How much would $1.50 in 1945 be worth today?

How much would $1.50 in 1945 be worth today?(wolframalpha.com)

19 points by wqfeng 12 years ago | 30 comments

jccooper 12 years ago |

If you had $1.50 in 1945 and held it until today, you'd have $1.50. Problem is, in 1945 it would have bought you lunch for a week, and today it would buy you one miniature fast food hamburger.

My parents tell me tales of my great grandparents who didn't trust the banks and probably buried money in the yard near where I live. If they buried it in cash, well, it wouldn't be a very impressive sum today.

That same $1.50 invested at 3%, you'd have... $12.22 today. A little better, but inflation's still pretty rough. You'd have been better off buying that pair of overalls in 1945.

Now, $1.50 worth of gold in 1945 would be worth $57-ish today, so if my great grandparents didn't trust the greenback either, then that theoretical coffee can is worth something. But don't take that as investment advice; the dollar price of gold went through the roof when the dollar was taken off the gold standard (go figure) and that's not going to happen twice.

shearnie 12 years ago | |

My wife's grandad left her some cash as an inheritance. It was only something around 20k. But he saved diligently for his grandkids for years and year even before they were born. I wonder if at the time it was a decent savings but just destroyed by inflation.

aidenn0 12 years ago |

Even better: the half-cent was last minted in 1857 so:

    $us0.005 1857 today

    14.04¢ (2014 US dollars)

So the half-cent was worth more than a dime when it was eliminated, and the penny (new smallest denomination) was worth more than a quarter. We could simplify our currency by eliminating all coins smaller than a quarter and have currency in similar resolution to 1857.

EricBurnett 12 years ago |

I get the query "$1.50 1945 today" with no answer. What am I supposed to see?

sanswork 12 years ago | |

Change it to $1.50usd 1945 today to see what the OP expected you to see.

Jxnathan 12 years ago | |

$19.80

baldajan 12 years ago |

Fix: $1.50 USD 1945 today

The problem with this query is, wolframalpha auto detects location and uses the $ currency (if available) in that country. So it only really works in the states, and maybe countries that don't have a $ currency.

Jxnathan 12 years ago |

$1.50 in 1785 (when US dollars were issued) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241.50+1785+today

quackerhacker 12 years ago | |

I know this is just accounting inflation, but from a collectors stand point...if you had $1.50 from that era, it would be worth waaaaaay more than $37.70 :)

rangibaby 12 years ago | |

I was more surprised at the lack of inflation (about the same between 1785 and 1945 and 1945 and now).

ChristianMarks 12 years ago | | |

Interestingly, the period after 1945 coincides with the explosive growth in computing performance, according to William Nordhaus of Yale University in a 2002 study entitled The Progress of Computing [1].

Nordhaus documents computer performance improvements on the order of 1 trillon to 5 trillion times "...in constant dollars or in terms of labor units since 1900." During that period, Nordhaus notes that "...there were relatively small improvements in efficiency (perhaps a factor of ten) in the century before World War II. Around World War II, however, there was a substantial acceleration in productivity, and the growth in computer power from 1940 to 2002 has averaged close to 50 percent per year."

Automation really picked up in industry in the period since 1970, which has seen relatively stagnant wages for most of the working population.

[1] http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/prog_030402_all.pdf

dsjoerg 12 years ago | |

yep it's wild. even more startling is 1785 to 1900. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241.50+1785+to+1900

ChuckMcM 12 years ago |

The more interesting result is that what was "worth" $1.00 in 1945 is "worth" $13.20 today. Of course a nice family car was $1,500 in 1945, which would be $19,800 today, except you can't buy a nice family car for $19,800 today. Its quite useful to compare things like "how many hours of labor bought you car?" or what percentage of your production went to feeding your family. That is when you start looking at whether or not people are better or worse off than they were in 1945.

billforsternz 12 years ago |

I remember reading a Time magazine article about inflation around 1980 when I was at university. I remember it projected to the not too distant future (maybe to 2000?) and said, and I quote because it stuck in my mind; "We'll probably all make $100,000 then, but the downside will be that a candy bar will probably cost a whole dollar". I think of it whenever I buy a confectionary item, invariably for multiple dollars.

snowwrestler 12 years ago |

I've come to believe that inflation is the least-understood concept in personal finance. The fact that this is on the HN homepage seems like evidence supporting that.

Ozark 12 years ago |

for anyone using it outside the US try "$us1.50 1945 today" or it will attempting this with your local currency and there will probably be no data

GhotiFish 12 years ago | |

It interpreted it as 1.50 CAD * 1945 and I briefly panicked.

wqfeng 12 years ago |

It's interesting. I'd like to see more countries. How about ￥1 1980 today ?

picea 12 years ago | |

I haven't looked for others but Australia has a convenient calculator: http://www.rba.gov.au/calculator/annualPreDecimal.html

RustyRussell 12 years ago | | |

1 pound 10 shillings in 1945 (which would convert to $1.50 in 1965 with the changeover to decimal) becomes $98.74 in 2013. Ouch!

WalterBright 12 years ago |

The US had no net inflation from 1800-1914, and endemic inflation ever since.

ganeumann 12 years ago | |

And thus William Jennings Bryan's famous Cross of Gold speech: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

The gold standard meant that there was no ability to increase the monetary base (and thus no inflation!) at that time (1890s), causing much bitterness among populists.

bryan_rasmussen 12 years ago |

That's a pretty lousy rate of return for inventing time travel really.

The normal way one calculates this is by buying power of those dollars - what could you buy then and what would it cost now.

But really I could have bought a Sub-Mariner comics #15 in mint condition, and it would be worth quite a bit more today.

foocc 12 years ago |

I get:

Assuming Hong Kong dollars for "$"

HK$1.50 (Hong Kong dollars) to | today

(no exchange data available)

lukeholder 12 years ago | |

Change it to $1.50usd 1945 today to see what the OP expected you to see.

benched 12 years ago |

Inflation is very powerful. I always feel like people don't think about it in enough detail. For example, the year that your dollars were worth twice what they are now? That would be the long-ago time of ... 1988. Did you learn your general sense for how much "20 dollars" is in the '80s? Doesn't "40 dollars" just sound like more, somehow? I wonder how many people mentally account for just how elastic nominal amounts are.

billforsternz 12 years ago | |

Don't forget though that not all goods are affected the same way. I remember working on a project in the early 1980s. We decided that the future was non-volatile solid state memory and that Intel's new "bubble memory" looked pretty sweet. From memory it cost something like $NZ1000 for 100Kbytes, yes that is K for Kilo, of solid state, non volatile memory. Today a 16Gbyte flash drive costs around $NZ10 retail. So in round terms today we get something like 100,000 times the bang for one hundredth of the buck. And of course the modern product is hugely preferable in terms of speed, size, weight, robustness, power consumption and any other metric you can name. Obviously tech is a standout field, but there are others, air travel for example.

aidenn0 12 years ago | |

I know, and you rarely see a $50 (in fact many places will refuse to take notes larger than $20) despite the fact that $20 notes were common in the 80s and a $50 is similarly valued now.

chad_oliver 12 years ago | | |

To be fair, credit cards* are much more common now than they were in the 80s. Cash is mostly a back-up medium.

* or Eftpos cards, if you're in Australia or New Zealand.