Guess the Price Guess It
Which Cost More? Eight Price Comparisons From the Past
Not exact prices, which nobody remembers reliably, but the comparisons: which of two things cost more at the time, and what that says about the period.
Guessing historic prices is mostly a waste of time, because the numbers are meaningless without knowing what people earned. A figure from 1955 tells you nothing on its own.
Comparisons are much more informative. Asking which of two things cost more, at the same moment, in the same place, strips out inflation entirely and leaves the thing that actually matters: what was scarce, and what was cheap.
Have a go at these eight before opening the answers.
The comparisons
One. In the mid-1950s: a television set, or three months of an average wage?
Two. In 1960: a long-haul flight, or several weeks of an average wage?
Three. In 1930, before mass-market paperbacks: a new novel, or a good meal out?
Four. In a typical nineteenth-century working household: meat, or rent?
Five. In 1975: a ten-minute international phone call, or a decent restaurant meal?
Six. In 1950: a new winter coat, or a week’s groceries?
Seven. In 1750: sugar, or the same weight of flour?
Eight. Across the whole period: manufactured goods, or an hour of skilled human labour?
What the pattern shows
Work through them and one trend dominates everything else.
Things made by machines have become dramatically cheaper relative to income. Clothing, electronics, furniture, household goods, food and travel have all fallen, some of them by an order of magnitude in real terms.
Things that require human time have gone the other way. Repairs, alterations, childcare, trades, hospitality and personal services have become relatively more expensive, because the person doing them now has far better alternative uses for their hours.
That single reversal explains an enormous amount about how households changed over the twentieth century: why repair stopped, why clothing became disposable, why appliances replaced domestic staff, and why the things that feel expensive today are mostly the things that involve somebody’s time.
Open the answers below for all eight.
Reveal what it is
Answer 1. Television · 2. Air travel · 3. Books · 4. Meat · 5. Long-distance calls · 6. Clothing · 7. Sugar · 8. Labour
1. In the mid-1950s a television set represented a very large share of an average annual income in most countries — comparable to a serious vehicle purchase — which is why so many households rented rather than bought. 2. Air travel was extraordinarily expensive relative to income until deregulation and jet efficiency changed the economics from the 1970s onwards. 3. Before mass-market paperbacks, books were a substantial purchase; the paperback revolution from the 1930s onwards is one of the biggest price collapses in publishing history. 4. Meat was the expensive part of a household food budget for most of history, which is why traditional cooking uses so little of it and wastes none. 5. Long-distance telephone calls were charged by distance and by the minute, with international calls expensive enough to be rationed by the clock in most households. 6. Clothing consumed a far larger share of household spending before containerised shipping and offshore manufacturing; garments were repaired, altered and handed down because replacing them was genuinely costly. 7. Sugar was a luxury commodity for centuries before industrial refining and beet production made it cheap; its price history is tied closely to colonial trade. 8. Labour is the reverse case and the key to the whole list: relative to manufactured goods, human time has become dramatically more expensive, which is why repair has largely stopped making economic sense.
Editor's note: These are comparisons rather than exact figures. Historic prices vary enormously by country, region and year, and any single number quoted without a source and a date should be treated with suspicion.
Where this came from
- Historic price and wage series — Office for National Statistics
- Consumer expenditure and living costs research — Bank of England
- Economic history reference — Encyclopaedia Britannica
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