> the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars
I.e. it was something more like 6k-7k in terms of dollars at the time of payment.
As a unrelated note it really is depressing to think about how easy it is to buy off politicians and how much money the bribers have vs an average person.
~$6,000-$7,000 is the amount the researchers were paid off with in the mid 60s. This is roughly equivalent to ~$50,000 in 2016 when using CPI-U figures.
$25,000 in the mid 60s would be equivalent to ~$193,000 by the same measure, and does not relate to $50,000 in 2016 in any way.
But your core point that the items in the CPI-U basket do not adjust equally, which is why it's a basket in the first place. Median housing price in 2016 was ~$300,000, so ~$193,000 is a bit of variance... but not nearly as much as mixing the numbers from the different comparisons made it sound.
In terms of 2016, from gemini:
> In 2016, $25,000 from 1969 was worth approximately $163,490.
> Based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), $1 in 1969 had the same purchasing power as $6.54 in 2016. This represents a total inflation increase of roughly 554% over that 47-year period
rendaw was pointing out the $50k in the article & parent comment was in terms of 2016 dollars, not that the mid 60s $25k in CodeWrite23's comment converts to $50k in 2016.
I.e. that the researchers would not be getting anything close to a house + charger + spare change for just half the $50k amount. They got more like $6k-$7k at time of payment in the mid 60s. Which is still a good chunk of change for the time... just not the amounts it was made to sound.
The reason you may not know it's an issue is because inflation in our current system isn't just a loss of purchasing power, it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money: the banking/financial system. So of course the system invested a lot of money, time and effort in convincing you that it's a good thing to continuously donate a fraction of your purchasing power to the finance industry every year.
So what? Nominal wages can go up just fine. They do that all the time.
> it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money
No. That would only be true, if economic actors were too stupid to anticipate expected inflation. People ain't that stupid.
The second part is just confusing. Inflation benefits the first to "receive/spend" new money? Receiving and spending are opposites, and inflation benefits anyone that's spending whether they got that money first or fiftieth.
If you want demons to point a finger at, you're going to have to look further back in time than the 20th century. Then and now we're just doing a frantic tap dance to keep what we inherited from catching on fire.
(Modern day 2%-ish stable inflation is mostly fine for the economy, even if it technically erodes the value of money in the long term. The classic pre-WW1 gold standard was also fine-ish. The Frankenstein gold standard-ish they until the 1970s was bad. And so was the rampant inflation that followed for a while.)
Political evolution is spread over many years and is structurally anisotropic. Metallism's death was inevitable by the 18th century at best, but don't misunderstand that to mean it was going to happen immediately. It's also just a symptom. The enlightenment's political revolution is a manifold spread across centuries. Don't just look at the symptoms, you won't understand anything and it will lead you to half-baked conclusions.
Gold is way too inelastic to work as a basis for currency in an industrial economy.