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  • From: Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Purchasing power of U.S. dollar across the years, something on relative wages
  • Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:28:34 -0700

Lynda wrote:

Can you provide cites that show that the pay relative to the cost of living
was "much" higher than today?

Lynda


I can give you price comparisons . As I have mentioned before, the milk from 55 cows (hand-milked) brought in ninety eight cents in 1938 for two weeks output (after deducting for a pound of butter)---the price paid to the trucker hauling the ten-gallon cans of milk was more than the milk was worth. The price of milk improved in 1939, when the U.S. started sucking all the capital out of Britain as "the arsenal of democracy". We actually started getting as much as seventy five dollars for a two-week milk paycheck.

We had four hundred laying hens. In the 1930's large flocks of chickkens were unheard of---mostly due to the fact that t here was no refrigeration and chickens were crated and sent live to retailers and sold live to consumers. The only reason I was able to go to high school was the egg revenue from our hens, paid to me daily by a local grocer. The price varied from seventeen cents to nineteen cents a dozen---$6.30 cents a day was a fortune. I cannot account for the high price except that I did not know a single neighbor who produced eggs for sale as we did..

Cut and packaged pork retailed for seven cents a pound. Things like tongue, liver and giblets were given free by the buther for the asking---I got a lot of liver that way to use as bait when I went fishing for bullheads in big, but shallow Beaver Dam Lake..

Rent for a good house in town was $35 to $45 dollars a month---we moved around a lot, and paid $45 for a very big two story house and garage, sublet the top floor to a jobless railroad porter whose ten children were supported by the Catholic Church---there were no social services other than occasional soup kitchens and the County Poorhouse. Over twenty five percent of the populace was jobless and most of the others underemployed---a steelworker friend of mine who lived in Akron and was working foreman with a two-man crew on a blast furnace in Gary, Indiana only worked three days a week--guy named Jim Price who later built and operated the Tata Brothers steel mill in Jamshedpur, India, with 65,000 employees. He was paid five dollars a day (like the Ford plant) to feed and tap the blast furnace.

A big draft horse sold for $125, a docile one-year old colt that looked good, $75., a six-year old low-mileage 1931 Model A Ford in excellent condition, $350.

My one-room country schoolteacher (who bought our tenant farm when I went off to the Army Air Corps), was paids a salary of $175 a month, lower than teachers in the town high school, but still high enough so there were more teachers than jobs. He was an excellent teacher whose graduate students were in great demand by the local high school principal, who roamed several townships looking for good academic prospects. But he considered farm prospects better than teacher prospects, having observed I raised our farm income (exclusive of eggs) fifty percent in 1938 after a rogue horse broke seventeen of my fathers ribs, and tried to kill me in the pasture---I was close enough so it was more push than impact, so I was merely hurled twenty or twenty five feet. I don't know what Arland Jackson paid for the farm--the Wonewoc bank desperately wanted to sell 212 acres and a huge barn for $14,500 and I wouldn't pay it---had arrived at the conclusion that to yield a good living a farm then would have to be a minimum of 800 acres. I found a beautiful 2200 acres for $20,000 across the Wisconsin River from Portage Wisconsin, alluvial silt land and tall trees (no open fields), a hundred acres of which would have paid for the land at a nearby lumber mill---but having to single-handedly build house and barn at the same time was too formidable a taxk, so with no illusions, no romanticism, but foreknowledge of WWII since the Panay Incident of 1937 from my one-tube radio, I chose a career in what was then called the Army Air Corps.
The high school teacher salaries varied according to difficulty of their courses, and how essential the courses wore for a farmer clientele, but the high school principal felt that College Prep had better prospects for the brighter students he tried to recruit. We had the usual collection of dullards, but in my graduating class of about thirty, five very bright graduates, about three more than average. I had a University of Wisconsin scholarship, but didn't use it due to the G.I. bill. A years tuition than was
very low, as I recall $1200 regardless of major. As I thought, a fantastic bargain for the renowned chemistry department and the acknowledged best geology professor of the time, one Cameron, whom I revered. Don't know what college profs were paid in 1946..

The history and geography teacher, Mr Ford was brilliant and I suspect was at the highest pay level at $250. The Physics and German teacher probably got the same---never forget the many "Aha!" moments in his class when the light came on after wrestling with a very complex problem. I built a seventeen-foot kayak and two paddles in the Manual Arts Dept---as I recall that teacher got $200 a montth. The very good English teacher was a woman and there was a glass ceiling then too---$175 a month. I literally lived in a marvelously stocked library in the town of Beaver Dam from age seven to ten, reading three and one half books a day, so I could have gotten along without an English teacher entirely.

C.J. Krumm, the high school Principal got roughly double the top teacher's salary, about $500 a month. There was then no such thing as an assistant. No big deal, Wisconsin always paid decent wages to teachers---as early as 1906, John Francis Sims received $3000 as President of Stevens Point Normal school in sandspur and jackrabbit country---then probably the most impoverished part of the State---now highly prosperous dut to the influx of people from Illinois, and where my youngest boy has his business..

Compare these teacher wages to the wage of a well-paid factory worker in 1938, $125 a month.

Wages alone are not a good indicator of purchasing power---the available databanks generally refer to a basket of goods, some of those that existed in 1938 have vanished, and others added, plus the fact that most merchandise has been upgraded by addition of all sorts of bells and whistles in the case of automobiles, with better bearings, tires and what used to be fifty or sixtty thousand miles between overhauls, is now three hundred thousand.

Here's some databanks, I know one of the links works (the most important), couldn't conjure up the others today.



.

The Value of Money

by Nell Ingalls, July/August 1998 Image of dollar being cut by scissors

What better way to illustrate how much better things were in the "good old days" than to compare how much things cost then and now? One can calculate the relative purchasing power of money in different years. How realistically the resulting numbers reflect the relative standard of living or the quality of life is another question.

For those situations where relative purchasing power can't be compared directly, sources exist that can give readers of history and historical fiction a good idea of the worth of amounts of currency and the cost of goods mentioned in their reading.

Finally, here and in a companion article, we mention present-day comparative costs of living in different areas across the country and around the world.

Why Figures Can Lie
The Consumer Price Index
Where to Find the Numbers
Calculating Inflation
Foreign Countries
Actual Historical Prices
Comparative Cost of Living
Notes
Sources

Why Figures Can Lie
Generally, the farther apart the years being compared, the less valid it is to use the relative prices of goods in those years to measure the standard of living. Many variables affect the price of goods: supply and demand, new technologies, and increases in workers' productivity, among others. John Steele Gordon explains the factors involved in an entertaining and enlightening article, "The Problem of Money and Time" (American Heritage, May/June 1989, pp. 57?65). And?ask anyone in the '90s!?many things besides money contribute to the quality of life.

Goods and services themselves have changed, of course. Regardless of relative cost, would most people trade today's capacious, frost-free, ice-dispensing refrigerators for the ones their family had in the 1950s ?which didn't have automatic defrosting and which never kept the ice cream quite frozen? Would most people in the '50s have traded in their comparatively modern refrigerators for the iceboxes of the '20s and '30s? And how about switching your Compaq for a Smith-Corona?

Changes in the nature of most goods and services are less dramatic between years closer together. Still, some goods and services?especially those affected by developments in technology?can change radically in a short time. Think of how fast your computer equipment gets outdated!

How far one could stretch a dollar is only half the equation. The other half? Income. The average industrial job paid $1,350 per year in 1939.1 In 1997, even low-skilled factory jobs in the Chicago area paid more than that amount per month.2 For a truly accurate comparison, one would have to take income into account: How much time would one have to, or have had to, work to buy the same amount of goods and services in two different years? Those statistics are beyond the scope of this article.

The Consumer Price Index
Regardless of what it proves?or doesn't?you still want to calculate the worth of today's dollar for a year in the past, and vice versa. "Worth" in this context means relative purchasing power. Using 1862 as an example, the question can be phrased in three ways:

* How much (how many goods and services) would an 1862 dollar buy today?
* How much money would it take today to buy what $1 would have bought in 1862?
* By what percentage has the cost of living risen since 1862?

In other words, inflation.

The most common measure of inflation in the U.S. is the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI measures changes in prices (i.e., purchasing power) of goods and services over time by using a "market basket" of commonly purchased goods and services. Economists have been debating whether the CPI overstates inflation?especially lately, in discussing how to fund Social Security?because the CPI market basket does not allow for substitutions. In the real world, when a certain item becomes too expensive, consumers often substitute a less expensive one; the CPI does not take this behavior into account. (For a discussion of this issue and a more detailed explanation of what the Consumer Price Index does and does not do, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Indexes: Frequently Asked Questions.)

The Consumer Price Index is expressed as an index number with a specified base period, which is assigned a value of 100. From time to time, the CPI is revised and the base period changes; the new period is then assigned the value of 100. When comparing the change in prices between two years, you must use the same base period for both years. To show the difference: the 1997 annual average CPI for all urban consumers (CPI-U), U.S. city average for all items, using the 1967 base is 480.8; using the 1982?84 base, it is 160.5.

Where to Find the Numbers
The Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles the Consumer Price Index. It posts many tables for current and historical, national and regional versions of the CPI at Consumer Price Indexes. For the kind of broad-brush comparison to answer questions prompted by curiosity, the best table to use is the Table Containing History of CPI-U U.S. All Items Indexes and Annual Percent Changes from 1913 to Present. This gives monthly and annual index numbers from 1913 to present using the 1982?84 base. It also shows the percent change (inflation) from December to December and also the percent change between the annual averages of adjacent years. Depending upon the reason for the request, one of the historical series for regions or metropolitan areas might be a better choice. Note: When looking for tables using the 1967 base on this Web site, choose "Old Series" from Most Requested Series.

The Chicago office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, +1 (312) 353 1880, can provide the same figures. Using a touch-tone phone, you can request documents from its Fax-on-Demand service, available around the clock. Request the 8-page catalog of documents by calling the same number. But you may need to look no farther than your own ready-reference shelf; the Statistical Abstract of the United States publishes several tables about consumer, producer, and international prices and inflation.

For CPI numbers prior to those available on the Web or by fax, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 gives figures for the Consumer Price Index for the years 1800 to 1970, using the 1967 base. Remember, be sure to use the 1967 base for both years being compared.

For even earlier years, see John J. McCusker's How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States. It "provides step-by-step instructions for [converting] past prices?even those expressed in colonial currency of pounds, shillings, and pence?to today's values." McCusker uses commodity price indexes rather than consumer price indexes, so the figures in his book cannot be used to calculate inflation as we describe below.

Calculating Inflation
Now that you know where to find the figures, you're ready to plug them into the formulas. Ladies and gentlemen, start your calculators!

An 1862 Dollar Today
How much would an 1862 dollar buy today? Using figures from the same base period, divide the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the earlier date by the CPI for the later date. In this case, we will use the base year 1967 because that's what Historical Statistics of the United States uses. The CPI for 1862 was 30. Divide 30 by the annual average CPI for 1997 using the same base period; this figure, according to the BLS, is 480.8. This yields 0.06. So an 1862 dollar would have bought about 6 cents' worth of goods in 1997.

Today's Dollar in 1862
Another way to phrase the question is, how much does one need today to buy what $1 would have bought in 1862? Again, using the same base period for both years being compared, divide the annual CPI for the latest year available by the CPI for the earlier year; 480.8 divided by 30 equals 16.03. One would have needed $16.03 in 1997 to buy what $1 would have bought in 1862.

Inflation
Finally, inflation can be expressed as a percentage, which is the way it usually appears in news reports.

480.8 - 30
---------- x 100 = 1503
30

480.8 minus 30 = 450.8, divided by 30 = 15.03, times 100 = 1503

The cost of living in 1997 was 15.03 times the cost of living in 1862, for an increase of 1,503 percent.

Inflation Calculated for You
Thankfully, we don't have to perform those calculations ourselves. Several Web sites can do it for us.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has posted a Consumer Price Index, 1913- table, excerpted from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, showing the annual average CPI and the rate of inflation for the years 1913 to the present. Also at this site, the page What's a Dollar Worth? contains a calculator that will figure the amount of money the same $1 of goods and services in year x would purchase, or would have purchased, in year y. According to this calculator, if in 1958 I bought goods or services for $1, in 1997 the same goods or services would have cost $5.55.

Another site that uses the same BLS numbers and formula is the AIER (American Institute for Economic Research) Cost-of-Living Calculator.

The Inflation Calculator uses the same Consumer Price Index numbers from BLS and Historical Statistics but makes them available back to 1800.

Instead of the Consumer Price Index, the NASA Parametric Cost Estimating Reference Manual's Inflation Calculator uses the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) Deflator for the U.S. government's fiscal year, October 1 through September 30. According to this calculator, $1 worth of goods or services purchased in 1958 would have cost $4.99 in 1997.

Remember, all of the above sites refer to increases or decreases in the cost of a mix of goods and services, not specific items.

Foreign Countries
The question becomes more complicated when trying to factor in foreign currency. The Consumer Price Index can be used only with U.S. dollars, so the tables and formulas based on those numbers will not serve to correlate, say, British money of Dickens's time to today's U.S. money.

Historical exchange rates3 translate one currency into another as one would convert inches to centimeters; like the metric and English systems of measurement, systems of currency express the same quantity in different terms. If a loaf of bread costs x in U.S. dollars today, one could convert that dollar amount into today's British currency, but the loaf of bread itself may cost more or less in Britain than it does in the U.S.?that's purchasing power. In fact, likely the cost of the same loaf of bread varies within each country according to location. (See our On the Web column, Comparative Living Costs, for Web sites to compare the cost of living across locations.) Not to mention that the same products may or may not be available to purchase in both places today, let alone 5 or 25 or 100 or 500 years ago.

Purchasing Power of the Pound, a table from the UK in Figures (UK Government Statistical Service), translates the internal purchasing power of 100 pence between selected years from 1914 to date.

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, by Daniel Pool, contains a table and explanation (pp. 20?22) of the units of value and the physical currency used in 19th-century England, handy for readers of novels set in that time. While stating that the purchasing power of the currency of England from 1800 to 1859 and 1990s America are "fundamentally incommensurable," the book provides entertaining background about the daily lives of people from different walks of life.

Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600?1775: A Handbook, by John J. McCusker, gives exchange rates (not the prices of goods) in pre-Revolutionary America, when each colony had its own currency. It includes the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. Short essays help interpret the tables.

Chapter 6, "Money" (pp. 63?76), of Weights, Money and Other Measures Used by Our Ancestors, by Colin R. Chapman, "examines the various coins and monies of account used over the centuries, chiefly in England" up to and after decimalization. It includes a few tables of values of coins and representative prices, wages, and living costs.

Actual Historical Prices
Above, we talked about comparing the purchasing power of money today and in years past. However, the figures obtained from those calculations don't reflect the mix of goods and services actually purchased and their prices. When your patron, the budding novelist, wants to know how much certain items cost back in 19?, what can you do?

Historical Statistics of the United States gives the retail prices of certain foods from 1890 to 1970 in Series E 187?202. Wholesale prices for selected commodities are given from 1800 to 1970 in Series E 123?134.

The Statistical Abstract of the United States contains a section on prices. It contains tables of retail prices, covering food, housing and household furnishings, clothing, medical care, transportation, energy and utilities, entertainment, and educational expenses for recent years.

The Most Requested Series at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Web site includes monthly Average Price Data for utility and energy and food products. Prices are available from 1980 forward with a few from the late 1970s.

Check old almanacs. Before 1955, the Information Please Almanac published a table listing average retail prices of principal food items. After that year, it was replaced by a table showing minutes of work needed to pay for certain food items. In some years, the old Chicago Daily News Almanac and Year-Book (which SLS Reference Service owns) printed tables of food prices specific to Chicago as well as national tables.

Search periodical indexes for citations to articles quoting prices of yesteryear. For patrons who are interested in reading more broadly about this aspect of economic history, search library catalogs using the Library of Congress subject heading COST AND STANDARD OF LIVING.

Some libraries own facsimile editions of early Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs, which show retail prices for a wide variety of consumer and household goods. SLS Reference Service owns Sears catalogs in microform from 1888 through 1993 and Christmas catalogs from 1933 through 1986, which we will lend. We also own copies of the original printed catalogs for many of those years. A 1938 catalog sells everything from over-the-counter pharmaceuticals to roofing shingles.

Consider viewing microfilm of newspapers and magazines for the period in question. Advertisements will give an idea of the goods purchased then and their prices.

The Value of a Dollar: Prices and Incomes in the United States 1860?1989 may save you some digging. It compiles prices and descriptions of typical goods purchased, and also contains historical surveys setting the context of each period, wages for common jobs and the length of the average work week, and other statistics, such as values of certain investments and prices of foods commonly consumed. The sources from which the prices were compiled include magazines and newspapers, advertising trade cards, and some government reports. A table in the front gives the value of an 1860 dollar for every year through 1989, calculated using the composite commodity price index; this yields different results than do the formulas and tables using the Consumer Price Indexes described above.

As the title suggests, The Value of a Pound: Prices and Incomes in Britain 1900?1913 contains statistics for prices, employment and earnings, and incomes, along with brief essays describing the economic conditions to put the numbers in context.

In general, books and articles about life in times past may tell prices and wages, along with narrative about daily life to put the figures in perspective.

Comparative Cost of Living
Consumer price indexes measure changes in prices in a single geographic area, however large or small, and cannot be compared across areas. For Web sites with comparative cost-of-living data, see our On the Web column, Comparative Living Costs. Here are some printed sources. Remember to check publication dates and the age of the data, when possible, for both printed and electronic sources.

ACCRA Cost of Living Index. This quarterly publication lists the prices for grocery items, housing, utilities, transportation, health care, and other basic goods and services for 329 urban areas. ACCRA calculates an index figure for direct comparisons. Data are submitted by volunteer organizations from each area, so many areas?unfortunately, the Chicago area currently among them?are not covered. The Statistical Abstract of the United States reprints the ACCRA composite and category indexes, at a lag of about a year and a half.

"Managing Your Career," a special edition of the College Edition of the National Business Employment Weekly ("How Much Is a Paycheck Worth?" by Gabrielle Solomon, Fall 1995, p. 31) showed how to use the ACCRA Cost of Living Index to calculate an equivalent salary in another city, as some Internet sources do.

Using the following formula and figures from the ACCRA Cost of Living Index for the first quarter of 1998, compare Jonesboro, Arkansas (City #1) to Juneau, Alaska (City #2).

City #1 Index # x starting salary
------- ------------------------- = $______
City #2 Index #

How much salary would one have to earn in Jonesboro to have the same standard of living as on a salary of $30,000 in Juneau?

Jonesboro, AR 88.1 x $30,000
------------- -------------- = $19,709
Juneau, AK 134.1

It would take only $19,709 to maintain the same standard of living in Jonesboro as a salary of $30,000 in Juneau. But going in the other direction, you'd need $45,664 to stretch as far in Juneau as $30,000 does in Jonesboro.

Juneau, AK 134.1 x $30,000
------------- --------------- = $45,664
Jonesboro, AR 88.1

A different formula, given in the prefatory matter of the ACCRA Cost of Living Index, explains how to calculate the percentage increase in after-tax income needed to maintain the same lifestyle when moving to a more expensive city, or the percentage decrease one could sustain when moving to a less expensive city.

American Cost of Living Survey. Arsen J. Darnay and Helen S. Fisher. Gale Research, 1994; 2d ed., 1995. "A compilation of reported prices for nearly 600 products and services in 443 (2d ed., 455) cities in the United States drawn from more than 70 sources, including federal and state statistical reports, city surveys, association databases, and the periodicals literature. Includes an ACCRA overall index number for direct comparisons.

World Cost of Living Survey. Helen S. Fisher. Gale Research, 1997. Compiled from similar sources as the American Cost of Living Survey for 645 locations around the world with as much uniformity as possible, given the nature of goods available. For direct comparisons, includes overall index numbers calculated by the U.S. Department of State (where available) to compare the cost of living in Washington, D.C., with a foreign post. Note: This index cannot be used to compare the cost of living between foreign posts or in a foreign post over time.

U.S. Department of State Indexes of Living Costs Abroad, Quarters Allowances, and Hardship Differentials. The U.S. Government publishes these indexes quarterly "to compute cost-of-living allowances for employees at posts where living costs, based on an American pattern of living, are significantly higher than the Washington, D.C., area." A separate index is calculated for private citizens living abroad, which does not include special advantages available only to U.S. Government employees. Note: This index cannot be used to compare the cost of living between foreign posts or in a foreign post over time.

Prices and Earnings Around the Globe. Union Bank of Switzerland. Compares prices and wages for major cities of the world using actual figures and index numbers. Includes tables of working hours and incomes for common jobs in construction, industrial, service, and professional occupations.

Nell Ingalls is a Research Librarian at the Suburban Library System Reference Service.

Notes

1 The Value of a Dollar: Prices and Incomes in the United States 1860?1989. Gale, c1994.

2 Crain's Chicago Business 1998 Top Business Lists, vol. 20, no. 52.

3 For sources of historical foreign exchange rates, see "Pounds to Dollars," by Glenn Kersten, Points of Reference no. 153 (July 1991), pp. 6?7. Foreign exchange rates also appear in the Dictionary of Statistics by Michael G. Mulhall (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1899, reprinted by Gale) and the New Dictionary of Statistics by Augustus Webb (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1911, reprinted by Gale, 1974).

Sources
ACCRA Cost of Living Index. Alexandria, Virginia: ACCRA, 1967?.

American Cost of Living Survey. Arsen J. Darnay and Helen S. Fisher. Gale Research, 1994; 2d ed., 1995.

American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) Cost-of-Living Calculator
http://www.aier.org/colcalc.html

Chapman, Colin R. Weights, Money and Other Measures Used by Our Ancestors. Genealogical Publishing Co., 1996, c1995. Originally published in England under a different title.

Current Value of Old Money
http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html
A bibliography of printed and online sources for comparing the prices of goods and services over time.

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Consumer Price Index, 1913-
http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/economy/calc/hist1913.html
What Is a Dollar Worth?
http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/economy/calc/cpihome.html

Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975.

The Inflation Calculator (Great Neck Township, Long Island, New York)
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

McCusker, John J. How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States. Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1992.

McCusker, John J. Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600?1775: A Handbook. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, c1978.

Parametric Cost Estimating Reference Manual's Inflation Calculator http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/inflate.html

Pool, Daniel.What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Prices and Earnings Around the Globe. Union Bank of Switzerland. Most recent edition is 1997. Phone its Public Relations office in New York, +1 (212) 821 3000, to request a free copy.

Purchasing Power of the Pound
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Product.asp?vlnk=4824&Pos=&ColRank=1&Rank=422

Statistical Abstract of the United States. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, annual.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Most Requested Series
http://stats.bls.gov/top20.html
Consumer Price Indexes
http://stats.bls.gov/cpihome.htm
Consumer Price Indexes: Frequently Asked Questions
http://stats.bls.gov/cpifaq.htm

U.S. Department of State Indexes of Living Costs Abroad, Quarters Allowances, and Hardship Differentials. Department of State Publication 10197, Bureau of Administration, Office of Allowances. Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October.
http://www.state.gov/www/perdiems/quarterly_reports/index.html

The Value of a Dollar: Prices and Incomes in the United States 1860?1989. Gale, c1994.

The Value of a Pound: Prices and Incomes in Britain 1900?1913. Gale Research International, c1995.

World Cost of Living Survey. Helen S. Fisher. Gale Research, 1997.

Nell Ingalls is a Research Librarian at the Suburban Library System Reference Service.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Jolene Carlson
carlsonj AT sls.lib.il.us

Reviewed: October 06, 2003 .

Copyright: 1997-2004
Suburban Library System



-------------------------


http://www.sls.lib.il.us/reference/por/features/98/money.html

http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/business_stats/issue/135/

http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/business_stats/page/1563 (wages)

http://www.aier.org/2002pubs/RR01.pdf











In my case, the quality of education depended upon the quality of the
teacher, all the way from first grade through college, and particularly
in high school, on the quality of the high school principal, who had
free rein in choosing an outstanding staff of teachers. He was
certainly aided by the fact that teachers were relatively much higher
paid than today---attracting the best as in any other business other
than education. In the 1930's, administrators did not blot up the
majority of education funds to defund teachers---Depression Era taxes
had to be focussed on essentials---real essentials. All books were
provided by the school, not as an expense loaded upon parents as today,
and recognizing that food is essential for mental acuity, as well as the
fact that some students might only get one meager meal a day, all
students in Wisconsin got morning milk and some kind of solid food, and
because of the mineral deficiency in Wisconsin soil, iodine tablets.


http://www.sls.lib.il.us/reference/por/features/98/money.html (calculating purchasing value of a dollar---mix of goods, not individual items)










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