Dumb question. Why do people use inflation? Like Rockefeller would take the cash and put in a %2.5 account for 100 years? He probably would have put it in an investment at minimum gaining %7-10 account for 100 years - giving him multiple trillions.
A common refrain is that Carnegie Hall only cost $1M ($29,581,868.13 when adjusted for inflation) to build, so why do we still credit its founder with their name? Shouldn't we rename it in honor of someone who's contributed more to the Hall?
What this doesn't take into account is what it would cost to _build_ a new Carnegie Hall today. Labor is far more expensive (highest $/hr ever in 2019 if I'm not mistaken [1]) today and so are building materials [2].
So it's true he'd see compounding returns from investing, but to do what they did back then would cost significantly more today. IE, their dollars took them further back then.
Also, worth noting Rockefeller donated 6% of his salary to charity every pay check every single year of his life, not just when he could "afford" it [3]. So if you take into account the _missed_ compound returns of those charitable contributions, you can start to get a sense for just otherworldly their charitable efforts were.
Not trying to say these guys were angels. And yet, as rich as they were, I think too often that overshadows the gargantuan contributions to charity they made.
[1](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/02/are-wages-increasing...) [2](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/consumer-price-in...) [3](https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/people/hall-o...)
Is it really such a great thing to give away money you don't need. IMO tha should be the absolute minimum baseline expectation for someone who controls so much wealth.
Because it is very hard to think about the currency values in terms of purchasing power.
Inflation is the lowest metric in that count, but reflects a somewhat uniform drop in purchasing power (per dollar) across the whole market.
My friend's mom told me her mortgage for a Bay Area house was 75$ a month, the two cars parked in front were worth more than a 2 bed house when she got the cars.
So it was much cheaper to buy a house, but much more expensive to get a car and I can't even have a ballpark figure for what a gigabyte of computer memory would have cost in 1971.
So, inflation adjustment is at best a rough proxy for purchasing power at current costs.