$1,731 in today's USD is $37,392. That new car would be $18k, rent was just over $500. There's places in the US where average rent is close to that, and I bet if we removed NYC and the Bay area the national average wouldn't be super far off.
Education and staples are where you're getting drilled on a daily basis. Harvard costs many times the average national income rather than being a fraction of it.
Average income of $1,731/yr is equivalent to $37,393 in present dollars. Current average wage is $63,795.
Felt like nerding out on this.
You can use the rule of 72 to figure compounding inflation (or interest) in your head. Just take 72 divided by your inflation rate and you get how long it takes for a price to double. Example: Assuming 3% yearly inflation , It would take 72/3 or 24 years for the price to double. Then, just double the starting price for each 24 year period. So assuming a car was 1,000 in 1950, it would cost about 2,000 in 1975, 4,000 in 2000, and 8,000 in 2025 if inflation for that product was exactly 3% yearly.
A couple percentage points difference makes a huge difference in how long it takes for a price (or investment to grow). The stock market has an average yearly interest rate of like 8%. That translates into a investment portfolio doubling every 9 years instead of the 24 years it would be for 3%. So 45 years in the market would turn an initial 1k investment into a ~$32k investment.
Of course, you could also use an online compound interest calculator(simple one here), but I like to know how to do the calculation myself personally.
Chasing lower prices? How about higher incomes?
NYT: "Per capita income in 1938; Average Figure Was $5l5, Compared With $679 in Boom Year and $376 in 1933 NEW YORK STATE HIGHEST Yearly Earnings Show a Mean of $822, With Mississippi Lowest With $205"
We could use submarines too
Bolsheviks
holy shit that the price of a car is way more than the rent cost. Nowadays a car is 4-5x a months rent the price on the chart is lile 20x
What can we do to shrink our economy and progress by 90 years?
What an asinine post.
You guys act like that system was even good back then because things were "cheaper".
Want to affect prices? Then literally stop buying shit.
No Nikes no coke no mcds no chips. They charge you as much as they do because U LET THEM!
Permanently Deleted
Something I don't see throughout this thread is definition of the average house.
My house was built in 1940*, and I think it is representative of the "average" house of its day in that it is two bedrooms, one bath, a tad over seven hundred square feet.
It's quite difficult to find anything built this century that is so humble and small.
We want to believe the average house is and should be four bedroom, three bathroom, twenty six hundred square feet.
None of this is meant to express any opinions on what should be, but rather than I suspect one of the comparative metrics is likely off. I still paid waaaaay more than inflation increase on my little abode, but it was comfortably affordable and cheaper than anything I could rent.
- Clarification on my house. I got extremely fortunate to find it. The seller bought it, tore it down to the ground, and rebuilt a brand new house on the original footprint. So my house is really only two years old, but the property rolls still show it to be eighty years old.
