Money, it's a gas

Nothing like a Pink Floyd reference to date me. Anyhoo, I had an interesting exchange on the GSN board about inflation and a very long-lived game show...

Other poster: Try this: Watch Jeopardy! on any given night in your local market. Write down the final score of the day's winner, then divide it by 20. That's roughly what he or she would have taken home back in the '60s and '70s. As you can see, it was a different era.

Well, it's not quite that bad. The BLS inflation calculator estimates that you would have to divide by about 7.5 to get the same dollars as in 1964, the year Jeopardy debuted. The online calculators do put things into perspective, though. Kind of weird to think that a $750 payout on Cash Cab was only $100 in 1960s money.

Other poster: Well, the values on today's Jeopardy! board are twenty times what they were in 1964, which is where I got that figure from. Ideally, you should calculate the value down to what it would have been using the '60s board values, then plug that number into an inflation calculator.

What that means is that Jeopardy has actually stayed well ahead of inflation. Each answer (or question) in 2012 is worth about three times, in real terms, what it was worth in 1964 (20 divided by 7.5). So I guess if you divide by three - or 2.7 to be persnickety - you would get about what the same answer in 1964 would have been worth, in real purchasing value.

Economics is such fun.

UPDATE: By the way, I switched around the blog's appearance a bit. No real reason. Just got tired of the old format. The predominant color is still a soothing blue.