Who wants to be a Millionaire
Yesterday, Lisa and I listened to songs from the 30's on XM Radio's It: the History of Pop program. As was often the case during the Great Depression, one of of the songs talked about being a millionaire. Lisa mused about what it meant to be a millionaire in 1931 compared to today.
Well, turns out you can get a fairly easy answer to that question. Wikipedia's entry on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) includes a graph of prices and inflation for the period from 1914 – 2006 (click the "Continue reading" link below to see the graph).
So what's the answer? As you can see from the graph below, the CPI was around 13 in 1931 and today is just above 200. That's a factor of 15 increase. Thus, a millionaire in the early 30's would be about a 15-millionaire today.
Comments
I'm glad you figured this out, Don. People still speak of being a millionaire as having an enormous amount of money, but we really ought to be talking about 15-millionaires as having a lot of money!
Posted by: Lisa Roberts | October 19, 2007 10:58 AM