Purchasing power of one US dollar in every year from 1635 to 2020
It's a damn good thing people on fixed incomes don't live to be 400 and don'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'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'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'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.