And then converting GBP to USD, I get: $2,508,900 they were carrying around in that bag.
I don’t understand money and economics much today, much less back then. It seems to me that trying to compare numbers from then and now isn’t going to be terribly accurate, but is it close enough that I can picture them having two and a half million dollars? No wonder Fogg is so free spending. That’s a lotta money. I’d buy an elephant, too.
There’s different ways of doing it, but if you go by the price of bread or milk or eggs, etc then versus now, you can make a conversion…what that money would buy then and what it would cost now.
For instance, if 10,000 pounds would’ve bought 100,000 loaves of bread then at 10p (1/10 of a pound?) per loaf, and a loaf of bread is 3 pounds now, then it would be like carrying around 300,000 pounds today.
Now that I’ve thought about it, this might not be entirely accurate as the cost of living can vary differently than the value of a monetary unit.
In 1990, I made about $200 a week. Gasoline was around 75 cents a gallon. $200 would buy 266 gallons of gas.
Now, gas is $3.00 a gallon so that would mean that in today’s currency, the $200 would be worth $798, which is pretty close to what I make per week now, but in 1990 I was in high school living with mom and dad, and now I own a house and 2 businesses and have a wife and two children.
If we go by minimum wage, in 1990 it was $3.30 per hour. Now it’s $5.35.
That would make the $200 in 1991 worth $324.25 today, which is probably more accurate.
jasonh300 is on the right track. The general concept is called inflation of course and it tries to encapsulate how much the average cost of goods and services have changed over time. The problem with the previous explanation is that it is too specific. Inflation measures take hundreds of things into account.
There is a reason for that. Individual goods and services don’t change price at the same rate over time. Milk was brought up earlier. Milk and other foods are an example where something has gotten cheaper and perhaps dramatically so over time. The food budget of the average American household has shrunk since the early twentieth century with greater variety and often better quality. Electronics have also gone down in price so profoundly and predictably that consumers are used to waiting to buy electronic products months after they are released. That is typical of deflationary spending.
On the negative side, housing prices have generally outstripped inflation greatly in recent years. Back in the period the book was written, personal labor like servants were very cheap and middle-class people could afford one or several of them.
You are right though, one conversion number can’t tell us anything. Those people couldn’t get a computer with all the money in the world yet, someone with even $2,000,000 generally can’t afford a household full of personal help and other servants.
I’m not sure how the OP used the site linked to - I find it gives a set of conversions arriving at anything between £1m and £22m. The lowest using the retail price index, the highest being based on GDP.
Or you can do the comparison based on specie. Silver is currently trading around $138 per troy pound, so 20,000 troy pounds of silver (which is what the pound was supposedly worth) would cost about $2.76 million.