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Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

12 Responses to “Inflation Rates vs Your Birth Year”

1. cognos Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 3:26 pm

   Yeah… this is moronic. They could’ve picked alot of other things… like a calculator, which would’ve cost $300 for you the year you were born and today would cost $3. Or a heart pill… but hey, what 5yrs of life worth?

   Also, take your income… divide into $26k. Lets say that 20x.

   I bet you wouldnt have made $100k in your “birth year”.

   Why is $26k their avg income? That seems silly.

2. constantnormal Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 3:36 pm

   ok, what am I doing wrong here? I’ve tried this using multiple browsers, and they all come up with 404s on the flash file.

3. constantnormal Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 3:42 pm

   And apparently, it disallows years prior to 1950? What’s up with that? There’s certainly data avialable for these items prior to 1950 …

4. b_thunder Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 3:46 pm

   enter year 2000 and compare with today’s prices – everything you need to know about the GW Bush years

5. rip Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 3:48 pm

   Looks like housing and gas are the big winners.

   @constant: Yeah. What’s with that no one was born before 1950? Or is there just aren’t enough left alive to bother with?

6. constantnormal Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 3:55 pm

   Og, God, this is one of THOSE sites … I had to tell by browser to identify itself as running on Windows, and it loaded just fine.

7. cognos Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 4:19 pm

   So… I also think they are doing things like -

   ‘What was the average price of a house?” “In 1970 it was $25k. Today its $220k”.

   Without ANY adjustment for the fact that it was 1,700 sq ft in 1970 and 2,700 sq ft today. For the fact that today it has granite counters and 3 shower heads and is 3x as energy efficient… and the crime rate is 3x lower every.

   But hey… who cares about quality. A house is a house right? And life was SO damn good in 1970.

8. ashpelham2 Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 4:37 pm

   A lot of holes in their philosophy, but still you cannot argue with those costs today. There is inflation and it’s been torrid since about 2000 particularly. And it hits the poor the hardest, as does just about every economic downdraft. I’m sure there’s a leftist slant at work here, but the current numbers aren’t that far off.

   Still, what’s with all the hating on this little exercise? It’s just an simple illustration of what’s been going on, using real world numbers, without all of the controls that a more scientific survey would show. What difference does it make if the house is more energy efficient anyway, if the energy itself has gone parabolic in it’s per wattage/btu price? What difference does it make that a Corvette was 10,000 in 1975, when I was born, and now it’s $60,000? Couldn’t afford it then, can’t afford it now. What about the wages? Minimum wage has sure shot up by several multiples since then, but those input costs are trumped LARGELY by the salaries paid to the employer. And what about healthcare??????

9. RW Says:
   January 31st, 2011 at 8:23 pm

   Pretty clunky app. Frankly easier to just go the Cleveland Fed’s inflation calculator at http://tinyurl.com/4ljug68 – adjusted data all the way back to 1913 (I’m not that old but sometimes it feels like it). Can’t enter really large numbers but its easy enough to set a base of 1 and use the result as a multiplier.

   Not sure how good the data and/or algorithm in the birth inflation app is: I entered my birthday as the year I began driving and it gave a fairly large appreciation for the price of gas but when I did the same thing using the Cleveland app the result was as I expected: I’m paying slightly less per gallon now in inflation adjusted terms than I did in 1965 (extractive industries in the US have been heavily subsidized by the tax-payer even without counting externalities such as pollution and environmental degradation/cleanup).

10. RW Says:
    January 31st, 2011 at 8:33 pm

    Almost forgot to mention, Paul Krugman at http://tinyurl.com/4ojk93p points to a site at the Atlanta Fed where they are headed in the right direction WRT tracking core inflation. And it’s updated monthly.

    IMO it’s trends in prices that are typically reluctant to move (“sticky”) that give the better tell on inflation/deflation.

11. How the Common Man Sees It Says:
    January 31st, 2011 at 10:42 pm

    Thanks for reminding me that when I was born I couldn’t afford a thing and the same holds true now

12. formerlawyer Says:
    February 1st, 2011 at 1:26 am

    A full set of U.S. historical calculations can be found http://www.measuringworth.com/index.php at this URL:

    http://eh.net/hmit/

    The choice of measures is explained here:

    http://www.measuringworth.com/worthmeasures.php

    The corresponding Canadian inflation calculator is :

    http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/inflation_calc.html