The value of pre-modern currencies.

[jimmy olsen]

Interesting problem. 

Anyone know a better website than http://eh.net/hmit/ or a method to figure out the current value of pre-modern currencies?

Article has links and charts, so just read it over there.
http://www.froginawell.net/japan/2009/01/when-translating-leave-currency-in-the-original-units/

[The Brain]

What is the problem (non-rhetorical)?

[jimmy olsen]

What is the problem (non-rhetorical)?

The difficulty in a layman trying to find out how much a premodern currency is worth in today's currency of choice.

[The Brain]

What is the problem (non-rhetorical)?

The difficulty in a layman trying to find out how much a premodern currency is worth in today's currency of choice.

I tend to avoid explicit numbers like that. They rarely make much sense.

[crazy canuck]

What is the problem (non-rhetorical)?

The difficulty in a layman trying to find out how much a premodern currency is worth in today's currency of choice.

Why would a layman have any need to do such a thing?

[garbon]

I'm confused by the OP and then it including a link that one shouldn't try and "translate" the currency.

[The Minsky Moment]

Weigh the metal, check the spot price.

[CountDeMoney]

Anyone know a better website than http://eh.net/hmit/ or a method to figure out the current value of pre-modern currencies?

I'm sure you can look up the current Polish exchange rate from The Economist.

[Syt]

Isn't it hokey to try to translate ancient coinage into $/€?

I think that working with equivalencies (enough to feed x people for a year or something) work better to give laymen (including me) an idea of pre-modern monetary amounts.

Hell, even if a book says that something in the year bumfuck BC is the equivalent of $10,000,000 . . . would that be 1910, 1950 or 2012 $$?

[Valmy]

I think the best way is to compare an ancient amount of money to what a common ancient Joe would earn in a month or a year.  I remember being pretty struck by the fact that in those societies food was so expensive that if you were a non-wealthy town or city dweller virtually all of our income went to food.  That really hit home why everything came apart everytime food prices went up even a little bit and why any non-essential goods were almost exclusively made for the elites.

[ulmont]

Isn't it hokey to try to translate ancient coinage into $/€?

Yes.  As many economists have noted, ancient income amounts do not translate well.  The ancients typically had absurd amounts of wealth when measured against the amount of personal labor they could afford, but significantly less wealth when measured against machines and devices.  And, of course, there are any number of items they could not buy at any price that we take for granted today.

Ah, found it.  Here's an example, just considering Fitzwilliam Darcy rather than the ancients:

So how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy, anyway? What does ten thousand (pounds) a year in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War mean, really?

I have two answers, the first of which is $300,000 a year, and the second of which is $6,000,000 a year.

Consider it first in relative income terms. Output per capita--annual GDP in America today divided by the number of people in America--is valued at some $36,000. Our crude estimates tell us that output per capita in Britain just after the Napoleonic Wars was valued at some 60 pound sterling a year.

Thus in relative income terms--relative to the average of disposable incomes in his society--Fitzwilliam Darcy's 10,000 pounds a year of disposable income gave him about the same multiple of average income in his society as an annual disposable income of $6,000,000 a year would give someone in our society.

On the other hand, my guess is that someone today with a disposable income of $300,000 a year can spend it to get the same utility as Fitzwilliam Darcy could by spending his disposable income of 10,000 pounds a year. This is a guess--a guess that our material standard of living today is some twenty times that of Mr. Darcy's England.

Nevertheless, it is an informed guess. By our standards, early nineteenth century Britain was desperately poor. There are lots of things we take for granted--and that are for us trivially cheap--that Fitzwilliam Darcy could not get at any price. Consider that Nathan Meyer Rothschild, richest (non-royal) man in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century, died in his fifties of an infected abscess that the medicine of the day had no way to treat.

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/how_rich_is_fit.html

[garbon]

Isn't it hokey to try to translate ancient coinage into $/€?

Yes.  As many economists have noted, ancient income amounts do not translate well.  The ancients typically had absurd amounts of wealth when measured against the amount of personal labor they could afford, but significantly less wealth when measured against machines and devices.  And, of course, there are any number of items they could not buy at any price that we take for granted today.

Ah, found it.  Here's an example, just considering Fitzwilliam Darcy rather than the ancients:

So how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy, anyway? What does ten thousand (pounds) a year in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War mean, really?

I have two answers, the first of which is $300,000 a year, and the second of which is $6,000,000 a year.

Consider it first in relative income terms. Output per capita--annual GDP in America today divided by the number of people in America--is valued at some $36,000. Our crude estimates tell us that output per capita in Britain just after the Napoleonic Wars was valued at some 60 pound sterling a year.

Thus in relative income terms--relative to the average of disposable incomes in his society--Fitzwilliam Darcy's 10,000 pounds a year of disposable income gave him about the same multiple of average income in his society as an annual disposable income of $6,000,000 a year would give someone in our society.

On the other hand, my guess is that someone today with a disposable income of $300,000 a year can spend it to get the same utility as Fitzwilliam Darcy could by spending his disposable income of 10,000 pounds a year. This is a guess--a guess that our material standard of living today is some twenty times that of Mr. Darcy's England.

Nevertheless, it is an informed guess. By our standards, early nineteenth century Britain was desperately poor. There are lots of things we take for granted--and that are for us trivially cheap--that Fitzwilliam Darcy could not get at any price. Consider that Nathan Meyer Rothschild, richest (non-royal) man in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century, died in his fifties of an infected abscess that the medicine of the day had no way to treat.

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/how_rich_is_fit.html

I'm not really sure why it matters to take into account objects that didn't exist at the time as part of the equation.  After all, saying that Darcy had the equivalent of 6mil today shouldn't really suggest that he'd have all those things that hadn't been invented/discovered yet.

[ulmont]

I'm not really sure why it matters to take into account objects that didn't exist at the time as part of the equation.  After all, saying that Darcy had the equivalent of 6mil today shouldn't really suggest that he'd have all those things that hadn't been invented/discovered yet.

The more interesting point is that you come up with 6mil or 300k depending on whether you look at share of GDP or amount needed to spend to get equivalent items today, which is such a large slop factor that it makes the analysis little more than a guess.

[garbon]

I'm not really sure why it matters to take into account objects that didn't exist at the time as part of the equation.  After all, saying that Darcy had the equivalent of 6mil today shouldn't really suggest that he'd have all those things that hadn't been invented/discovered yet.

The more interesting point is that you come up with 6mil or 300k depending on whether you look at share of GDP or amount needed to spend to get equivalent items today, which is such a large slop factor that it makes the analysis little more than a guess.

Except that amount needed to spend to get equivalent utility today is sort of a crock given that standards of living have changed (and again in many ways because of items that had not been invented or discovered yet.  I don't think anyone goes into this thinking - oh that means Darcy could by X if we he was a live today but simply an attempt to understand what 10,000 pounds a year means as far as relative income.

[Valmy]

Sort of like people claiming Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the richest men in all history.

Granted Warren Buffet does not have his own army.