What Would We Have To Do To Go Back To 1950s Prices?

Invent a time machine, dummy

Bring back polio!

Put your children through college with the money you'd save.

To bring back 1950's post war prices we'll have to start WWIII. We'll nuke Russia and then have 24 hours of fabulous bargains before the radioactive cloud kills us all.

With 1950s prices, a house would only cost us $8500. Of course, our annual salaries would only be $3500. See, that's the rub. Inflation of prices is only one piece of the puzzle.

"The average income of men reached a new record level in 1955, according to estimates released today by the Bureau of the Census,Department of Commerce. The average (median) income of men was $3,400 in 1955, a gain of about $160 over the previous year. Increased wage rates together with greater regularity of employment in 1955 largely accounted ror this substantial rise.

Among women, the average (median) income in 1955 was $1,100, about the same as it had been in the preceding three years."

(From the 1956 Census report).

$8,500 in 1955 = $94,331.22 in 2022, r5.

I would LOVE to be able to buy a house for that.

I say drop the bomb. You won't believe the price you can command for a cup of uncontaminated water!

You CAN! But you'd have to live in rural west virginia, or some other backwater.

r8 you should make that a "Tasteful Friends" post

Knotty pine is a NO. No matter what they try to rehab as retro cool. That isn't one of them.

Once upon a time you could buy a nice home out of the Sears catalog and have it delivered.

R8, that's a nice house, and if you were a digital worker who didn't mind the ignorance and hatred of your neighbors and the lack of services like basic medical care, it could work.

Things were cheap before WWII. How did we get like this? Everything is so outrageously expensive. Even if the US made all its own shit, wouldn’t workers demand high salaries thus jacking up the prices?