One thing that might be missing from your calculation is that "one median-family-year of work" meant "about one person working" in 1940 but means "about two persons working" in 2022.
The difference isn’t quite that large as many households are just single people and while the female labor force participation rate increased (34% 1945 vs 57% now) the male labor force participation rate declined ( 83% 1948 vs 68% now). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
Similarly there where a great deal of households in the 1940’a with two working adults.
You read that statement incorrectly, the share of dual incomes among married couples doubled.
Married-couple households however have dropped dramatically over time, 76% of households in 1940, 55% of all U.S. households in 1990, and 46% in 2020. “In 1940, married couples with children represented 43 percent of all households; married couples without children represented 33 percent of households”
Sort of interesting, but I think does not negate the point. A dual income household is not necessarily a dual income married couple. For the purpose of calculating dual income households, you have to consider non married romantic partners and even just relatives and roommates. And again, retirees dropping things down.
This effect of the median family being dual income is likely true for now, and false for 1940. It is much stronger if you subset down to "families", but this nuance doesn't likely appear in the "median household income".
This take ignores the unpaid work performed for the family and community, largely by women. When two people in a family are employed, more of their household labor (cooking, caring for the young and the old, etc) is purchased instead of provided by a family member.
Housework productivity has gone through the roof since the invention of dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, etc. My grandma used to actually work hard the whole day to run the houshold. My family today manages with maybe two or three hours of light work per day.
People don't actually want this. We sell ourselves on the Jetsons-like idea of automating away our daily tasks so we can just live our lives, but that scares us.
Most people don't actually seem to want to have mist most of their waking hours free to do whatever they want.
But how would Jeff Bezos swim in money if his underpaid parcel couriers would be able to financially survive on working four hours a day?
It's utterly ridiculous how much of the productivity increases of the last decades ended up not distributed to the workers either in terms of wage/salary hikes or reduced working hours. Something like billionaires rarely existed for a long time, usually it was the royal family and that's it - and now, alone in the last 20 years the amount of billionaires is 6x higher than at the start of the millennium. All of that wealth has been looted from the lower classes and in quite a few cases the taxpayers.
Yes, but they cost much more than now so it was very common to have a sewing machine in every house and use it. If you're 30 and have a sewing machine at home now, chances are that you're a cosplayer.
Well. The partner staying home in the 1940s also rendered services to the family. Services that now need to be purchased from outside. So really, it’s always two people spending their waking hours. Only I suspect that in the 1940s, things were a little less stressed out. Judging from today’s bestseller lists and all those productivity and hack your body / marriage / x podcasts.
As economies develop, goods become cheaper and services become more expensive. If you visit rural Peru, a massage is roughly the same price as two gatorades - or 3 liters of clean drinking water. Shoe shining is 1/10th the price of a 1 liter bottle of clean water.
Contrast this with the US where a service like a massage would be >100x more expensive than a liter of clean drinking water. The same pattern holds true with other services such as shaves/haircuts etc.
Also lots of the project ingredients were not really market commodities. There could have been a lot more exchange of money involved if eg there had been a market for weapons grade uranium/plutonium or moon rockets and staff had been paid FAANG salaries.
(There's of course a big opportunity cost in employing the best physicists and biggest r&d investments in nukes - eg solar energy and grid storage could have been here decades earlier in an alternative scenario.)
> So, the inflation figures under represent the cost by a factor of 3.5 over those 80 years.
But this is not inflation per se, it's what's counted as “economic growth”: the median family in 1940 had a much lower standard of living than the one in 2024.
But of course sorting what's inflation and what's relevant economic growth is highly subjective: some things like cars and housing have literally inflated (they are enormous now compared the what they looked like even 40 years ago) and that's usually counted as economic growth, but is it really? In some way it is: having a bigger house is nice. But in other way it's not: do you really need that much space when you're older and the children left long ago? And sometime it's actually a net loss: living 30 kilometers away from work and depending on a car for everything is not a gain.
Same for electronics: computers are much, much faster than they used to be in 2000, so the statistics counts that as economic growth. And it is, you couldn't do modern AI on 2000 hardware, or physics simulations for industry and all. But at the same time, for the average consumer, the gain in speed has been eaten by software consuming more and more resources. Sometimes from sheer laziness (there's literally no reason for Windows to be this slow) but sometimes it's a bit more ambiguous: today's video games couldn't run on hardware from 20 years ago, and I remember being very happy to see the graphics improve during my teenage years so it's not entirely pointless. But at the same time, it's not as if video games were more fun or enjoyable now than they were 20 years ago: the consumer surplus from video games is basically the same no matter the quality of the graphics, so maybe it shouldn't be counted as growth at all.
The measure of “real” economic growth (and the measure of inflation) depends a lot on how you weight these things (it's called “hedonic adjustment”) and as we've seen, it's very difficult, and fundamentally subjective. And I wish statistics agency provided a measure of CPI without hedonic adjustment in addition to regular CPI (like they already do multiple variants of CPI depending on the basket of goods that's taken into account).
In 1944, the USD was pegged to gold at $35/troy oz. The current spot price of gold is $2300/troy oz. 1 troy oz of gold in 1944 = 1 troy oz of gold in 2024.
This gives the price of the Manhattan Project as $131 billion in 2024 dollars.
Not sure if this is that good of a metric given that I've read before that in recent history, precious metals have much higher demand where there is crisis and instability - and 1944 is certainly one of the peaks for that. I guess since 2023 it's also been quite a peak.
It’s a great metric at the moment for the reasons that you’ve given. We are living in a period of crisis and instability. Just like in that time, we are close to yet another global war. The difference is whether or not nuclear weapons will keep things from further escalating.
But why is gold a better metric than anything else?
Like if there's a global war I bet people are going to want canned food much more than a gold chain. So should we use the price of chicken soup in 1944 vs 2023?
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But yeah I also agree with eru; being "close to yet another global war" is a way better place to be than "actually in a global war". Considering pretty much every century has them.
Precious metals (gold/silver) are very expensive given their weight, relatively easy to divide up, and won't significantly go stale or decompose (some oxidation will occur - sure). I'm sure there are other assets that this is also applicable to - it's just the categorical example I remember discussing with my accounting teacher ~19 years ago.
No, in 1944 the dollar was fixed at $35 per ounce of gold. It was not a time of crisis for the gold market, because gold was money. The peg was eventually removed (I think in 1971). Right now there are factors driving the price of gold up, including massive central bank purchases and also massive understated inflation in the West. Everyone knows that fiat currencies are fleeting so the world is preparing for an inevitable decline or collapse of the dollar.
It's easy to check BLS inflation against old ads for goods and see that BLS inflation is pretty spot on. I've yet to meet someone claiming "massive understated inflation" that has done this simple check honestly.
As to the claim that "fiat currencies are fleeting," it is a fact every country of 200+ has one, so it's safer to say every non-fiat currency has failed.
There's also significant empirical evidence such economies are on the whole less volatile than older ones limited by how fast one can dig material out of a hole. See a list of severity and frequency of US recessions, or study the Great Moderation, or simply look at the volatility of gold prices, to see how unstable non-fiat pricing is.
Have you ever noticed how inflation metrics are always finding ways to ignore how housing and rent has gone up much faster than wages?
Pretty much all the important things in life have gone up more than stated inflation.
I don't care that I can get a cheap very environmentally unsustainable cardigan for less than ever before. Likewise for a watery nutrition-less tomato.
Meanwhile education, housing and healthcare are the least affordable they've ever been.
>It's easy to check BLS inflation against old ads for goods and see that BLS inflation is pretty spot on. I've yet to meet someone claiming "massive understated inflation" that has done this simple check honestly.
When property values blow up 50% in a year or two and people pay $20k+ over sticker for cars, it's not "supply chain issues" nor 8% inflation dude. I have looked at old ads for stuff, and the difference is that now the same goods are manufactured for 1/10th the cost overseas and somehow cost way more anyway or at best roughly the same price as before. The BLS has a very complex scheme for understating inflation that involves substitutions, hypothetical costs, and other gimmicks. It wasn't always so fishy but the change was made to make the economy look better. I could argue with you at length about details but I can tell it will not be productive.
>As to the claim that "fiat currencies are fleeting," it is a fact every country of 200+ has one, so it's safer to say every non-fiat currency has failed.
Gold and silver are valuable everywhere and have been since they were first discovered many thousands of years ago. So your claim is utterly false. Every fiat currency that has existed has gone to zero, as well as any that were based on claims of redeemability.
>See a list of severity and frequency of US recessions, or study the Great Moderation, or simply look at the volatility of gold prices, to see how unstable non-fiat pricing is.
Gold prices are only volatile in terms of dollars, due to speculation in the futures market. The banks and governments play games with gold prices to discourage investors from seeking it. There are some cyclical or geopolitical factors in it too. But as JP Morgan said, "Gold is money. Everything else is credit." It can be manipulated but not nearly as much as fiat.
It's important for people to realize that the US dollars market are quite open that if the current actors thinks that the dollar is going down, it'll go down very fast. So if you are an average HNer (citizen) don't go freak out and put all of your money on gold or bitcoin. (This is not a long-term assessment though; that being impossible to predict the far future).
Nobody wants to see the US dollar collapse overnight. Neither the US nor China (which holds trillions of US bonds). But everyone wants to move from that standard including the US (which, being the reserve currency, has suffered a horrible NIIP since the end of the gold standard[1]).
That seems to subtly assume that a century of technological progress hasn't changed the value of what a family can produce. That is pessimistic given that computers were maybe the greatest leap forward in technology related to engineering design.
A Manhattan project should be much more achievable today than it was in the WWII era.
I understand what you're getting at, but equating wage inflation with price inflation would be a mistake that would lead to some nonsensical results.
That is, if you only look at wage inflation, it would mean that you can never factor in productivity improvements to how much more people can buy with their money.
Measuring inflation by salary is misguided, since real wages are not fixed as is clearly demonstrated by an honest rise in purchasing power. Food is a much smaller portion of income is a trivial way to see the dramatic changes.
Inflation is not underestimated by a factor of 3.5 over that time, as can be checked by nominal prices of a suitable basket of goods, which is the definition of inflation.
Except food is less valuable than it once was thanks to changes in production techniques being able to produce a whole lot more of it for a fraction of the cost.
Ideally, inflation only observes the change in value of the currency. Easier said than done, of course.
> Except food is less valuable than it once was thanks to changes in production techniques being able to produce a whole lot more of it for a fraction of the cost.
There is no "except." This is central to inflation definition and econometrics.
As a result the average budget spends less on this component. Inflation tracks a basket of goods of what people currently buy, then compares that to neighboring adjusted baskets. For example, we don't buy as many horses and buggies any more, so that component of the basket has phased out. Electronics has phased in.
> Ideally, inflation only observes the change in value of the currency.
Not really, since different goods do not always correlate in price, so there is no "value of the currency". There are values of goods priced in a currency, which do not move in lockstep.
Inflation is defined as the general rise in prices, and in this case is precisely measured relative to (several) baskets of goods obtained by statistical sampling of the US population. All the precise methodology, data, sampling methods, etc., are all easily found on the BLS website.
> Inflation tracks a basket of goods of what people currently buy
Exactly. If there was no except, you could just peg inflation to an apple and be done with it. You need the basket exactly to filter out the noise that occurs when the goods in the basket see an independent change in value. Food is unquestionably less valuable today as compared to most of the past, irrespective of the change in value of the currency.
> Not really, since different goods do not always correlate in price
Exactly. That is because everything has its own independent value, including currency, which change over time independently. Let's say you can buy an apple for $1 today. But tomorrow a damaging storm decimated the apple crop. Now it takes $2 to buy an apple. Did the price rise because apples are now more valuable, or because the dollar is less valuable?
Who knows? It is impossible to know. But if you look at the change across many items...
> Inflation is defined as the general rise in prices
Exactly. The general rise in price is the value of the currency declining. It is statistically improbable for all the items in a basket of goods to gain in value at a similar rate all at the same time. As such, you can conclude with near certainty that the rise in price is a result of the decline in value of currency.
As it pertains to the above, if a general rise in price over a given period is 25¢, while apples are up $1 over the same period, then you can reasonably surmise that the storm caused apples to become 75¢ more valuable than the previous state with the other 25¢ being a decline in the value of the currency.
There is no perfect way to measure the change in value of currency, but that's a really good way to do it. Which is why we do it.
I think you're underestimating the technological development in the last 80 years to a comical degree. In 1944, half the country didn't have flush toilets!
Anyone who does serious work with ancient technologies knows both that the older stuff was much more repairable but also needed to be repaired much more often.
Material and building science has advanced a mind boggling tremendous amount - even modern toilets are significantly better than an actual un-upgraded 40’s - if you can find it.
At the same time we can mass manufacture endless cheap plastic shit.
And remember that just a few years before in 1936, there was the Rural Electrification Act to provide rural people in the US (who had basically been living 19th-century style) with electricity, which was standard for town and city dwellers for decades.
Just because something is higher quality does not mean it has higher subjective value. E.g. i still think i come out ahead with cheap clothes and a laptop then someone 100 years ago with higher quality clothes.
A better comparison would be this: would you rather have 3 suits that you wore everyday that cost a months wages, or 30 shirts and pants that cost a weeks wages but are lower quality.
(Also, IMO, houses today are much higher quality than in the past as soon as you account for safety)
The US was much poorer back then. Much lower standard of living. So wages were also much lower even inflation-corrected. Also there was a war going in and people were drafted and had no choice but to work for a minimal salary. I think that explains a lot of it.
The whole country had a mission, and the overwhelming feeling was that the US along with the Allies were in a conflict for survival, that without winning the war the existence of the US would not be possible. On December 6th 1941 public opinion leaned towards isolation from the “European” war. On December 8th 1941 Congress voted unanimously sans 1 vote to declare war against Japan. It is hard to overstate the fervor that immediately swept over the whole country. People are willing to endure the most demanding trials given the proper circumstances; at times the most realistic course of action is to do what once seemed impossible.
It seems obvious to me that authoritarian regimes have much more corruption than democratic ones because in a dictatorship there is no transparency and therefore corruption goes undetected. That means that power and wealth gets concentrated into hands of a small elite. There is less true innovation. What makes things cheaper is the progress of democracy.
>That means that power and wealth gets concentrated into hands of a small elite
It is with some restraint that I note that "democracy" per se does a piss-poor job of preventing this, when Tim Cook's net worth exceeds the yearly GDP of the Seychelles. This is particularly true in a world where capital controls information channels, and therefore public opinion. To really prevent capitalists from capitalizing on their capital to amass ever more capital, you also need a social infrastructure that redistributes wealth away from powerful individuals back to society, so that social issues can be addressed.
That is true, but at least in theory in democracies people can vote for progressive taxation.
I'm not sure if wealth is any better distributed in autocratic countries, think Putin's Russia and its oligarchs.
Democracy is a continuum, any country can evolve into either direction. It's not like this country is democratic and that is not. Countries have more or less of it.
"The only post-Jobs CEO of the second most valuable company in the world has a higher net worth than the 10th smallest country in the world, with less population than Apple has employees".
Yeah, I sure hope that would be true otherwise Apple has some explaining to do.
Or it is but real good project management is overlooked. Sure regulation doesn't help, but if you look at recent big infrastructure or software projects failures it doesn't explain all. When I read about the Apollo project management it seems nowhere near the mediocrity of modern MBA corporate committee management.
But these days, we have established infrastructure, to manage a lot of the things that the Apollo guys needed to construct from whole cloth.
Also, the way that SpaceX does research is highly effective (and inflammable). Failing fast works, as long as we are set up to learn the lessons, and avoid doing things like sticking people on top of unverified tech.
There was an interview, recently with either Ben Nelson, or his predecessor, where they mentioned that NASA (or its directly-managed contractors) would never have been allowed to blow up a whole bunch of boosters, just to finally arrive at a design that normalizes what used to be considered impossible. On the first crash, he would have been hauled up in front of a Senate investigation committee, and forced to explain why it would never happen again.
It is not. The difficulty is that, mainly, we don't know lots of the variables there; and at the time the US was in a race to do it. But the moon is just a regular small planet that is much easier to escape its gravity than earth.
Yeah, I guess the several hundred thousand people involved were just slacking off a lot on government money.
Please don't forget to close such statements with an /s, lest some notorious software "engineers" on HN might be led to actually believe engineering the most powerful vehicle on earth mostly by hand was a negligible task.
They really weren't cheap. The costs were just pushed to the future. It's estimated that it will take between $16.8 billion and $550 billion to clean up the Hanford site. The Santa Susana facility where Apollo rockets were tested is going to cost billions to clean up (there are other things contributing to the cost there).
I’ve heard stories from people who have worked at Hanford, and it seems like a lot of that money is being squandered. Excess caution, basically everything is radioactive waste, and just overall wasteful spending for decades.
“Clean up” is clearly a euphemism for some sort of money funnel.
Hanford.gov even readily admits this!
“In April 2009, the Hanford Site received a nearly $2 billion in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Contractors quickly hired thousands of new employees for temporary stimulus jobs in environmental cleanup.”
When you’re under the gun, bang for buck is crucial. When you have a relatively fat, wealthy and lazy society (compared to WWII and even the post-war 60’s) all the costs go up. Eg you could build roads or railways or ships back then. Now there are 100’s of rules, lobbyists everywhere and everyone wants their cut. Financial incentives matter far more now, since survival has been (temporarily) taken care of.
Manhattan is technically just the R&D component, the full Manhattan is the trillion+ US has spend on building out the nuclear force and 1T+ more it will spend to modernize in next 30 years.
It is noteworthy that Wikipedia gives as cost for the Artemis program a total sum of US$93+ billion (2012–2025).
It is a bit difficult to compare, because NASA shuffles around cost, and the plan is that Artemis will do way more (moon base) than Apollo. But Apollo seems to have been not only a technological marvel, but exceptionally well managed?
Regarding Manhattan project it has this mythical quality (the name alone is cool), but the Russians had the a-bomb only 4 years later and smaller countries (South Africa) are able to achieve it too.
Or did it simply benefit being done in a time where the critical components were less valuable? After all, projects like Apollo reveal to us new uses for materials, people, etc. so they tend to become more valuable afterwards.
Regarding the Manhattan project: you can't compare the cost of research and developing a novel device vs the cost of developing the same device using stolen secrets.
I think the Manhattan project had a lot of consideration towards making it economical. (and huge government programs weren't quite so common back then) Plus, I think things that were returned/recycled weren't counted against the total. e.g. the $600 million worth of silver they borrowed to make calutrons, because there was a copper shortage.
Economy was not really a consideration. The project developed two different bomb designs (plutonium and uranium) in parallel. They tried three different paths to fissile material: gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation for uranium and reactors for plutonium.
The government can switch to being really efficient and less corrupt when it's under the barrel of a gun and needs to fight for survival. See WW2 US or present day Ukraine.
Less so after decades of unchallenged safety and prosperity where it switches to nepotism and rent seeking as the default MO.
Everything about the official inflation calculation is almost totally borked in terms of generating useful information. Like, information that would be useful for someone doing something real, like future historians or Zombie FDR.
There's probably dozens of mechanisms at work to explain "why??!!", but the root cause is - like so many other damn things in America - financialization, from its birth post-1972 with vehicles like EUROBOND, to its "pedal to the metal" moment with all the liquidated commie national assets, to the craptacular commodity runup crisis courtesy of Bush II wrecking the Levant and West Asia. Oh, right, and the financial system ending in 2008. When we seamlessly blended up - legally - private with public risk. Oh yeah. Sixteen years ago.
Anyway, financialization. We don't account for money supply accurately, they're dynamic with price indices now, blabbity blabbity blah blah, 1962 dollars were probably worth waaaayyyyyyyyy more than we think they were.
There is no number of 1962 dollars that could buy you an electric car, HPV vaccine, or Nintendo DS, which means they're worthless if you want to buy those things.
(Since you can't time travel from 1962 to a point where those existed. If you just waited for them, then presumably you've kept them in an interest-bearing account in the meantime, and so the value of the dollar doesn't apply.)
They weren't cheap, money just still had value back then.
What's bizarre is how few people understand how currency has become devalued since its separation from the gold standard, and even more so in the last 5 years. These are the same fools who put their money into "high yield" savings accounts giving them 3% when official inflation is >5%.
A fairer way to look at it is how many years of the average citizens salary is it.
The manhattan project was $2B in 1944, or 121,000 median-family-years of work using salary figures from the 1940 census.
Apples stock buyback was $110B in 2024, or 122,910 median-family-years of work using figures from the 2022 census.
So, the inflation figures under represent the cost by a factor of 3.5 over those 80 years.