[apologies to Ray, who gets this twice]
On 18/10/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
There are certainly any number of government publications (and presumably websites) from around the world that give a wide range of economic indexes for inflation, employment, population, interest, GDP, etc. The application of these national indexes to specific locations would produce totally unreliable results. If no ships were bringing coffee to Alaska in 1865 it's value there may have been considerably higher than elsewhere, and those inhabitants may have needed to be satisfied with a bitter blend of chicory.
Mmm-mm, chicory.
My point was not so much local economics as changes in scale - depending on what measurement you use, the $7.2m paid to buy Alaska in 1867 could be anything from just shy of ninety million (the value quoted in [[Alaska purchase]], which I suspect is nonsensical) to very nearly ten billion. I'm not an economist, so I can't tell you what is more reasonable - but encouraging the use of "worth $x in modern money" is going to be meaningless a lot of the time, especially if we have it generated automatically.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk