As a kid, I knew about inflation in a general sense, as something the adults talked about (and this being the late ’70s and early ‘80s, there were a lot of these conversations). And I got that prices tended to go up over time. Once I had an allowance, I saw that my DC Comics increased in price from $.50 to $.60 to $.75.
But while I noticed this, it was a small enough increment over time to not really sink in, even as it can be fascinating to look at in hindsight.
But then I was reading a Hardy Boys book. For those not familiar with American kid’s books, the Hardy Boys is a classic series of young detective novels dating back to the late 1920s. I couldn’t tell you which book I was reading, but it was probably one from the ‘40s or ‘50s, and the Hardys had gone to New York and stopped at a coffee shop to eat. They got some standard fare — sandwiches or burgers or somesuch, along with sodas and dessert — and when they went to pay, the entire meal cost less than a dollar!
(I can’t remember if that was for each brother’s meal, or the combined cost of two meals — it’s been forty years.)
Even then, I’d eaten at enough local diners to know that was ludicrously cheap. Even the cheapest places would run you $3-5 for a sandwich, and the soda and dessert would be another $.75-$1 minimum (each).
That was when I really understood that the value of the dollar (and all fiat, though I was a long way from knowing that term) dropped a lot over time. I could have eaten lunch out nearly every day on just the change in my piggy bank if I'd found myself transported back 25 years.
Obviously, it took a while to really understand more about the economy (not even counting how many times I learned more about it and had to adjust what I knew), but this was my first real moment of realization.
Wonder if other folks had similar epiphanies, or if it was more of a gradual thing.
(Chart at the top from John Jackson Miller’s column here.)