Inflation has become an incessant topic of conversation. It's difficult to miss in our daily lives, whether we're staring at a grocery bill, calculating housing costs, or noticing the rising price of simple essentials.

In the opening notes to my books, I generally talk about the value of the dollar, then and now, to give readers context since a price mentioned in a story can feel abstract until we have some sense of what that amount might mean in today’s money. That comparison is useful in the writing process, too. Research helps me to better understand the everyday choices behind the figures, in terms of what people could afford, what felt costly then, and how economics might have influenced their lives as well as their purchasing power.

Around 1900, near the end of the Gilded Age, a dollar had far more purchasing power than it does today. Typical online historical price index estimates show that $1 in 1900 is roughly equivalent to $34 in 2026. Such numbers, however, are generally based on the Consumer Price Index (first issued in 1913, when inflation was kind of a new thing). Now the CPI is, I hate to say, a number cooked up by the government to keep us all quiet. (Remember, the number for the past several years has been between 1.5% and 3.5%, which if you actually live in the real world you know is patently bullshit.)

And unlike corporations, whose executives are routinely thrown into the pokey for cooking the books, the government routinely revises their ‘official’ numbers up or down, often months or years after people have made investment or purchase decisions based on the original figures. This explains why so many government economists and bureaucrats are behind bars—oh wait, they’re not.

Moving on. For reasons too numerous and complex to go into here, I think 34:1 is far too low. For the past few years, I have been saying $50 as a better number (something that cost a dollar in 1900 would cost $50 today), but lately in doing yet more research I have come to the conclusion that this is still too low. I will be revising it upward in future, so stay tuned. For those of you with an economic bent, you may find my logic interesting (maybe even compelling).

I used to be an investment and financial advisor and hold a government license as such, so I’m not just twiddling my thumbs here.

So what happened to the dollar?

In the Gilded Age, the United States was on the gold standard (meaning that the dollar was ‘fixed’ or tied to the price of physical gold). As a result, inflation wasn’t really A Thing; prices didn’t rise or fall much since the price of gold per ounce was fixed at $20.67-20.69 the whole time from 1834-1933. Today gold is selling for north of $4,000 an ounce, so that’s two hundred times its value in 1900.

Thus one could even make the argument that one dollar in 1900 would be worth $200 today, but of course it’s more complicated than that across different classes of goods or services. Anyway, more to come—for now, suffice it to say that our government’s intentional devaluation of our currency (especially in the past few decades, as deficit spending has become the norm) has eroded the purchasing power of the dollar at a rate that is, or should be, a cause for greater alarm than the mild outrage one hears about the price of gasoline or eggs. And it is most definitively our own government that has done it to us, folks; that’s a fact. ‘Inflation,’ or rising prices, is simply a euphemism for what it really is: the gradual devaluation of the dollar.

But again, those reassuring 2% and 3.5% CPI numbers keep most of the population quiescent and off the barricades. Except, of course, in France.

This stuff is important to me because I want my readers to step into a past economic world that reflects the reality of then and now. By including these details in my writing, I hope to bridge the gap between two centuries, transforming a dry number on a page into an understandable experience that feels authentic and tangible to readers.