The Rod Martin Report

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The Rod Martin Report
The Rod Martin Report
The Average American Today Is Richer Than John D. Rockefeller
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The Average American Today Is Richer Than John D. Rockefeller

Incalculably richer, in fact.

Guest Author
Mar 03, 2016
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The Rod Martin Report
The Rod Martin Report
The Average American Today Is Richer Than John D. Rockefeller
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Life 100 years ago, in 1915.

by Donald J. Boudreaux
March 3, 2016

This Atlantic story reveals how Americans lived 100 years ago. By the standards of a middle-class American today, that lifestyle was poor, inconvenient, dreary, and dangerous. (Only a few years later — in 1924 — the 16-year-old son of a sitting US president would die of an infected blister that the boy got on his toe while playing tennis on the White House grounds.)

So here’s a question that I’ve asked in one form or another on earlier occasions, but that is so probing that I ask it again: What is the minimum amount of money that you would demand in exchange for your going back to live even as John D. Rockefeller lived in 1916?

$21.7 million 2016 dollars (which are about one million 1916 dollars)? Would that do it? What about a billion 2016 — or 1916 — dollars? Would this sizable sum of dollars be enough to enable you to purchase a quantity of high-quality 1916 goods and services that would at least make you indifferent betw…

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