[kileywm]

Interesting snippet of wisdom from the article:

> The real comforts of life cost but a small portion of what most of us can earn. Dr. Franklin says “it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.”

In reading a few of the chapters, it was really interesting to see the dollar amounts written. They seemed rather high for 1880.

> She has a nice one thousand dollar camel's hair shawl, and she will make Smith get her an imitation one, and she will sit in a pew right next to her neighbor in church, in order to prove that she is her equal.

Inflation calculators put that camel shawl at nearly $25,000 (2019 dollars).

[akiselev]

There used to be a lot fewer luxury goods and they were a lot more expensive because most came from "exotic" far away places (and many were valued solely because of it). Camel's hair, especially, likely wasn't an automated textile like cotton and it's a rather expensive material to begin with (a good shawl would likely run into four figures even now).

$1,000 is roughly two to five years average income (depending on the state) in 1880 so if the average family income right now is ~50k and a family of professionals makes 250k, it's not that far fetched. Especially when you consider that church was the important social outing for a majority of the population.

[fapjacks]

The world we live in is an astonishing exception compared to pretty much any point in human history and one of the outcomes of this is that our instinct for price has been greatly skewed by the cheapness of things because of mass-manufacturing. Though certainly true in some cases, it's not that good, quality items of sturdy construction have gotten more expensive, it's that everything else we use normally -- all the cheap plastic shit from China -- is so cheap to manufacture, that the quality stuff seems so expensive.