Which Christmas would you prefer? The one from the good ol' days of 1964 or the Malthusian days of 2010?..The choice is easy for me.

Ahhh...the good ol' days of the 1960's!! Ummm, not so much.  I think we suffer from a collective case of "good old day" syndrome.  You tell me, would you rather have the Christmas of 1964 or 2010? (HT: Carpe Diem)



Carpe Diem

 I remember my "rich" friends getting a T.V. like either one of these! The small white boxes on the picture show the equivalent of $749 and $799 in 1964 to today's dollars--$$5,300 and $5,650, respectively.  In other words, factoring in inflation, the purchasing power of $749 in 1964 is equivalent to the purchasing power of $5,300 today. Another way of looking at it, is that 1964 TV would cost you $5,300! Yikes! The true test of the value of money is what it can buy. Below are some examples of bundles of goods you could buy today with the equivalent of 1964 dollars.  I can buy ALL these today AND a better TV to boot,  than I could in 1964!:

Carpe Diem

AND



Carpe Diem





The ONLY reason I would choose 1964 is because I would only be 4 years old...Other than that, well...Perhaps THESE are the good ol' days!

Source CARPE DIEM:

""Bottom Line: For a consumer or household spending $750 in 1964, all they would have been able to afford was a console color TV from the Sears Christmas catalog. A consumer or household spending that same amount of inflation-adjusted dollars today ($5,300) would be able buy able to furnish their entire kitchen with 8 brand-new appliances (refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher, range, washer, dryer, microwave and blender) and buy 9 state-of-the-art electronic items (laptop, GPS, camera, home theater, plasma HDTV, iPod Touch, Blu-ray player, 300-CD changer and a Tivo recorder). And of course, even a billionaire in 1964 wouldn't have been able to purchase many of the items that even a teenager can afford today, e.g. laptop, GPS, digital camera.

As much as we might complain about high unemployment, high taxes, a huge deficit, we have a lot to be thankful for, and we've made a lot of economic progress since the 1960s as the example above illustrates, thanks to the "magic of the marketplace."""