That's the problem with going too far using "money" or "GDP" - you can roughly compare the WWII 45% of GDP spent with today - https://www.davemanuel.com/us-defense-spending-history-milit... because even by WWII much was "financialized" in such a way that it appears on GDP (though things like victory gardens, barter, etc would explicitly NOT be included without effort - maybe they do this?).

As you get further and further into the past you have to start trying to measure it using human labor equivalents or similar. For example, what was the cost of a Great Pyramid? How does the cost change if you consider the theory that it was somewhat of a "make work" project to keep a mainly agricultural society employed during the "down months" and prevent starvation via centrally managed granaries?

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helterskelter 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You don't even need to go that far back to run into issues, when I read Pride and Prejudice, I think Mr. Darcy was one of the richest people in England at around £10,000/year, but if you to calculate his wealth in today's terms it wasn't some outrageous sum (Wikipedia is telling me ~£800,000/year). The thing is that the economy was totally different back then -- labor cost practically nothing, but goods like furniture for instance were really expensive and would be handed down for generations.

With £800K today, you may not even be able to afford the annual maintenance for his mansion and grounds. I knew somebody with a biggish yard in a small town and the garden was ~$40K/yr to maintain. Definitely not a Darcy estate either.

Thinking about it, an income of £800K is something like the interest on £10m.

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zozbot234 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Newsflash, old antique furniture from around that time is still really expensive even today. It was a hand-crafted specialty product, not run-of-the-mill IKEA stuff. If you compare the prices of single consumer goods while adjusting for inflation, they generally check out at least wrt. the overall ballpark. The difference is that living standards (and real incomes) back then for the average person were a lot lower.

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psychoslave 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

~£800,000/year when compared to median value in current UK? Outrageous is relative sure, but for most people out there it should be no surprise they would feel that as an outrageously odd distribution of wealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom

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bombcar 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The point is that ~£800,000/year is high, even possibly "very high" but it is not "most wealthy man in Britain" high, and certainly nowhere near "hire as many people as worked for Darcy".

	▲	cm2012 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Its more like making 800k per year today in India, where a lot of people make much less so you can have servants

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somenameforme 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The big change is the end of any sort of backing in money. The Minneapolis Fed calculated consumer price index levels since 1800 here. [1] Of course that comes with all the asterisks we're speaking of here for data going back that far, but their numbers are probably at least quite reasonable. They found that from 1800 to 1950 the CPI never shifted more than 25 points from the starting base of 51, so it always stayed within +/- ~50% of that baseline. That's through the Civil War, both World Wars, Spanish Flu, and much more.

Then from 1971 (when the USD became completely unbacked) to present, it increased by more than 800 points, 1600% more than our baseline. And it's only increasing faster now. So the state of modern economics makes it completely incomparable to the past, because there's no precedent for what we're doing. But if you go back to just a bit before 1970, the economy would have of course grown much larger than it was in the past but still have been vaguely comparable to the past centuries.

And I always find it paradoxical. In basic economic terms we should all have much more, but when you look at the things that people could afford on a basic salary, that does not seem to be the case. Somebody in the 50s going to college, picking up a used car, and then having enough money squirreled away to afford the downpayment on their first home -- all on the back of a part time job was a thing. It sounds like make-believe but it's real, and certainly a big part of the reason boomers were so out of touch with economic realities. Now a days a part time job wouldn't even be able to cover tuition, which makes one wonder how it could be that labor cost practically nothing in the past, as you said. Which I'm not disputing - just pointing out the paradox.

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...

	▲	wahern 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And yet the homeownership rate in 1950 was 53% (an all-time high up to that point) compared to 65% today: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Housi... Only 80% of units had private indoor toilets or showers. It is notable that the median monthly rent was $35/month on a median income of $3000, so ~15% of income spent on rental housing. But it's interesting reading that report because a significant focus was on the overcrowding "problem". Housing was categorized by number of rooms, not number of bedrooms. The median number of rooms was 4, and the median number of occupants >4 per unit (or more than 1 person per room). I don't think it's a stretch to say that the amount of space and facilities you get for your money today is roughly equivalent. Yes, greater percentage of your income goes to housing, and yet we have far more creature comforts today then back in 1950--multiple TVs, cellphones, appliances, and endless amounts of other junk. We can buy many more goods (durable and non-durable) for a much lower percentage of our income. There's no simple story here.