In 1915 a ticket to "Birth of a Nation" cost $2.00. How much is that in 2010 dollars?

looney_tunes

Comparing money amounts at different times is tricky. One technique is to compare wages or cost of consumer staples, and see by how much they have changed. But it isn't very reliable without a whole lot of statistics to analyse, so this attempt is really quite superficial! http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alan/family/N-Money.html#Mitchell According to this link, an agricultural laborer in California could have expected to earn about $35 a month. This makes a $2 ticket equal to about 6% of a month's wages. http://quarriesandbeyond.org/states/ca/stone_industry/ca-stone_indus_c1915.html This site only refers to 2005 values, and doesn't include agricultural laborers. But a bus driver earned $1594 a month on average. http://www.worldsalaries.org/usa.shtml For a movie ticket to be roughly the same percentage of monthly earnings, it would be about $91. I have been unable to locate more recent figures to give 2010 value. May 26 10, 8:08 PM

serpa

Thanks, looney-tunes. I was searching and found an inflation calculator. It came up with $43:17. I should have looked more before I posted. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl May 27 10, 8:30 PM