Curmudgeon Progress

In my long term quest to become a curmudgeon worth talking to there are certain milestones hat signal progress.  I have just realized that I have already passed one of these milestones.

The milestone in question is the classic, "things didn't cost as much in my day!"

It is impossible for anyone who wishes to enjoy life to constantly update the full repertoire of our knowledge of pricing, and so we tend to develop a rough guide.  Most of us know that a gallon of milk is closer to $5 than $15, but few of us know how much it is to the dime.  It is extremely hard to change one's understanding of the price of goods in the gaps between actually purchasing the goods.  As I have said before, the environment in which humans largely evolved was, in comparison with today, extremely static  The value of a tool was simply the value of that tool for someone's entire (probably short) life. The increase in the price of items is not something that is naturally understood by most people.

Prices go up, and they go up almost constantly, and actually quite consistently since about 1970.  This doesn't mean that everyone keeps getting poorer (actually, over the forty year period I mentioned above it's slightly the other way) because income increases as well.  What it all comes down to is the terrifying subtlety of compound interest.  You barely notice a 3% change in prices year-to-year, but you multiply that 3% over a while and the change is huge.  Prices double about every twenty years. For me, twenty years ago was 1993, and that's when I really started working properly and taking care of myself entirely.  That is the point where my basic understanding of prices started.

I have just noticed that I find almost everything shockingly expensive.  $7 for a Big Mac Meal?  I remember when it passed the $3 mark (when I actually ate them).  $50 jeans?  I remember when Gap jeans were cool AND cost $30.  I go grocery shopping, and while I understand that I am shopping for two, and I buy nicer things than when I worked on a direct care workers wage, I still spend more than four times as much each visit.  While I have thought of myself as rich, after all our income is such a bigger number than we have had before, it still seems that we should be getting further than we are.

What I am now trying to do is recalibrate all of my price and wage intuitions with updated information, simply based on a rough 20 year/double amount basis.  I am not sure that will make me feel substantially less rich, but it will remove a fair amount of my frustration at what things cost.

My first full time job paid me $16,400 a year.  Now that would be about $30,000.  I was not well off but I could afford a used car, an apartment, food, and um cheap beer for entertainment.  At the time $30,000 would have been easy-street. So, I have to understand that $20,000 a year is poor (for the USA), and $100,000 is not obscenely wealthy but rather upper-middle class.  The most money I ever made was $30,000, roughly ten years ago.  That would have been the equivalent of $23,000 in 1993 and $40,000 today.  That was a really good wage for social work, about twice the official poverty line.

The upshot of all of this is that either everything costs twice as much as it should, or my wife makes half as much as I thought.