Comment by tim333
13 hours ago
In 1945 they had the gold standard at $35/oz so $27.50 would have been 0.7857 oz of gold currently worth $2540.
13 hours ago
In 1945 they had the gold standard at $35/oz so $27.50 would have been 0.7857 oz of gold currently worth $2540.
In 1945, US GDP per capita was almost $1600. Using your conversion factors, that would be almost $150k today. The actual number is something like $85k. I don't think Americans are that much poorer today than they were 80 years ago.
You’re starting to get into the theories of how they hide true inflation
1945 is the year 5 AMC (After McDonalds)
i’m american, what’s the price in big macs?
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Poe's law strikes again. Is this supposed to be a parody of goldbugs or do you seriously think Americans were that much richer in 1945? Without a wink we don't know
How is GDP per capita a useful measure in the presence of almost-trillionaires?
Depending on which city they sleep in, Bezos or Musk make all local citizens multimillionaires. Per capita. Statistically.
Henry Ford had about 200Billiin adjusted for inflation around that time. Not quite as high as a couple of guys today but not that far off
This is very true. One should look at some select percentiles instead, IMHO.
Is this a reasonable metric though? No one was buying books in 1945 with gold.
Gold is considered to have relatively consistent value over time.
Median home price in 1940 Boston area was $3,600 or 180oz gold. Today the median home price is 215oz of gold in the same area (or $670,000). In terms of gold, house prices are up 20%. In terms of dollars, 18000%.
A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.
Real inflation of fiat is easy to obscure for political reasons. That’s much harder to do with the market value of gold.
> Gold is considered to have relatively consistent value over time.
Not really. It has fluctuated a lot. You can pick starting and ending points a few years apart and come up with very different results relative to actual inflation.
> A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.
Now take this idea and average it across a large number of different items and you arrive at inflation statistics, which are better than using 1 commodity or 1 purchasable item as a benchmark.
9 replies →
Naw. Just look at the plots over the last hundred years. Lately, it's become just as financialized at bitcoin or any of the other "stores of value".
https://www.5yearcharts.com/historical-gold-price-chart-how-...
> A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.
A car or house built in 2025 is very different object than one built in 1945.
Consistent commodities like coal, rice, or silver make better points of comparison, but each give wildly different values for inflation just as gold does. Inflation doesn’t mean anything specific on very long timescales because the underlying economy fundamentally changes.
There’s really nothing suggesting gold is a more fundamental measure of value than silver which was far more commonly traded. IMO the reason people focus on gold today is its more consistent use in video games as a currency rather than say platinum. There’s just never been enough gold to use as a common medium of exchange between individuals, but in virtual worlds that’s a non issue.
2 replies →
> A new car still costs around 13oz of gold
But a new car today is vastly different from a 1940s car, so different that it's nonsensical to use it to compare purchasing power of gold.
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Median home prices have risen. Home prices have gotten out of control due to limits on supply that's one of the main factors of inflation. Cars today are very different then cars back then and come with more features. The dollar is what we use for currency and the measurement of inflation is well defined (even if there can be good faith argument of which inflation works better especially when comparing long term) meanwhile gold is just shiny rocks
> Gold is considered to have relatively consistent value over time.
Uh... Gold has doubled in the last two years. Fast forward past the trade war and it'll likely crash again. Gold is far, far more volatile than currencies. More even than securities, and frankly even most commodities are more stable.
> In terms of gold, house prices are up 20%
Except that the gold price fluctuated by 50% within the last 30 years: https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html
It's a better metric than the estimate of the dollar inflation. Gold standard was in use until 1971
If I were selling books in Europe in 1945, I’d much prefer gold to Reichsmarks.
desilvering of coins was in the 1965 coin act.
So if they paid in dimes/quarters/ half dollars /dollars, they were paying in silver
All cash was convertible to gold at a fixed rate, so more or less they were
In 1945 US citizens were banned from owning gold so the exchange rate was not really tethered to the common value of the dollar.
Gold is volatile. Two years ago it would have been half that.