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I have a question that pertains to my next Cato Essay.

During his visit to America in 1882, Herbert Spencer turned down a lecture tour that would have paid 300 pounds per lecture. (Spencer used British pounds to relate the amount, even though the lectures were to be given in the U.S.)

Can anyone tell me -- roughly -- what 300 pounds in 1882 would amount to today, in U.S. dollars?

Precision may be impossible here, but I would like to be somewhat more precise than using the phrase "shitload of money."

Ghs

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I have a question that pertains to my next Cato Essay.

During his visit to America in 1882, Herbert Spencer turned down a lecture tour that would have paid 300 pounds per lecture. (Spencer used British pounds to relate the amount, even though the lectures were to be given in the U.S.)

Can anyone tell me -- roughly -- what 300 pounds in 1882 would amount to today, in U.S. dollars?

Precision may be impossible here, but I would like to be somewhat more precise than using the phrase "shitload of money."

Ghs

£14,493.00 now you have to convert this to today's US dollars - this is value as of 2005

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/default0.asp#mid

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To present day value of about $250,000 working off Adam's figure. (There has been inflation since 2005 so I padded it a little.) Today's dollar is worth about 2 cents the 1913 dollar. Only some U.S. ex-Presidents might pull in that in talks today. Back then those kind of lectures were much more popular.

--Brant

1 pound = 1.55 bucks

about 1900 J.P. Morgan negotiated the sale of Carnegie Steel with Andrew Carnegie on a ship to Europe. The price was almost half a billion. Almost half of that ended up in Carnegie's pocket. J.P. was willing to cough up another fifty million. Carnegie's company was combined with two other steel companies to form U.S. Steel in 1901 with a capitalization of 1.4 billion. It was the world's first billion-dollar company. That would be about 70 billion of today's dollars, BUT that was a huge percentage of the economy back then. 70 billion today is next to nothing comparatively.

--Brant

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To present day value of about $250,000 working off Adam's figure. (There has been inflation since 2005 so I padded it a little.) Today's dollar is worth about 2 cents the 1913 dollar.

--Brant

pound = 1.55 bucks

about 1900 J.P. Morgan negotiated the sale of Carnegie Steel with Andrew Carnegie on a ship to Europe. The price was almost half a billion. Almost half of that ended up in Carnegie's pocket. J.P. was willing to cough up another fifty million. Carnegie's company was combined with two other steel companies to form U.S. Steel in 1901 with a capitalization of 1.4 billion. It was the world's first billion dollar company. That would be about 70 billion of today's dollars, BUT that was a huge percentage of the economy back then. 70 billion today is next to nothing comparatively.

--Brant

That can't right, can it?

I used some conversation tables on Wiki (from 1880 pounds to 1880 dollars, and then 1880 dollars to 2010 dollars -- and I came up with a guesstimate of around $15,000 in 2010 dollars (somewhat less, actually)..

This amount sounds reasonable, though I am admittedly not very handy in such matters. But the equivalent of a quarter-million dollars per lecture sounds way too high to me.

Ghs

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If we assume Adam was one decimal point off then we'd get 25,000 using my methodology. Makes a lot more sense than 250,000. If we assume no inflation to 1913 and that 300 1913 pounds can be multiplied by 50 like the dollar then we get 15,000. However, the pound seems to have suffered more inflation than the buck in the last 100 years and I stand by my 25,000 which I agree makes sense compared to ten times that.

--Brant

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1.55 times 14,493 would be $ 22, 464.15 in 2005 dollars - then

so what is $22, 464.15 from 2005 worth in 2012

Brant:

our posts crossed - the decimal point was after the "three" in my post...making your and my calculations correct.

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1.55 times 14,493 would be $ 22, 464.15 in 2005 dollars - then

so what is $22, 464.15 from 2005 worth in 2012

Brant:

our posts crossed - the decimal point was after the "three" in my post...making your and my calculations correct.

Opps! I screwed up when I came to the plate for the first time. I'd add a few thou more for inflation since 2005 = 25 gs.

--Brant

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When Rand was on the lecture circuit ca. 50 years ago she was getting (I heard) $2500. According to westegg this works out to 17819.02 in 2010.

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When Rand was on the lecture circuit ca. 50 years ago she was getting (I heard) $2500. According to westegg this works out to 17819.02 in 2010.

It's much worse than that for the government has changed the way the CPI is calculated causing understatement of actual inflation recently.

--Brant

keeps Social Security "solvent"

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So this means Spencer was worth 300 x 1/.2 = $1,500 in the coin of 1882, 6 times more than Oscar Wilde. How many asses did they need to pack in the seats, and how much a head did they have to charge to break even? There wouldn’t have been electric amplification then, so lung power would have been an issue, though no worse than for a priest in a cathedral, or at a revival meeting I suppose.

BTW Mark Twain used to supplement his income with lectures, particularly late in life after his investments had all gone south.

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Convert 1880 pounds into 1880 dollars here:

http://en.wikipedia....d_States_dollar

So this means Spencer was worth 300 x 1/.2 = $1,500 in the coin of 1882, 6 times more than Oscar Wilde. How many asses did they need to pack in the seats, and how much a head did they have to charge to break even? There wouldn't have been electric amplification then, so lung power would have been an issue, though no worse than for a priest in a cathedral, or at a revival meeting I suppose.

It's possible that Andrew Carnegie was behind the offer to Spencer and that the lecture tour was never intended to be a profit-making enterprise. (This is just a guess, however.) Carnegie admired Spencer; he even called him "my teacher" in his autobiography.

Spencer met Carnegie in 1882, during his visit to America. They traveled from Cleveland to Pittsburg together, because Carnegie wanted to take Spencer on a tour of his steel works.

Carnegie described Spencer as "the great calm philosopher brooding. Buddha-like, over all things, unmoved." Carnegie was therefore surprised and amused by an incident when they were having dinner. When Spencer was brought the wrong kind of cheese, he said to the waiter: "Cheddar, Cheddar, not Cheshire; I said Cheddar." Carnegie remarked: "There was a roar in which none joined more heartily than the sage himself....Spencer liked stories and was a good laugher."

Years later, in 1891, Carnegie gave Spencer a grand piano for a gift.

Ghs

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Carnegie described Spencer as "the great calm philosopher brooding. Buddha-like, over all things, unmoved." Carnegie was therefore surprised and amused by an incident when they were having dinner. When Spencer was brought the wrong kind of cheese, he said to the waiter: "Cheddar, Cheddar, not Cheshire; I said Cheddar." Carnegie remarked: "There was a roar in which none joined more heartily than the sage himself....Spencer liked stories and was a good laugher."

Ghs

I should modify this account.

It's not that Carnegie described Spencer as "Buddha-like," etc. Rather, he imagined Spencer would be like this. But as Carnegie traveled with Spencer aboard the Servia in 1882, on the voyage from Liverpool to NY, he learned that Spencer was not at all like he had imagined. Rather, Spencer was sociable and even jovial, reacting with "explosive laughter" to some of Carnegie's stories.

For Carnegie's remarks and his version of the cheese story, see:

http://books.google.com/books?id=RekoAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA333&ots=aYO-f-y4VU&dq=herbert%20specner%20carnegie%20cheese&pg=PA333#v=onepage&q=herbert%20specner%20carnegie%20cheese&f=false

Ghs

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It might help to try finding out how much a good steak dinner cost in NY in 1882, or how much a tailored suit cost, or an ounce of gold. Nowadays a theater ticket costs what, about double the price of a steak dinner in NY? So, take that, try to estimate how many people can hear an unamplified lecture…ah forget it, there’s too many variables to estimate.

Another thing, note that Oscar Wilde was at the beginning of his career, and his trip was sponsored by Gilbert and Sullivan, who thought he’d help promote their new show Patience. It makes sense that he’d command a smaller fee than Spencer.

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It might help to try finding out how much a good steak dinner cost in NY in 1882, or how much a tailored suit cost, or an ounce of gold. Nowadays a theater ticket costs what, about double the price of a steak dinner in NY? So, take that, try to estimate how many people can hear an unamplified lecture…ah forget it, there's too many variables to estimate.

Another thing, note that Oscar Wilde was at the beginning of his career, and his trip was sponsored by Gilbert and Sullivan, who thought he'd help promote their new show Patience. It makes sense that he'd command a smaller fee than Spencer.

The basic scuttlebutt is that one (Troy) ounce of gold buys a good men's suit over the decades and centuries. That makes sense in that it's a great deal of labor. That'd be $1600 today. You cannot, however, use the years the price of gold was held down in the United States starting in the second Roosevelt administration. This means what cost $20 in 1913 when the Federal Reserve got up and running might cost $1000 today assuming 98% devaluation of the almighty buck. The implication is gold is now over-valued by $600. Don't bet on that because of the gross increase in world population, wealth and economic activity and a world awash in fiat currencies.

The historical gold/silver "standard" ratio of 16-1 is now 53-1 meaning $30/ounce of silver might go to $100 just to re-match up to the old ratio with gold price static. But silver has tremendous volatility and $30 can turn into $20 in sort of a brink of the eye then shoot up to $200 if gold itself shoots up to say $2500 after going down to, say, $1200 for whatever reason. Gold and silver are disaster insurance. A way to maintain wealth. You buy the physical, put it in a secure place and forget about it. As insurance only it makes no sense to use more than 5-10% of investable wealth for that purpose. More is speculation, another word for gambling if you don't really understand what is going on and what you are doing. There's a day coming, I think, when there will be virtually a world-wide confiscation of gold through coordinated central bank action involving the European Union, The U.S., the U.K., Japan and China with India being the wild card as Indians are so deep into gold ownership confiscation would topple the government if it seriously hit the jewelry market.

--Brant

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According to this:

http://collections.m...i01p038-048.pdf

Oscar Wilde's fee was $250 and admission cost $.75 per person during his American lecture tour, also in 1882.

I read a little more about this in Spencer's Autobiography. He said that a "lecture bureau" offered him $250 per lecture. This is the same amount you mentioned for Twain. The amount of 300 pounds appears to have been a special offer by someone else, after Spencer declined the first offer.

Ghs

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