USD Purchasing Power in Real Time Since 2000

spprashant

You know what, it's not as bad as I was thinking.

drbig

As much as the notion of "Purchasing Power" is <macro>economic, thus perhaps having a greater chance of being related to reality, I've been wondering if - and how - could these long-term measures account for greater diversity and "scale" of "things money can buy". Nowadays if you're properly rich you can buy a seat on a sub-orbital flight. This wasn't an option in '00, no matter how rich you were. On the other end of the scale, for basic things a (really) good quality loaf of bread will always be cheaper in Poland than say up north from Oslo, Norway; whereas a USA-designed made-in-China laptop pretty much never did scale with the rest of the "CPI basket"... Point being: we sure do have numbers - what they really mean in practice is vague at best.

blindriver

What is the calculation? And how can you calculate it 10 decimal points?

nrclark

This isn't very surprising. Typical US economic policy aims for 2-3% annual inflation. That counter shows an average 2.6% inflation across 26 years, which is kind of right in the range we'd expect. It's debatable whether this is good longterm policy - but it's been the norm in the US for decades.

Aurornis

$1 put into the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested would be more than $6 today. That more than offsets the inflation. It also gives some clues about why the raw dollar purchasing power has been lost to inflation. Don’t keep your retirement savings all in cash.

traviswingo

Hey all. This was merely intended as a fun visualization of inflation over long periods of time, in a format that’s slightly easier to grok for most people. That’s it. There’s no further intention behind this, I just thought a real time “decay” visualization would be neat. Literally everything about how this works is in the source in maybe 30 lines of js. It’s not complicated. Data is from BLS (whether or not that's accurate is another conversation entirely). I auto update the data monthly via a chron job, right around the time new data is published. I’m not really changing this from where it’s at. It’s done as is. There are other sources out there already if you want to customize the date range or see a graph. Thanks for checking it out :).

0xbadcafebee

The real time number isn't as interesting as the potential future number. If the dollar stops being the reserve currency, the purchasing power of the dollar will crash. No more cheap borrowing, no more low interest rates, hello constant high inflation. The Iran war has made that increasingly likely to happen. It may even have been intentional. https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/currencies... | https://spectator.com/article/the-us-currency-is-under-attac...

drnick1

The author just discovered the meaning of inflation? What matters (for living standards) is that real wages and GDP grew over the same period.

xnx

At best, this is a strong warning not to keep your money in the mattress. Saved in any safe investment would beat this inflation and typical wage would also beat this.

grebc

The way the figure is presented is usually opposite to how most talk about value of past monies.

sanex

I question the accuracy. In 2010 I could buy a McDonald's double cheeseburger for $1. Now they're like $3 and they took off a slice of cheese.

engineer_22

If each digit right of the cents place was 1/2 as tall as the digit to its left, I could process it more intuitively. A change of one hundred millionth of a percent is not enough to consider even if I have 10 million dollars. How is this calculated? It's a rate based on historical purchasing power parity index trends, or it's tied to live market data?