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Comment by CodeWriter23

2 days ago

You could buy a house and a 69 Charger for $25K in the 60's with a tidy sum left over.

$50k in 2016 dollars.

  • You're correct, but for some reason heavily downed at the moment (Edit: no longer the case!). Relevant excerpt backing this up:

    > the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars

    I.e. it was something more like 6k-7k in terms of dollars at the time of payment.

    • Did you know the average bribe accepted for a politician is something like 5K (This was from a few years back so probably higher now). So yeah this is totally within bribe limits.

      As a unrelated note it really is depressing to think about how easy it is to buy off politicians and how much money the bribers have vs an average person.

    • Average home price in the late 60s was 25k so even if it is equivalent to $50k in 2016 dollars, 25k could still get you further than today in some specific areas.

      2 replies →

  • $25,000 in 1969 has the same buying power as approximately $220,000 to $226,000 today

    In terms of 2016, from gemini:

    > In 2016, $25,000 from 1969 was worth approximately $163,490.

    > Based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), $1 in 1969 had the same purchasing power as $6.54 in 2016. This represents a total inflation increase of roughly 554% over that 47-year period

    • People are just downvoting you rather than discussing for some reason. It drives me bonkers when I see that happen here... :).

      rendaw was pointing out the $50k in the article & parent comment was in terms of 2016 dollars, not that the mid 60s $25k in CodeWrite23's comment converts to $50k in 2016.

      I.e. that the researchers would not be getting anything close to a house + charger + spare change for just half the $50k amount. They got more like $6k-$7k at time of payment in the mid 60s. Which is still a good chunk of change for the time... just not the amounts it was made to sound.

I doubt that the 50k was given to the research as personal pay. It was likely a “research grant” that was used to fund the research and/or get swallowed up as “overhead” by the university

take me back

  • [flagged]

    • It's a confluence of various factors. Explosive population growth, for example. The modern economy (of which fiat currency plays a pivotal role) relies on that of course, as the lending system is a bet on future growth. If that fails the whole thing can enter a state of catastrophic failure. But population growth has more precedence. Fiat currency, bureaucratization, etc. were adopted as reactions to increasingly explosive populations and unchecked rationalism developing the absolutely ridiculous modern state system.

      If you want demons to point a finger at, you're going to have to look further back in time than the 20th century. Then and now we're just doing a frantic tap dance to keep what we inherited from catching on fire.

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    • No, fiat currency has allowed our money supply to track closer to our GDP, preventing currency shortages and price manipulation by foreign adversaries, giving us the most stable economy the world has ever experienced over the last 50 years. Yes, it can be abused (and some Asian countries have taken this to dangerous extremes), but it’s better than all the alternatives so far.

    • The good standard didn't even last half a century before collapsing.

      Gold is way too inelastic to work as a basis for currency in an industrial economy.