61–70 of 89 posts
Regarding the point about his good fortune of being born in 1835, I wonder what the date is for new tech billionaire CEOs. The article made me wonder if we are in our own little gilded age now. Mark Zuckerberg: 1984 Larry Page: 1973 Sergey Brin: 1973 Elon Musk: 1971 Michael Dell: 1965 Jeff Bezos: 1964 Jack Ma: 1964 Masayoshi Son: 1957 Steven Ballmer: 1956 Bill Gates: 1955 Steve Jobs: 1955 Paul Allen: 1953 Larry Ellis…
So it says $450k then is equivalent to about $11M now, a multiple of about 24. So scaling up.. the coal miner's daily pay was about $36 in today's money and monthly rent about $144. A 3 bed NYC apartment, on the other hand, was about $1920 in today's money. Seems the gap between poor and the 'typical' rich has come down a lot, even if it doesn't feel like it.
In the rush to close a largely abstract gap (as it is by nature entirely relative to some previous, also unique, point in history) I worry we risk losing touch with the practical day-to-day gains/costs. Especially as the controls often end up pushing down on the work class rather than the intended targets at the top. Such as shifting operations and taxable revenue overseas.
Not to mention how individual morality is always pinned to it when it's often the side effect of much higher level systems (the rise of globalism [1], regulatory-heavy states vs tax shelters dynamic [2], growth of the financial industry [3], etc, etc). Then "fixing" becomes a vindictive pursuit rather than for the benefit of everyone.
Quality of life of the general population should be the primary measure in this conversation. Merely focusing on a single metric, such as closing some gap between two relative ends of a spectrum, could very easily lead to bad policy making that does little to help those on the other end.
[1] https://news2-images.vice.com//uploads/2016/11/chart-41.png
[2] https://i.imgur.com/R6SWilB.png
[3] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/financial_servic...
Regarding the point about his good fortune of being born in 1835, I wonder what the date is for new tech billionaire CEOs. The article made me wonder if we are in our own little gilded age now. Mark Zuckerberg: 1984 Larry Page: 1973 Sergey Brin: 1973 Elon Musk: 1971 Michael Dell: 1965 Jeff Bezos: 1964 Jack Ma: 1964 Masayoshi Son: 1957 Steven Ballmer: 1956 Bill Gates: 1955 Steve Jobs: 1955 Paul Allen: 1953 Larry Ellis…
Maybe you're already aware of this but being in a gilded age would not be a good thing. The gilded age described a society where serious problems were masked by a thin veneer of gold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paige_Compositor
"The Paige Compositor typesetting machine that drove the family to the brink of bankruptcy, forcing them to leave their Hartford home."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically, the price of food was much higher than it is now. Thank our farmers for operating more efficient year after year. https://mjperry.blogspot.nl/2010/07/as-share-of-income-ameri...
You are right that modern technology has figured out how to turn energy into soil (way oversimplified!), and that probably 80% of the nitrogen in the bodies of any of us reading this came from the Haber process. However, it still sounds bizarre that about 90% of their expenses was food.
What do you think being poor is?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole sentence is illogical as 'annual' implies 'per year'.
I think it means average cost per month. Basically what they say is that yearly spend was $960, and then present it as per-month-cost, but I can imagine food prices varied quite a bit with the seasons back then, so that true spend at any given month could be quite a bit different from this average.
An avocado in a British supermarket costs about 90p right now. In season, you can normally get at least three of them for that money. Similar price changes occur for soft fruit etc.
100 years ago (even 50 years ago), your diet, rather than your food budget, would have been the thing that changed with the seasons to match availability.
There seems to be an error: "The family’s annual food bill was $80 a month." For a person earning $1.50 per day, that would have been a whopping monthly food bill.
Someting is off with the food prices. Multiplying the other amounts by 100 yields reasonable comparisons to todays prices: $485 - mens suit $8000 - NYC rent $150/day - working person salary $600 - rural rent $35/lb butter $40/dozen eggs
So it says $450k then is equivalent to about $11M now, a multiple of about 24. So scaling up.. the coal miner's daily pay was about $36 in today's money and monthly rent about $144. A 3 bed NYC apartment, on the other hand, was about $1920 in today's money. Seems the gap between poor and the 'typical' rich has come down a lot, even if it doesn't feel like it.
Compared to 2-3 years ago, many inflation measures can look or feel accurate, but go more than 30 and they are downright deceptive, and impossible to glean any meaningful insight. Even items that sound the same ("Houses") can be monstruously different (No indoor plumbing, no electricity, slavery for maintenance, etc.). How can you really compare today to Mark Twain's day when the shared subset of actually comparable items between our inflation index and his index likely contains no more than apples and tomatoes?
