I heard Fr. Robert Sirico say once that most of us now carry more technology in our pockets than it took to put a man on the moon in 1969. If you remember that, you’ll also remember when a radio was a substantial piece of furniture and having a color television made you a very popular kid in the neighborhood.
In the 1964 Sears Christmas catalog (if you don’t know what that is, ask your mother. Or your grandmother.), you could get a really swanky television console for $750. For that price today, you can head to your favorite electronics store and pick up six 24-inch flat screen televisions – one for every room in the house. AEI’s Mark J. Perry has a little fun comparing the Christmas of 1964 to 2014’s holiday, at least in terms in what the average family can get for their money. He adjusts for inflation for those console tvs:
The original prices are listed ($750 for the Sears Silvertone entertainment center and $800 for the more expensive one), and those prices are also shown converted to today’s 2014 dollars using the BLS Inflation Calculator: $5,700 for the basic 21-inch color TV model and $6,100 for the more expensive model.
Perry then takes that $5,700 and goes shopping today: appliances, a game console, television, smart phone, a nifty camera and a few other items. He says:
As much as we might complain about a slow economic recovery, the decline of the middle class, stagnant median household income, rising income inequality and a dysfunctional Congress, we have a lot to be thankful for, and we’ve made a lot of economic progress in the last 50 years as the example above illustrates, thanks to the “magic and miracle of the marketplace.”
Even for a Grinch, that makes for a pretty good Christmas, economically-speaking.
Read “The magic and miracle of the marketplace: Christmas 1964 vs. 2014 – there’s no comparison” at AEI.
