I have always enjoyed the articals that are published every so often that uses hours of pay of an average worker it takes to buy such things as milk,eggs gasoline,housing and education. It a far better way to compare the way things are in reality.

$5Au's great uncle, who was a professor of Latin in NYC (Columbia Univ.?), left a bed to his niece in his will, along with a handful of items bequeathed to other relatives. Despite having a fine career, he accumulated very little in the way of goods or money. That was nearly a century ago. Look around your home. Most of you have two or more televisions, two cars, several rooms of furniture, and a 401(K) or other retirement plan. It is staggering to think that the average person today is far wealthier than previous generations. However, we may have hit the high water mark for our national wealth. Two million fewer workers are employed full time than just a few years ago. We are becoming a nation of part time workers ill-equipped to cope with an enormous national debt, healthcare costs that will skyrocket once Obamacare guarantees to insurance providers expire, and wages that will fall further and further behind inflation.

Loved the article. Nice web site. Thanks for the posting.

Thanks for telling us about Savvy Street, a real find for intellectual nourishment. I see several of my favorite authors are participants. Now where will I find the time to peruse?

Walter Donway writes good sense and well when he has done his homework as here.

As a sort of aside- I am a great fan of writer Jane Austen who I know kh reads. Austen wrote from about 1800 to 1810. She was quite numerate and often mentioned sums of money. I have a quick rule of thumb- one year 1800 UK pound equals 100 of my dollars. But this is only valid for some purposes, for defining status rather than comparing purchasing power. There are things we have now that did not exist in that time, potable running water, electricity.. motor vehicles, bicycles..
Another writer (Singer) from 19th C Russia tells us what defined the rich family in the village - they owned their own bed. I reckon it is safe to say most of us are greatly better off now. But why? Is the wealth better shared? Do we work harder? No and no. The proposition of our dbh -that it is technology must be the answer. But where does this technology come from and why? It has to be in incentives tho' I think not necessary financial, a recognition that property rights are a precondition for human rights.

More rambling, governments have racked up unprecedented debt. Normally, debt is bad, it means vulnerability. But there is something unique about much of this modern debt, no one owns it! So does it matter? I have not seen proper discussion of this. Many nations have arrangements but the US is the clearest, there is a private company, the Fed, it is controlled by government appointees, it has no owners but it has no-liability shareholders, it lends money to government by book or computer entries. It does not take in or earn or borrow money, it just lends. I think I am out of my depth here, but I make two statements: if money can be created out of nothing then money and wealth cannot be the same, all this seems to be closer to a Ponzi than anything else.
The way I see it, It is so bizarre that you could not make it up. Perhaps I am wrong.

*headshake* The author clearly stated the value of the dollar rose and fell-UNTIL after 1913. something big happened then. and more importantly after 1933 when something REALLY big happened. but if you want to compare it to the value of having sex with an attractive healthy person-by all means. the dollars in your wallet are all typhoid mary's, at some point. get it now?

What was inflation like of the dollar was like for 100 years before 1913? Would be an interesting contrast.

Here is another important link to research on the Federal Reserve:

http://www.realityzone.com/creature.html...

When Henry Ford promised work for a dollar a day, his competitors thought him a fool for such extravagance. It led to the saying, "another day, another dollar." What would be the equivalent today? Another day another dime?

The value of money: Begin at the singularity: an individual must eat. How many hours of effort does it take to obtain the daily requirement of food to survive? In the most primitive times, the food was right there, on the trees and bushes, in the fields, in the year-round growing season of idyllic climate (call it Garden of Eden).

As population increased and climate changed, more effort, even migration, became necessary to obtain the equivalent requirement. So the one unchanging, universal measure of value is human time and effort (call it "work" or "the job").

Human intelligence, through invention and discovery, enhanced efficiency and productivity and increased the value of time and effort. Doing more with less allowed the building of the world as it is today.

he value of anything must be measured against that most fundamental component, human life. Assigning an hour of human life an arbitrary dollar figure distorts and obliterates that basic premise, usually for some to gain at the expense of others. Likewise gold, assigned an arbitrary dollar value, is worth only what people believe emotionally that it's worth. Ooh, shiny.

An hour of human life needs to be measured against what it gains in the most basic necessities of food and shelter. How many minutes of work does it take for a meal? How many hours of work does it take to pay the rent or mortgage? My first job paid $1 an hour. I worked 9 minutes for a loaf of bread.

It's interesting to see the increasing move toward survivalism of folks who build their own huts in the wilderness and live by the earlier methods of hunting, fishing, growing their own food. The rest of us are at the mercy of supermarkets and their complex supply chains, an uninterrupted flow of electricity and water, and reliable ways of earning the means to obtain those.

The bottom line is, how many irreplaceable hours of your life are you willing to spend to obtain some desired object or goal, under the conditions that have evolved around you? No one OWES you a job. And once nature no longer provides food free for the plucking in that idyllic communal paradise, all means of survival must be created.

That is the point where private property enters the social context, as things belong to those who put their time and effort into producing them.

Young people, who see a virtual infinity of time stretching before them and can waste it like grains of sand on the beach, seldom think of value in terms of hours. But they clamor for a "living wage" to get enough money for the pleasures of their lifestyle, severed from any calculation of what value their work produces.

Older folks, seeing the sand in the hourglass running down, become more choosy on how to spend their time. And if they've saved or invested to tide them over comfortably in their golden years, they make the bitter discovery that government policies have frittered away the objective value of their savings and are impoverishing them by daily degrees. Their work, i.e. the hours of their life, represented by what they own, is being harvested by schemers in a web of complexity to which few have a map and whose structure is an application of intelligence and inventiveness gone immoral. I'd go so far as to call it cannibalistic.

"U.S. citizens who watch the value of the U.S. dollar, and their savings, shrinking year after year cannot refuse to accept dollars."
That glass-half-full side of this is people will accept your dollars to purchases assets.

It's very hard to create long-term yardsticks of value. Ultimately value is meeting people's wants or needs. We might choose the cost of 1000 sq ft of residential space or the cost of 2000 calories. But the residential space we have today and the 2000 calories we eat today are very different from in pre-industrial time. Maybe we could border on crass and look at the cost of sex with an attractive healthy young person because that hasn't changed that much over time. Maybe someone with a less dirty mind can think of a better yardstick.

The author seems to be saying it's a failing of the USD that it's hard to convert from today's dollars to the dollars Abraham Lincoln spent for his Springfield home. That's not a failing of the dollar. It's amost impossible to calculate using any means.