I was going to make a joke about the problem being finding a bank that would last that long, but you’ve got me thinking.
We obviously can’t use inflation to calculate values from that far back, as we don’t have the data, dollars didn’t exist, and the dollar isn’t tethered to an underlying asset anymore, so the best comparison is probably buying power.
A loaf of bread aparently averages $2.74 at the moment, but you could almost certainly make a loaf yourself for a dollar or less.
I’ve not had much luck finding the cost of bread in everyone’s favourite historical yardstick, Rome, in that era, the best I’ve found is the cost of grain in 200bce or so. Legionaries earned about 3as per day, which would buy enough grain to make 20 loaves, so 1 loaf would be an hour or two of work (assuming a legionary is employed 24 hours a day, the grain costs a bit more than a day’s salary, and I’m rounding a lot).
So basically, if your ancient roman ancestor had invested a couple of hours of their wages, and your familial line since then had all kept it growing at a very modest 1% pa, you’d be a trillionaire by now.
I was going to make a joke about the problem being finding a bank that would last that long, but you’ve got me thinking.
We obviously can’t use inflation to calculate values from that far back, as we don’t have the data, dollars didn’t exist, and the dollar isn’t tethered to an underlying asset anymore, so the best comparison is probably buying power.
A loaf of bread aparently averages $2.74 at the moment, but you could almost certainly make a loaf yourself for a dollar or less.
I’ve not had much luck finding the cost of bread in everyone’s favourite historical yardstick, Rome, in that era, the best I’ve found is the cost of grain in 200bce or so. Legionaries earned about 3as per day, which would buy enough grain to make 20 loaves, so 1 loaf would be an hour or two of work (assuming a legionary is employed 24 hours a day, the grain costs a bit more than a day’s salary, and I’m rounding a lot).
So basically, if your ancient roman ancestor had invested a couple of hours of their wages, and your familial line since then had all kept it growing at a very modest 1% pa, you’d be a trillionaire by now.