaningless, it’s a time period approximation.

Given the lack of computerised record keeping at the time compared to now, it’s more important to have a reliable metric from the period than hit the 100y mark exactly

That's measuring the monetary value while ignoring actual utility. No amount of money could have bought a polio vaccine or advanced cancer treatments or genetic testing or microelectronics in 1933 but these are common things across the world now. Purchasing power doesn't just grow in quantity, it grows in technological sophistication that make any comparison between now and even the early 20th century more than useless - they're actively misleading. The biggest growth is in industrial production and distribution of goods and it isn't really quantifiable.

$1 million then is not $18 Million today in purchasing power IMO. Maybe it is in inflation. Probably relative to GDP /stock market is a better way to measure it

$1 mil in 1993 is not worth $18 mil today (ie. in 2020).

Inflation has averaged 2% during this time, so over 27 years: (1.02)^27 = 1.7069

$1 mil from 1993 would be worth no more than ~$1.71 today.

He said 1933, not 1993

1933, not 1993.

>... is almost always going to mislead the public and be irresponsible.

Yes, the author should be careful not to mislead anyone and inspire them to travel back in time to become a charioteer.

Laughed out loud here. But I still think there's more to the original argument: If someone takes this argument at face value, they may conclude that Roman society was a modern capitalistic one, with sponsorships for athletes, celebrities endorsing products and so on. Almost reminiscent of The Flintstones. It won't be of much consequence, but it would be a bit silly.

I've always gauged it by cost of living expenses for working class people.

It's one reason why I love the road to wiggan pier so much. George Orwell breaks down the cost of living in many areas of Britain for the average person. I think when I calculated it out, even me living in the US at $12/hr with a 700 rent payment and all other expenses, I was still living a comfier life than those people. And they put in some LONG days too.

The most interesting thing he pointed out too was it wasnt the corporate places that had the worst landlords and rooms, it was the small or individual owners. Simply because they couldn't afford to fix anything or give you back your deposit.

Comparisons in the largely static medieval and early renaissance periods in Europe can easily be made across centuries without even adjusting the numbers.

The medieval period was much more dynamic than eg classic antiquity. See the 'Real World' section of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis for some writing on the topic.

To get to your point: comparisons work for a surprisingly long time, when you compare societies on metallic monetary standards.

It's not really obvious why using eg gold or silver as money should keep the prices of goods and services we actually care about so stable over long times. One explanation I read is that the real cost of mining more gold is relatively stable (in terms of real labour and resources expended).

So if the market price of gold in terms of those real resources goes up, more mines will open and existing mines will work harder, eventually restoring long running equilibrium.

Similar when relative gold prices are dropping.

Another fun fact: modern economies on fiat money spend more real resources on mining gold than classic gold standard economies (like Scotland). Perhaps because people feel more of a need to invest in gold as an inflation hedge?

See 'The Resource Costs of Fiat Money Exceed Those of a Gold Standard' https://www.econlib.org/the-resource-costs-of-fiat-money-exc...

On the gold mining in different countries, maybe historically gold-based countries did all their mining back in the day and now have none left?

Not sure. Gold has been exchanged on global markets since basically forever. So local exhaustion of mines doesn't make much of a differences.

I think this is an important point. Life really wasn't improving much for the average person before the industrial revolution. GDP per capita estimates of the past before the industrial revolution give us something like 50-100% GDP per capita increase over 1000+ years.

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