An online inflation calculator declares that a dollar in George Washington’s pocket was equivalent to $34 today. That’s nonsense. The value of money can’t be converted between different historical eras.
The same is true of moral standards. They’re meaningful only within the cultural context of their period.
I’ll discuss the money comparison first, because it’s not so touchy.
The value of money is measured by the goods and services it can buy. The consumer price index, the most common standard, tracks the changing cost of a defined basket of common purchases. After 5 percent inflation, you need 5 percent more money to buy what’s in the basket.
This measure works well over a decade, because the contents of the basket remain mostly the same during that time. Over 50 years it works as an approximation. At 100 years, it’s doubtful. At 200, it’s absurd. Over that time, almost everything in the basket has changed.
The first president couldn’t have imagined most of the goods we buy today. Nor can we imagine buying some of the things in his economy: human beings, for example.
New technology can change the meaning of money, not only its value. So can the relative wealth of the people exchanging goods, the total wealth in the world, and unequal social or political power.
The people of the past didn’t think as we do. Try listening to a comedy routine from 75 or 100 years ago. You can hear audiences howling with laughter at stuff that’s simply not funny anymore.
Many of our judgments about right and wrong similarly change through time. I’m speaking of normative judgments: statements about how things should be, not how they are. (Facts do stay the same through time, and perhaps some core morality is universal and eternal—not my topic today.)
That is not to say we cannot legitimately judge the value of money or the ethics of past historic times. But doing so demands we work within the context of that period.
Consider slavery, or the theft of Indigenous lands. Wrong now, and wrong centuries ago. In 1608, the important Dutch jurist Grotius asserted the injustice of taking Indigenous lands. George Washington certainly knew slavery was wrong.
(But go back in time far enough, and you can find a time when societies in many cultural traditions—East, West, and Indigenous—accepted slavery as a normal order of life. Conquest, too.)
Understanding the financial or moral values of the past takes more work than using an inflation calculator or applying today’s social norms. And that work is good. It forces us to think critically of our own time.
The people of the future will judge us, too. Social norms will change and our flaws will become obvious.
Studying history can give us clearer eyes about the present. It can help us assess if our current social norms are correct—we must constantly question them.
Think of our descendants, looking back from the future, incredulous we paid only $34 for a main course or that we carelessly spewed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
If you enjoy my newsletter, please share it.