Money: how much in today's dollars

Try this website: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

That takes you back to 1800 in the US. One problem is that the further back you go, the more inaccurate this information becomes.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

Hello Stephanie,

If you were writing an academic paper then your question would require much scratching of your head and gnashing of teeth -- but if you're just looking for relative values for a fictional setting, then you can pick and choose with little concern about hardcore skeptics.

The problem is (from an economic point of view) that there is no absolute way to calculate value over time. There are a lot of factors that go into how much value anything has at any given time -- just look at our current credit crisis -- making any historical comparisons tentative at best. How currency is valued, for instance, has changed much over the 20th century, so comparing what a U.S. Dollar in 1920 was worth to one in 2008 is like comparing apples and oranges.

One way -- but by no means the only way -- is to do a comparison of the relative buying power of a Dollar at any given time, and the most popular method is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which basically takes a whole bunch of common consumer goods and services and tracks their cost over time, and then compares that to average wages/salaries at the same time. This, in other words, is a comparison of what percentage of a "standard family's" (of a defined number, like 4, plus middle class, etc.) income it cost to buy these things over time. The website is here, though it only goes back to 1913:

http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Probably a bit more than you wanted but hope that helps -

Also, don't forget that the further back you go the less meaning currency may have as it also has to compete with the idea of trading services for goods or other services.

For example, a butcher may trade his meat to a carpenter in exchange for carpentry work done. Fur trappers/traders were good for this as well. They'd trade their furs for what they needed.

Farmers/ranchers. This happened quite a bit in village life so that people had a means of getting what they needed for what they had. And tended to make currency somewhat useless - especially for those who had none.

Rabe...

There are a bunch of useful sites linked here.

On the Manhattan thing, the cash value of the goods conveyed by Peter Minuit to representatives of the Canarsee tribe was 60 guilders. Obviously, there was no such thing as a "dollar" in 1626; the "24 dollars" so often tossed about was an off-the-cuff calculation made in the 1880s. The calculation was wrong for a lot of reasons, including the fact that the Dutch guilder was revalued a bunch of times between the 17th and 19th centuries.

That said, 60 guilders was not an awful lot of money in the early 17th century; I seem to recall that Rembrandt's house had cost him something like 7,000 guilders.

On the third hand, the Canarsee were just ripping Minuit off, anyway: if anyone had any rights to Manhattan Island at that time, it was the Wappani. Basically, that "sale" was the equivalent of the US selling Newfoundland to China.

Well, if you're interested in how the experts do it, here's a decent page that explains the most popular methods:

http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/

StephanieFox said:

For example, I read somewhere (can't remember) that when the Indians sold Manhattan for $25 worth of beads, the $25 was more like $50,000 in today's money. That sounds a bit odd, but I'd like to know relative values.

Click to expand...

Actually, $25 compounded at 3% interest for 400 years is well over 1.5 million dollars.

I just finished the book "Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire" by Amanda Foreman. There's a footnote in it (pg. 4) that says...

"The usual method for estimating equivalent twentieth-century values is to multiply by 60."

(It's talking about 1750 - 1800 England.)