You know what I haven’t done in a while? (On this blog anyway.)

Math!

Math is fun! So, let’s do some math.

First, let’s check a few things out…

I did some digging and, as near as I can find, the price of a loaf of bread 100 years ago (that would be 1909 for the chronologically math challenged) was between five and twenty cents per loaf. I guess it depends on whether you got the good stuff. So, let’s figure the good stuff at twenty cents a loaf.

This year, the average price of bread nationwide in the United States is $1.40 per loaf.

Good so far?

Let’s say you have $18.96 in your pocket. How many loaves of bread could you buy? Today, you could buy 13.5 loaves of bread. Well, probably just 13 because I’m sure the store won’t let you buy half a loaf. That’s a nice baker’s dozen, no? Not a bad deal?

Okay, let’s whisk you back to 1909. Again, you have $18.96 in your pocket. (In 1909 dollars, of course, otherwise they wouldn’t accept your funny looking money.) So, how many loaves of bread could you buy then? The answer is 94.8 loaves of bread. Again, I’m sure you’re not going to be able to buy 8/10ths of a loaf of bread, so you’ll go home with 94 loaves of bread. That’s an even better deal than you could get today! And we have all sorts of cheaper ways to mass produce bread these days than 100 years ago, right?

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Inflation. Yeah, can’t beat that, right? Well, let’s look at this another way.

First I’m going to send you back to 1909. With the $18.96 in your pocket, you can buy one ounce of gold. Gold was worth (yearly average) $18.96 per ounce in 1909. So, your $18.96 could buy you 94.8 loaves of bread or one ounce of gold.

Now, let’s bring you back to 2009. How many loaves of bread could you buy with an ounce of gold today? Remember, it would buy 94.8 loaves of bread in 1909. Well, today, with one ounce of gold, you could buy 644 loaves of bread.

Today, it would cost you $901.65 to buy 644 loaves of bread. (The yearly average for gold this year is $901.65 per ounce.) It would cost you $132.72 to buy 94.8 loaves of bread, but your $132.72 couldn’t even buy you 3/20ths of an ounce of gold.

Isn’t math fun?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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