Where can I find information on how much a US dollar in 1928 would be worth today? By that, I mean a dollar in 1928 could buy x loaves of bread whereas a dollar today could buy y loaves of bread.
You’re looking for an inflation calculator. This one tells me that $1 in 1928 was equivalent to $12.41 last year.
Thank you.
I don’t doubt that inflation calculator, but the figure of $12 and change is misleading. Let me tell the following story, from my father. During the late 1920s (he was born in 1906) he worked in a radio supply store (Radio Electronic Service Co., around Independence Hall in Philly). Radio had serious hobbyists. One guy he told me about came in every week with his $12 pay envelope (checks were not much used in those days) and carefully remove $1.20, 60¢ for 12 trolley fares at 5¢ each and the same for six lunches at 10¢ each. He would then ask, “Now what can I get for $10.80?” Nowadays, even twelve RT bus fares would cost about $15 and you just might get 6 lunches for the same, although I doubt it. Even if you could, that $1.20 has grown to $30, a factor of 25. And that $12 a week pay for what was probably 48 hours implies a pay of 25¢ an hour, a thirtieth of the current minimum wage, I guess.
In 1937, the year I was born, he was overjoyed to get a job at $18 a week. Of course, we didn’t have a car, nor a TV. We did have a fridge, although I remember my grandmother had an ice box. And we had one radio, a fancy affair with many dials (short wave is the one I remember; FM didn’t exist) and a very fine motor-driven tuner with a magic eye. A wringer washing machine and we hung our clothes to be dried outside or, in the winter, in the basement. One telephone, extensions were expensive, and of course it was corded.
Not all things rise at the same rate, of course, but in 1928, the average cost of bread was 8.9 cents for a loaf.
I would love to know what a house cost back then as far as buying power. I know my grandparents were able to purcchase a home after a few years of landing in NYC
Depends on what kind of house and the location. In suburban Cleveland in 1928, you could buy a nice house for $5000-7000.
I can’t track back to 1928, but in 1940 the median value of a U.S. house was $2,938.Adjusted to Y2K dollars, that would be around $30,000.
Another point for comparison is that a new Model T would have been around $300 in the 1920’s.
$385 in 1928.
At least in the US, these guys http://www.bls.gov/ are the horse’s mouth for inflation. There’s a bunch of calculators and reference material on the various measures of inflation.
As a rule of thumb, since 1928 and compared to typical wages:
Food has gotten cheaper (and of better year round quality/appearance. Nutrition & taste? Not economic questions.)
Technology has gotten vastly cheaper (and vastly nicer)
Housing has gotten more expensive (but is nicer)
Transportation has gotten more expensive (but is nicer)
etc.
The mix of goods and services available has changed so radically in the ~80 years since then that you can’t really say “inflation is X% since then”, or “$1 in 1928 is worth $X in 2010”
I’ve been doing a lot of family history research lately. I was looking up some relatives for a friend of mine when I found one that she was unaware of. Always exiting!
It seems, according to an item in the New York Times in 1900, that he and a Brother were heirs to the estate of a recently deceased third Brother. The article said they split about $500,000.
I figured: meh… worth more then than now, but, having run the numbers through some of the calculators mentioned above, it seems they did pretty well.
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but it was something I couldn’t believe. I was watching the Andy Griffith Show where Barney was a realtor on the side. Andy was looking at his dream house that cost $3500. Barney told him that he could sell his current house for $2400 and get a mortgage from the bank for the difference. Using the above calculator, and adjusting for inflation (show was aired in 1965), Andy’s house was worth $16,149 and his dream house would cost $23,550.
I know that is was set in the sticks of Mayberry, but where in the U.S. can you get a house today like Andy’s for $16k? If you watch the show, it had two stories, a garage, nice yard, wrap around porch. I know that is just a TV show, but the numbers at least made sense to the producer.
Try Russel Bakers book “Growing Up”, whether you like him or not, it’s a beaufiful snapshot, and of course nicely written, it gives an idea of the worth of pennies in the “difficult years” though through the eyes of a child
One thing I see a lot of older people do is recall the prices of old, and relate them to today’s salaries; thus, they think everything was just really, really cheap then. They wax nostalgic for $2,000 cars, but in the context of today’s $50,000 salaries. They don’t seem to grasp the concept that salaries were also correspondingly lower than in the past; that’s why people didn’t buy new Cadillacs every couple of months, or factory workers didn’t move into upscale $20,000 houses.
In "The Great Gatsby, Nick pays $80 a month for his digs…
I suspect that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a good idea of reasonable rent in the Long Island area at the time, and the description of the house should give an idea of what eighty dollars bought.
Though I haven’t managed to find it back, there have been comparison scales done on other things than direct wages, for example work-months to housing, work-hours to food etc, also equivalents to health care and child mortality. Cost of technology is clearly difficult, but tractor to hand picking sort of things must have been compared.H. ROSLING does it with many things, his Gapminder site is fascinating, running stats with a different viewpoint
The Master had some words of wisdom on this subject
Agreed. This is also why “In [Some Country], the average person makes only [some pittance] a day” doesn’t really mean a whole lot without knowing a lot more about life in [Some Country].