Cost of Living Over the Centuries, from Stefan Jovanovich
Being too lazy to find out on my own and, therefore, that much more curious about the answers, I repost this past exchange by Yishen and Kim in the hope that they may have further thoughts on the subject. How much, I wonder, has the cost of lodging changed over the centuries and in the recent slump for an unskilled laborer? I can provide one factoid: for the unskilled laborer without papers here in the SF Bay Area the price of housing - i.e. sharing a bedroom with 3 other laborers in a ranch house in the non-posh suburbs - has gone down by 30-40%. House rents have slumped badly as the supply of tenants has fallen even faster than housing prices (the decline in remittances from the U.S. to Mexico is a lagging indicator of this trend.)
Yishen wrote:
I recently took a look at cost of living in 1700s London versus 2000s New York City.
I took the approach of figuring out how much of each item could an unskilled worker consume a year based on his salary and the price of goods then.
For instance, an unskilled laborer could purchase 511 lb of bacon in 1700s London with his annual paycheck versus 4122 lb of bacon in NYC today.
There's a lot of detail one can get rigourous about (like correcting for various taxes) and a lot of assumptions about prices, so I don't think the numbers I cite contain much (or any) precision, however the magnitudes of improvement should tell the right story:
Item 1700s 2000s
Postage 80 miles 1872 83324
Coarse Soap, 1lb 3744 5833
Beer, 1qt 1404 3888
Barber visit 936 1167
Butter, 1lb 624 5833
Bacon, 1lb 511 4122
Mail, London-NY 468 41662
Steakhouse dinner 468 583
Candles, 1lb 165 1458
Coffee, 1lb 94 1326
Tea, 1lb 62 1750
Simple dinner 899 1167
Ticket 45 93 (Handel's messiah vs Madonna's latest tour)
Our average Joe benefited the most in communication anywhere from 40 fold to 90 fold greater consumption.
Agricultural goods came next, some 10 to 30 fold for tea and coffee, 8 to 9 fold for processed goods like candles, butter and bacon.
Finally, a trip to the barber didn't change all that much in terms of affordability for the average Joe.
Kim Zussman replied:
By any measures standard of living (i.e., real wages/real cost of living) has improved dramatically since the 1930s. Just check any data source (government conspirators), and you will see that with improved productivity and agriculture, this is true over time in most periods.
However it is still possible, with 2006 dollars, to eat for less than $20/week:
Source .