Is there anywhere that's done a deeper dive into "what you could afford" means? I want to see how few hours you could work throughout history to afford absolute necessities. And then split this based on minimum wage, average wage, median wage etc.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26634594-the-rise-and-fa...
The bottom line is that if you zoom out essentially nothing happened for thousands and thousands of years until the industrial revolution.
EDIT: sorry, it is the inverse: how much light you get for a day's work.
In 2021 I can buy a bunch of bananas for $1 in the winter in the PNW. This is pretty much not possible for a 1900 factory worker let alone some remote 1800 pioneer. And let’s not even get to differences in the quality of housing like with electricity, or running water, or even a stove with temperature control. (Fun fact; recipes with exact cook times and temperatures only start showing up around the 1930s because previously it wan’t easy to control.)
it doesn't include things that don't have acute tech-driven inflation (housing/education/healthcare) where tech can't drive prices to zero as easily.
80 years ago the President of the USA suffered from polio. A vaccine costs about $1 now.
Education at primary/secondary level is mainly salary, buildings, land, so tracks well with inflation.
As locations concentrate, attractive land increases in value. Land in the middle of nowhere decreases in value if population is stable (but of course population has increased too)