Quote:
Originally Posted by Carmine
2) I take all these inflation calculators with a grain of salt. Both my grandparents were mid-middle-class people (but not upper caste) who were very conservative about their spending. Factory jobs, kids, mortgage on a 3bdrm brick ranch, new-ish mid-price cars... But they had TV in the late 40s and by the early 60s, bought nothing but Zenith/Magnavox stuff. If TV really cut into their income as much has been claimed, they would have done without. In fact, they did without CoLoR until '68 (buying Magnavox and Zenith) at the same time. If a $600 tv was like a $10,000 item to me, I assure you they'd have done without.
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It really was that expensive and simple math will proveit.
We know that a newly minted electrical engineering PhD in 1960 made about $5,000 at the time. (I've known EEs and scientists who made about that.) A skilled factory worker (car plant, say) made about $1,500 to $2,000.
So if recent graduate EE PhD makes $100,000 today, that's a factor of twenty over what they made in 1960. A skilled factory worker would make about $40,000, again, a factor of 20. Maybe even $50,000 a factor of 25.
Just simple math. The trick is to use salaries and labor costs, not goods, because we have low-cost items made by overseas slaves that depress the buying scale. How much did it cost to have a pair of shoes soled then vs. now? I can tell you that in the 1980s, it cost me $15 and now runs me $75, a factor of 5. How much was rent then vs. now? But when you compare the cost of a TV then vs now the numbers don't work because technology drops the price.
So the inflation factors are real. $600 in 1950 was like $12,000 today because if you make $2,000 per year in 1950 that $600 would be 1/3 of your income! It just has to be, as it was a percentage.