[benched]

Inflation is very powerful. I always feel like people don't think about it in enough detail. For example, the year that your dollars were worth twice what they are now? That would be the long-ago time of ... 1988. Did you learn your general sense for how much "20 dollars" is in the '80s? Doesn't "40 dollars" just sound like more, somehow? I wonder how many people mentally account for just how elastic nominal amounts are.

[billforsternz]

Don't forget though that not all goods are affected the same way. I remember working on a project in the early 1980s. We decided that the future was non-volatile solid state memory and that Intel's new "bubble memory" looked pretty sweet. From memory it cost something like $NZ1000 for 100Kbytes, yes that is K for Kilo, of solid state, non volatile memory. Today a 16Gbyte flash drive costs around $NZ10 retail. So in round terms today we get something like 100,000 times the bang for one hundredth of the buck. And of course the modern product is hugely preferable in terms of speed, size, weight, robustness, power consumption and any other metric you can name. Obviously tech is a standout field, but there are others, air travel for example.

[aidenn0]

I know, and you rarely see a $50 (in fact many places will refuse to take notes larger than $20) despite the fact that $20 notes were common in the 80s and a $50 is similarly valued now.

[chad_oliver]

To be fair, credit cards* are much more common now than they were in the 80s. Cash is mostly a back-up medium.

* or Eftpos cards, if you're in Australia or New Zealand.

[aidenn0]

Naturally. My grandfater did business meetings in NYC, and a lot of restaurants even didn't take charge cards (credit cards weren't even a blip on the radar). He would probably bring a few thousand dollars in cash with him on those trips.

I can't imagine carrying that much cash, even before the bump for inflation!