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INFLATION
How much did you pay for your first house? How much would that be in today's dollars?
The Inflation application is a very simple application that enables you to calculate
how much money has changed in value over the years. For instance, if your first paycheck
was $500 in 1981, it would be equivalent to $1,184 in today's dollars.
It's a lot of fun to ask people how much they paid for their first car, or their first house,
and it's also useful to keep the value of money in perspective.
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Inflation knows the inflation rates for the U.S Dollar, the British Pound,
the Canadian Dollar, the Australian Dollar, and the New Zealand Dollar.
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HOW DOES IT WORK? |
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Inflation contains a database of the inflation rates for various currencies
over the past hundred years or so. These rates were obtained from government agencies
from the currencies' countries. For instance, for the U.S. Dollar, the rates
were obtained from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For Australia, the USA,
Canada and New Zealand, the data is available going back to World War I or before.
Australia and New Zealand have changed their currency from the pound to the dollar
in 1966 and 1967, respectively. The application therefore lets you select the appropriate
years only. It would not make sense to talk about $100 Australian dollars in 1940 because
there was no such thing as the Australian dollar in 1940.
The United Kingdom actually has data available going back to 1800, although we only
included the data up to 1880. If you think that it would be useful to include
older data, please let us know.
Inflation rates usually do not go back more than a century or so. For one thing,
this type of economic data was often not collected back then. In addition, the more time
has passed, the more difficult it becomes to make a meaningful comparison.
What we buy now is vastly different from what people usually bought a century ago.
For instance, the percentage of money spent on food has gone down dramatically.
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We plan to have updates whenever new inflation rates come out, at least once a year.
If inflation rates are revised, we will also publish these as updates.
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We expect to release a new version of Inflation for the countries in the Euro zone
very soon. The currencies in Europe are quite a bit more complex, so this first release
focused on countries where the currency has not changed too dramatically.
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