I think the big mac index is far more accurate gauge of inflation than the B(L)S numbers published by the government.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/apr/how-big-m...

You should extend it into the past. Hapenny hit hard.

You're doing a public service, thank you.

It would be even funnier with exceedingly long fractionals.

EG, 109.453452 cent or 109 113363/250000 or some such.

It would be fun to have currency conversions too.

This is a powerful visual representation. I would suggest that the impact could be even stronger if you provided side-by-side images of 50 Cent, where the second is scaled up proportionately.

Love it. I think there's an off-by-one calculating the images at the top. (100-cent gives a single pixel slice of the third image.)

This is brilliant

Curious how you set it up. Do you have to manually update it when inflation data comes out, or is it automatic?

Where is the inflated music?

Using the first 35,000 words is a bit unfair for a rapper such as Lil Wayne who's been releasing work since he was 14.

Also I wonder if this is including proper nouns and other references. (I'd think it should, but it's hard to account for the fact that referencing seven different Chris's would be counted as one token used seven times. Similarly, many words have many meanings, and those are all being lumped together as well, so no accounting here can probably ever be perfect).

If you had all the lyrics for all the rappers I think I'd - aggregate word counts - combine variations - remove most commonly used words in each language (I, I'm, You, You're, etc)

Then see who came out ahead. You shouldn't get penalized for releasing more.

You could probably do a bunch of cool analysis with that data.

edit: Oh no, there's actually a Genius API isn't there. No no no no. I have no time!

I'm surprised Twista isn't much higher, if you listen to his lyrics he's always busting out different words like a thesaurus (I think he's one who mentioned reading one as a kid or something?) but I guess this just means he's not released as many songs. I do like that MF Doom is listed as well, big respect to him, I never listened to him heavily.

One thing to note, you don't need every word on the planet to convey amazing lessons with lyrics, some of the more profound lyrics (I can't remember, but it certainly felt that way to me 15+ years ago) were by artists somewhere in the middle of your graph for me.

Just looked up Tech N9ne on there, really surprised he's in the middle. Immortal Technique more to the right with the list of people who really use an insane amount of words in their lyrics, not surprised honestly.

Edit: Just realized its the first 35,000 words... Man... this needs to do its best to get all of them. Unfortunately, there's songs by artists I can't find on ANY lyrics sites, so I fear this list will never be 100% but a close enough ballpark.

yeah, no wonder cunninglinguist was pretty high in that list :)

Blackalicious near the top of the pack checks out.

Would love to see playboi carti on here.

And "0 Cent" before June 1994 :)

If you're into AI music I leave this without comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4GrSKMzQg0

Absolutely. This is the correct way do this. It should be adjusted downwards to account for inflation, not up.

I went back to get an Econ masters and studied international currencies. Some exchange rates are very stable over time and we don’t know why.

They don't say that the currencies are pegged, but I'm pretty sure they're defacto pegged. Same deal with the Euro.

In some sense it's absurd. But historically its normal.

And to be more precise, 25 years to halve is actually less inflation than the historical average of 3.29% from 1914-2025. At that rate it would take 21-22 years to halve.

Actually there is a surprisingly good trick to be able to calculate this called the rule of 72. Take the inflation percentage (2, 3 %) and divide 72 by it. Thats how many years it will take to halve. Not completing accurate but actually very close.

But yeah, inflation is a bitch over long time horizons. It makes me laugh when people say stocks are risky. Say you are 20 years old and want to save $2M USD for your retirement by 65. Expect that to be more like $470k.

Economist here. No, you don’t want that.

Inflation is annoying, but deflation is destructive. When that happens, people hold on to money as an investment and it doesn’t flow in the economy. The Great Depression was caused by deflation. (See Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the US.)

As a result, central banks try to have a little inflation, so that random mistakes don’t push us into deflation. The Fed’s target is 2%. I think it should be a little higher. (See Fischer Black’s “Interest Rates as Options” and the shadow short-term rate.)

No one should be holding inflating dollars over the long term. That money should be invested in loans (bonds, mortgages, …) or equity (stocks, real estate, …). We have good ways of comparing investments over time by removing the inflation. These are CPI or the GDP deflator.

We're $38.8 trillion in debt and still printing. https://www.usdebtclock.org/

We tend to target 2% inflation. Half in 25 years is under 3%, so on target.

That said, I feel like this number is way off, personally, based on changes in housing and food prices between the two times.

It's not absurd. And there's no automatic way to make money perfectly stable. That's not how money works.

And deflation is much worse. So we target a small 2% yearly inflation so that if it's 1% or 3% it's not a big deal. Whereas if you target 0% and wind up with -1%, you've got problems.

Why??? My (very limited) understanding is that we like a small amount of inflation, to incentivize reinvestment into the economy/R&D/etc. If there’s no inflation, you incentivize dragon-hoarding behavior

Get a brokerage account that has a sister bank account. Put money in, buy TIPS/gold/equities, pay the 30% tax or whatever on the inflationary difference, then buy your stuff. The point is to force you into buying more stable units of account and then taxing the inflation as a "capital gain."

Pretty genius because it can be framed as taxing greedy capitalists when literally they're just taxing fractional inflation.

Username is "CS Mastermind". Evidently not an economics mastermind.

How would that work? You have a claim to a past output that no longer exists. If the nominal value of the claim stays the same, the real value of the denomination unit must change.

People don't understand that money is a time and location bound object and pretend it is infinitely liquid and fungible when it isn't. Money is kind of like electricity. When you borrow it into existence and spend it, it travels a path through society, but it must then travel along a return path back to the source. Inflation could be thought of as a form of resistive loss, where current stays the same but voltage drops.

There's a reason why demurrage (or its ugly brother inflation) is a necessary bitter pill if you want a working money system. It forces money to travel down the return path sooner than later.

Wait, what's absurd about it?

I feel like this is the real-life version of my favorite joke from Andy Kindler: "I know they said don't re-invent the wheel, but does it have to be so round?"

Edit: emphasis

A lot less than in da club that’s for sure

It wouldn't matter because she can't get a dollar out of you.

30% error.

you bet. I pull it straight from the BLS.

That's an incredibly misleading graph. Never look at something with a growth rate on a linear scale, as it will always have a "hockey stick" shape, even with constant growth. If you look at the same series on a log scale, you see high inflation in the 70s, but from the '80s on it looks pretty similar to the pre-70s trend.

Imagine how much worse that chart would look were it not for deflationary pressure from science/technology introduced efficiencies.

... Is the term 50cent commonly blocked in firewalls, or am I missing some joke?

not really, he has a lot of businesses, this was one of them which turned out to be very successful. He was a very famous rapper back in the days, and he invented mixtapes :)

my friends use 50 cent often as a meme in their local currency to track devaluation comparing to dollar

damn, it wasn't sarcasm, people are dumb here

That or a similar occurrence elsewhere is probably the inspiration for this.

So before 2003 he was less than 50 cent? When was he a dime?

Seems the creation date of the domain was 2025-10-08, so you're in luck, this particular fun exists and was created in this era!