Purchasing power of one US dollar in every year from 1635 to 2020
It&#x27;s a damn good thing people on fixed incomes don&#x27;t live to be 400 and don&#x27;t have to hold all their savings in cash. Aside from the basic nonsense of projecting purchasing power over periods in which what you can now purchase didn&#x27;t exist.<p>This is of course also nonsense, but the one good that has existed that entire time is land. Manhattan was purchased for 60 guilders in 1623, projected to $24. According to Bloomberg, the estimate of Manhattan land value in 2018 was $1.74 trillion. Amusingly, thanks to the magic of compounding, that actually only implies a 6.5% average annual inflation rate.<p>Of course, land is a capital asset and expected to appreciate, but this is granting the Hacker News inflation hawks worst case that inflation rates should include nominal price increases in capital assets.<p>I&#x27;m having trouble finding decent data on this, but it looks like a guilder averaged about 10g of silver at the time? So saying Manhattan was worth 600g of silver, that&#x27;s about 21.16 oz. The present value of Manhattan in ounces of silver is 62,142,857,142. That is 5.674% annual inflation denominated in silver.<p>Not bad for the dollar, I guess? Less than 1% per year worse decrease in purchasing power compared to silver?<p>I have no idea how the website I was looking at computed a dollar to guilder conversion rate a century and a half before the United States existed, though.