Measuring worth

Today's value of an amount of money from the past, perhaps in a will or salary, has been delved into a couple of time on the blog. At the last BIFHSGO meeting member John Chatterley handed me a printout of pages from < www.measuringworth.com >.  The source looks to be worth bookmarking.

Prominent on the site first page is "Measuring Worth Is a Complicated Question." I believe it, and one measure of the credibility of the information presented is that the principals are both Professors of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, backed up by a seemingly credible advisory board of academic economists. Did I really write credible and economist in the same sentence!

The content of interest to most of us will be THE CALCULATORS and DATA SETS

I tried the Relative Values - UK £ database. Taking a figure from my teenage years, 5 shillings in 1963, the relative value in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, is:

£3.90	using the retail price index
£4.03	using the GDP deflator
£8.65	using the average earnings
£9.96	using the per capita GDP
£11.50	using the share of GDP

Seems like there's plenty of scope, a factor three over half a century, for debate.

Unfortunately there is no Canadian data at the site.