On recent evenings, just after sunset, I’ve seen a beautiful display of a crescent moon hanging in the western sky above Venus.
I’d be really impressed if it retrieved a Granny Smith instead.
@David Foster: Read your analysis with interest. I did you leave a comment there.
I don’t doubt food was more expensive in that day, it demonstrably was 30, 50, and 70 years ago. But the farther you go back, the harder it is to make sense of it with CPI. What’s cheap now and what was cheap then are almost in different universes, and much of what we buy now didn’t exist.
There’s a book, Household Management by Isabella Beeton. Goes into gory, quantitative detail on how to run a Victorian household, what you need to spend on and how much it should cost. (It also has thousands of recipes, but that’s another topic in itself). Reading that book made me despair of any simple way of comparing the general price level of any time before perhaps 1920.
One reason being the hugely different price of labor, and how much labor was substituted for what we today would use manufactured goods to accomplish. Keeping fireplaces going all winter instead of central heating, for example. Or how many household implements were bespoke, you’d ask a local craftsman to make you one. Someone like Bill Gates might be able to live that way today.
That’s the lifestyle of “middle class people” which in those days was a small fraction of the population, and a large fraction of the population was in domestic service to them. Very few Americans have domestic servants which would need to be fed and clothed and lodged. I tried once to get a rough estimate on what equivalent income a modest “middle class” Victorian must have had, if keeping servants, and based on our price of labor it’s something like $400 – $500 K, and I rather think that’s an underestimate since I don’t think very many American households have live in domestic help even at that level. But CPI applied to household expenses (stated in the book) gives a much worse answer, way too small.
The large population of working class people had an even different lifestyle yet, which is another big topic, and the huge population in agriculture is different in yet another way. Because their needs in terms of goods and services are so different, I don’t think you can do much to estimate their level of prices. You have the confounding factor of what the money could buy relative to what was available for the money to buy as well as what the money was actually spent on.
The online CPI calculator I use by BLS only goes back to 1913, and I wouldn’t trust it that far to be honest. Too different a world, in terms of what was in the economy.
Nicholas: There’s also the question of whether you adjust not just for the price level (meaning what would the price of an apple in 1913 be in today’s dollars), but also for income levels at that time. I suspect food was a much larger share of families’ budgets in 1913 than today. Also the purchases were more raw ingredients, requiring more prep time as opposed to the pre-prepared or packaged foods we can get today.
Loved your post Kate. Venus near the moon is always a beautiful thing to admire. When the moon is a very thin crescent you can often see the outline of the “dark side”. When the moon is at crescent the earth would be nearly full in its skies. It’s so bright that it slightly lights up the dark side and we’re able to see it. It’s called earthshine and I believe Da Vinci was the first to speculate as to how it works.
@Jimmy: I suspect food was a much larger share of families’ budgets in 1913 than today. Also the purchases were more raw ingredients
First is mostly true, except maybe farmers, second may not have been in 1913.
Lots of working class people in cities lived mostly on food prepared outside the home, since the places they lived had little accommodation for cooking, preparing, or storing food. It was not any cheaper for them to do this, in terms of their income, than it would be for a working class family today to eat fast food all the time. Since they probably had some kind of fire they could do simple things like toasting or making tea or whatever.
I still find Peter Zeihan stimulating, but every time he comments on Trump it’s TDS all the way down. Here he is answering a question about Mamdani, but Z just has to take a nasty, ill-considered swipe at Trump:
________________________________________
I mean, if if there is a trend for Mamdani, it’s the same trend for from Trump. These are two people who never had a real job in their lives and all of a sudden are now political leaders. We should not expect this to go well.
To compare Mamdani’s boutique background to Trump’s bareknuckle, detail-oriented career as a NY real estate developer is just blind intellectual bigotry IMO.
He was one of the founders of Traffic. but he was on and off with the group. His straight-ahead rock approach didn’t fit with the psychedelic-rock-pop-jazz-folk-everything fusion quest Steve Winwood and the others were on.
I HOPE YOU WENT LONG ON POPCORN FUTURES: Prominent civil rights activist warns bombshell Southern Poverty Law Center indictment is just ‘tip of the iceberg.’
Bob Woodson, an 89-year-old civil rights champion who faced jail time for his advocacy in the Jim Crow South, condemned the SPLC and admitted he wasn’t “surprised at all” that the nonprofit allegedly funneled more than $3 million to “field sources” to infiltrate extremists groups between between 2014 and 2023.
“This is just a more obvious expression of the contradiction of people who say they are fighting for civil rights, and as a consequence, they are corrupt,” Woodson charged on Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show.”
“This is just the tip of the iceberg. These are people who are supposed to be fighting for civil rights.
“They ask which problems are fundable, not which ones are solvable. So you get this kind of corruption that you’re witnessing,” the octogenarian declared.
More to come — lots more, apparently.
I remember the Harvey House restaurants at the train station when I was a small boy. They’re long gone now. They were famous in those days.
If you like musicals there’s a Judy Garland movie about the waitresses titled “The Harvey Girls”. Her big number is “On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe”.
Couldn’t be made today
Niketas…yes, that’s what makes inflation calculations so hard. At best, they can only be an imperfect and very rough estimate.
The time burden of food preparation is surely much smaller now; one result of that is that it is much more feasible to live as a single person in 2026 than it was in 1908.
I posted about Domestic Technologies for one post in my Technology in 1925 series:
huxley on April 24, 2026 at 6:02 pm:
“It’s all well and good to have fun with a metal tape measure until someone pulls the Moon out of its orbit and into the Earth and everyone gets hurt.
In my day young people were raised better. ?”
Well, not really. Back then the Moon was just better behaved.
My experience seeking a better “Fat Max” type of tape measure is that none of them actually achieve the “stand out” distance they claim. Maybe 11 feet if I am lucky? If they could make a “tape” with a bunch of unfolding truss type linkages that was suitably lightweight but as wide and stiff as necessary to reach 20 feet or so?? A NC said before, magic wand waving.
And I just remembered, I probably should just buy a laser distance measuring device instead. However, I am not quite sure I can trust the accuracy on them?? Anyone else know?
I have one, a Leica. It is fantastic and very accurate.
I do not know about the cheaper chinese versions, though.
Niketas Choniates: I will note that in the same era as that book, there was a famous writer who made the hiring of servants the dividing line between the poor — and the very poor. They hired children and the elderly, but even the poor had servants.
“I probably should just buy a laser distance measuring device instead.” -R2L
They’re more accurate than you probably need. But they really only can be used in situations when you have a target to aim them to. Measuring a 2×4, not so much.
That reminded me of the old days when i worked on a survey crew. We measured with a metal tape called a chain. Depending on the accuracy required, you had a clamp with a spring to measure the tension on the tape, for repeatability. You also had to make sure the chain was level. I don’t think we ever adjusted for temperature, but that would make a difference as well. For distances longer than the tape, you would drive a stake and pull the tape while using a plumb bob over the tape. Drop it on the head of the stake and drive a small nail. You would work your way along long distances repeating the process.
It was quite accurate. I think we did mostly class 3 surveying, which allowed 1 foot deviance in 5-10,000 feet. We often were closer than that.
A survey crew in those days would be 4-5 people. When lasers and GPS instruments came alone, the crew was two people or just the surveyor.
@ Mary Catelli > “but even the poor had servants.”
Back in the 1970s, when I still listened to the radio because as a poor graduate student I could not afford a tv, I heard an interview with Isaac Asimov, the science and science-fiction writer, one of my favorites.
The only part of the discussion I remember was an anecdote he told of a conversation he once had with his wife.
Asimov’s family were Russian immigrants in 1923, when he was about three years old. In speaking of the “good old days,” he said, his wife had lamented the passing of the era when even the poor had servants.
“Ah, my dear,” Asimov quoted himself as saying, “in those days, we would have been the servants.”
@Mary Catelli:They hired children and the elderly, but even the poor had servants.
In Victorian England 1 in 3 women WERE servants. That didn’t leave very many “poor” for them to be servants to. Complicated because some servants also had servants to wait on them.
Middle-class households had servants, which is not generally the case today, but they were only 15% of the population. People below middle class could perhaps afford occasional help, but not their own servants.
Household Management (1861) recommends that an annual household income of 150 l. can support one maid of all work and a girl to come in occasionally. Hard to translate 150 l. into today’s money but it was not “poor”, it was near the bottom of the “middle class” which was only about 15% of the population. The maid would have been paid bout 9 l. annually according to the same source. That means a household with one maid and an occasional girl is spending a bit over 8% of their income on these servants. A family making less would need that percentage to be higher.
A family making less that 150 l. a year could probably have someone to come in sometimes to help with chores.
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A museum exhibit about the Fred Harvey Company (operator of railroad hotels) in 1908 led to some Grok-assisted analysis of food prices, then and now:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/76595.html
On recent evenings, just after sunset, I’ve seen a beautiful display of a crescent moon hanging in the western sky above Venus.
I’d be really impressed if it retrieved a Granny Smith instead.
@David Foster: Read your analysis with interest. I did you leave a comment there.
I don’t doubt food was more expensive in that day, it demonstrably was 30, 50, and 70 years ago. But the farther you go back, the harder it is to make sense of it with CPI. What’s cheap now and what was cheap then are almost in different universes, and much of what we buy now didn’t exist.
There’s a book, Household Management by Isabella Beeton. Goes into gory, quantitative detail on how to run a Victorian household, what you need to spend on and how much it should cost. (It also has thousands of recipes, but that’s another topic in itself). Reading that book made me despair of any simple way of comparing the general price level of any time before perhaps 1920.
One reason being the hugely different price of labor, and how much labor was substituted for what we today would use manufactured goods to accomplish. Keeping fireplaces going all winter instead of central heating, for example. Or how many household implements were bespoke, you’d ask a local craftsman to make you one. Someone like Bill Gates might be able to live that way today.
That’s the lifestyle of “middle class people” which in those days was a small fraction of the population, and a large fraction of the population was in domestic service to them. Very few Americans have domestic servants which would need to be fed and clothed and lodged. I tried once to get a rough estimate on what equivalent income a modest “middle class” Victorian must have had, if keeping servants, and based on our price of labor it’s something like $400 – $500 K, and I rather think that’s an underestimate since I don’t think very many American households have live in domestic help even at that level. But CPI applied to household expenses (stated in the book) gives a much worse answer, way too small.
The large population of working class people had an even different lifestyle yet, which is another big topic, and the huge population in agriculture is different in yet another way. Because their needs in terms of goods and services are so different, I don’t think you can do much to estimate their level of prices. You have the confounding factor of what the money could buy relative to what was available for the money to buy as well as what the money was actually spent on.
The online CPI calculator I use by BLS only goes back to 1913, and I wouldn’t trust it that far to be honest. Too different a world, in terms of what was in the economy.
Nicholas: There’s also the question of whether you adjust not just for the price level (meaning what would the price of an apple in 1913 be in today’s dollars), but also for income levels at that time. I suspect food was a much larger share of families’ budgets in 1913 than today. Also the purchases were more raw ingredients, requiring more prep time as opposed to the pre-prepared or packaged foods we can get today.
Loved your post Kate. Venus near the moon is always a beautiful thing to admire. When the moon is a very thin crescent you can often see the outline of the “dark side”. When the moon is at crescent the earth would be nearly full in its skies. It’s so bright that it slightly lights up the dark side and we’re able to see it. It’s called earthshine and I believe Da Vinci was the first to speculate as to how it works.
@Jimmy: I suspect food was a much larger share of families’ budgets in 1913 than today. Also the purchases were more raw ingredients
First is mostly true, except maybe farmers, second may not have been in 1913.
Lots of working class people in cities lived mostly on food prepared outside the home, since the places they lived had little accommodation for cooking, preparing, or storing food. It was not any cheaper for them to do this, in terms of their income, than it would be for a working class family today to eat fast food all the time. Since they probably had some kind of fire they could do simple things like toasting or making tea or whatever.
I still find Peter Zeihan stimulating, but every time he comments on Trump it’s TDS all the way down. Here he is answering a question about Mamdani, but Z just has to take a nasty, ill-considered swipe at Trump:
________________________________________
I mean, if if there is a trend for Mamdani, it’s the same trend for from Trump. These are two people who never had a real job in their lives and all of a sudden are now political leaders. We should not expect this to go well.
–Petr Zeihan, “The World You Grew Up In Is About to Change Forever”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiT0bF3brHw&t=1039s
________________________________________
To compare Mamdani’s boutique background to Trump’s bareknuckle, detail-oriented career as a NY real estate developer is just blind intellectual bigotry IMO.
Michael Tilson-Thomas, 81, has passed on. RIP
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/04/23/michael-tilson-thomas-illness-san-francisco-symphony/89753829007/
Rocker Dave Mason has also died. You may not know the man, but you likely know his music and the bands he played with. Here’s an excellent clip:
–“Dave Mason in 60 Seconds”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_nCZQJSQ4I
He was one of the founders of Traffic. but he was on and off with the group. His straight-ahead rock approach didn’t fit with the psychedelic-rock-pop-jazz-folk-everything fusion quest Steve Winwood and the others were on.
–Dave Mason, “Feelin’ Alright?” (1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m63oLSpfMkM
RIP.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when once we practice to deceive.
https://instapundit.com/792290/
I remember the Harvey House restaurants at the train station when I was a small boy. They’re long gone now. They were famous in those days.
If you like musicals there’s a Judy Garland movie about the waitresses titled “The Harvey Girls”. Her big number is “On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe”.
Couldn’t be made today
Niketas…yes, that’s what makes inflation calculations so hard. At best, they can only be an imperfect and very rough estimate.
The time burden of food preparation is surely much smaller now; one result of that is that it is much more feasible to live as a single person in 2026 than it was in 1908.
I posted about Domestic Technologies for one post in my Technology in 1925 series:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/74391.html
It’s all well and good to have fun with a metal tape measure until someone pulls the Moon out of its orbit and into the Earth and everyone gets hurt.
In my day young people were raised better. 😉
The feds are going to stop giving loans for people to get degrees that depress earnings:
https://www.campusreform.org/article/new-education-dept-rule-strip-aid-low-return-degrees/29767
huxley on April 24, 2026 at 6:02 pm:
“It’s all well and good to have fun with a metal tape measure until someone pulls the Moon out of its orbit and into the Earth and everyone gets hurt.
In my day young people were raised better. ?”
Well, not really. Back then the Moon was just better behaved.
My experience seeking a better “Fat Max” type of tape measure is that none of them actually achieve the “stand out” distance they claim. Maybe 11 feet if I am lucky? If they could make a “tape” with a bunch of unfolding truss type linkages that was suitably lightweight but as wide and stiff as necessary to reach 20 feet or so?? A NC said before, magic wand waving.
And I just remembered, I probably should just buy a laser distance measuring device instead. However, I am not quite sure I can trust the accuracy on them?? Anyone else know?
I have one, a Leica. It is fantastic and very accurate.
I do not know about the cheaper chinese versions, though.
Niketas Choniates: I will note that in the same era as that book, there was a famous writer who made the hiring of servants the dividing line between the poor — and the very poor. They hired children and the elderly, but even the poor had servants.
“I probably should just buy a laser distance measuring device instead.” -R2L
They’re more accurate than you probably need. But they really only can be used in situations when you have a target to aim them to. Measuring a 2×4, not so much.
That reminded me of the old days when i worked on a survey crew. We measured with a metal tape called a chain. Depending on the accuracy required, you had a clamp with a spring to measure the tension on the tape, for repeatability. You also had to make sure the chain was level. I don’t think we ever adjusted for temperature, but that would make a difference as well. For distances longer than the tape, you would drive a stake and pull the tape while using a plumb bob over the tape. Drop it on the head of the stake and drive a small nail. You would work your way along long distances repeating the process.
It was quite accurate. I think we did mostly class 3 surveying, which allowed 1 foot deviance in 5-10,000 feet. We often were closer than that.
A survey crew in those days would be 4-5 people. When lasers and GPS instruments came alone, the crew was two people or just the surveyor.
@ Mary Catelli > “but even the poor had servants.”
Back in the 1970s, when I still listened to the radio because as a poor graduate student I could not afford a tv, I heard an interview with Isaac Asimov, the science and science-fiction writer, one of my favorites.
The only part of the discussion I remember was an anecdote he told of a conversation he once had with his wife.
Asimov’s family were Russian immigrants in 1923, when he was about three years old. In speaking of the “good old days,” he said, his wife had lamented the passing of the era when even the poor had servants.
“Ah, my dear,” Asimov quoted himself as saying, “in those days, we would have been the servants.”
@Mary Catelli:They hired children and the elderly, but even the poor had servants.
In Victorian England 1 in 3 women WERE servants. That didn’t leave very many “poor” for them to be servants to. Complicated because some servants also had servants to wait on them.
Middle-class households had servants, which is not generally the case today, but they were only 15% of the population. People below middle class could perhaps afford occasional help, but not their own servants.
Household Management (1861) recommends that an annual household income of 150 l. can support one maid of all work and a girl to come in occasionally. Hard to translate 150 l. into today’s money but it was not “poor”, it was near the bottom of the “middle class” which was only about 15% of the population. The maid would have been paid bout 9 l. annually according to the same source. That means a household with one maid and an occasional girl is spending a bit over 8% of their income on these servants. A family making less would need that percentage to be higher.
A family making less that 150 l. a year could probably have someone to come in sometimes to help with chores.