Here’s a conversation where someone claims to have called World Book and was told that the 1972 World Book Encyclopedia sold for $315-520.
Not the exact same book or date, but in thw ballpark. Other conversations online seem to confirm similar numbers.
Sam’s probably thinking of 1980 prices in Canadian dollars.
You are correct that US$2K in 1980 sounds high for the EB, considering that in 1988, the EB cost US$1400 per set.
Yes, that would be in Canada. At the time, you could get a decent used car for $2000, so it was the kind of thing poor families just didn’t have. When I had to research something for school, I had to take the bus to the public library. My wealthier friends with encyclopedias had a big advantage.
And if you were a self learner, the encyclopedia was your internet. You could immerse yourself in it for hours, following topics or just looking up interesting stuff. If there was one thing I wish we could have afforded back then, it would be a good encyclopedia.
Today anyone with a smartphone, which includes even the poorest quintiles, have cheap or free access to information vastly greater than even the rich had access to just a few decades ago. That too is an equalizing force.
I still haven’t seen a cite that an encyclopedia cost $2000 in 1980.
Also, Sam, would you address the rest of my post? Innovation and availability of new consumer goods has nothing to do with supply-side, trickle down policies. Nothing at all.
Apparently 1159.
The Hanseatic League originated in Lübeck around that time. Saskatchewan’s Dumbest Economist actually traces supply-side economics to that time rather than to the theories of Arthur Laffer. And yet, the first use of the term was probably by economist Herb Stein in the 1970s. Stein’s ideas were based on the work of Laffer. Stein died in 1999. Laffer is still alive. So I’m pretty certain they weren’t around in the 12th century peddling these ideas.
Even in Canadian money, it seems odd that an EB set would cost as much as $2000 in 1980. AFAIK the exchange rate at the time was something like 1.17, so a $1400 EB set in the US ought to be only around $1650 in Canadian dollars.
Not that $1650 is an insignificant sum either for poor people, just wondering about what seems like a rather high estimate for this particular price.
Well, not really “equalizing”, in that just as in the old days, the rich still have far better access to the source of information. As I noted, about 1 in 20 kids have to go somewhere other than the home to get access to the internet, just as you had to go to the library to get access to the encyclopedia. Kids in rich families tend to have more high-quality internet service and more and better devices to access it on.
So yeah, we certainly all have easier access nowadays to better (or at least much more abundant) information than we used to. But poor kids are still disadvantaged compared to rich kids in terms of ease of access.
What other encyclopedias were available in the 80s, and how much did they cost? I had a set of Funk and Wagnals back then. I don’t know what my parents paid for it, but no way it was $1400.
Slate. (article dated 2012)
That’s why I felt no twinge of sadness when the Britannica company announced this week that it has suspended its print edition. From now on, no more impressionable parents will be guilted into spending enormous sums—the set now goes [for $1,400](Merriam-Webster Dictionaries – Merriam-Webster Shop)—to help their kids do better in school. Good riddance!
2012, not 1980.
And it’s not like encyclopedia sales weren’t the height of honest capitalism,
CMC who’s childhood whatever encyclopedia wasn’t bought in a book store.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. I was asking about the price of encyclopedias other than Britannica.
In about 1983, I was at a grocery store and they had a display of encyclopedias. It was one of those deals where the first volume was 9 cents, and that was to get you to come back and buy all the remaining volumes as they came out. I think they were still less than 10 dollars for each one.
I bought 20 copies of volume 1.
Conservative tax policy here in Texas:
Liberal ‘wealth destruction’ tax policy in California:
Note that it takes more to be a 1%er in CA than TX. Don’t think that matters, but just wanted to note that the scale does change in this regard.
That’s why, in the “free market” of state economies, California is an economic hellhole, where no businesses thrive and nobody wants to live and work.
Funk & Wagnalls were sold in grocery stores. They’d issue a new volume every week or so, and Mom would just pick it up like she would 3 lbs. of chuck. After all the volumes were issued they offered yearbooks and a dictionary/thesaurus set. Each volume was maybe $4.95 or so. Nothing outrageous, and you just hoped your teacher wouldn’t assign a research paper on zebras before you completed the set!
I had a vague memory of my mom collecting the volumes at the local supermarket, but wasn’t entirely sure it was something that had actually happened, because it seemed a weird place to by buying Encyclopedias, especially piece-meal.
I actually remember those too. But I wanted to get them, but my parents wouldn’t buy them, since we already had a set of encyclopedias.
That that set was 6 years older than I was, and was missing the latter half of the “M”'s didn’t seem to persuade them otherwise.
I still remember reading about the space program in them, and since they were printed before the last Apollo mission, they had a list of all the “upcoming” planned missions, which never happened.
The thread is long, and I’ve not a lot of time, but Sam thinks that innovation and better standards of living more than make up for the loss of middle-class income since 1980?
One quick question, and I’m sorry if it’s been mentioned, but do the wealthy also get those innovations and better standards of living? I mean, can a wealthy person buy a TV better than the ones in 1980?
If so, that kinda seems like a bad argument.
Holy shit. I never thought of that! 
I never once said that. I said there are other factors than income that have to be looked at. That’s all.
That’s multiple times in this thread people have completely mischaracterized what I said, while I deal with endless nitpicks.
The rich pay a disproportionally smaller part of their income on such goods, remember? One of the arguments for giving ‘stimulus’ money to the poor is that they tend to spend all of it, while the rich will just add it to their savings. Anything which brings down the cost or increases the quality of staple goods like food and transportation disproportionally improves the lives of the poor.
I thought his argument was that we had to throw buckets of money at the rich in order to get that innovation and better standards.