3w ago

Well... There was definitely a direction of change that happened

74 comments

Just a reminder that the comm has moved to !historyphotos@piefed.social
They literally had this but fucked up the climate, future investions, infrastructure and pensions anyways
- They got rich by doing all that. Well their kids.
- Does everyone on lemmy just equate "old" with "Boomer"?
  
  Boomers were the people who were born after 1945, during the baby boom after the second World War. The people in this picture were, if they had kids born after 1945, the parents of boomers.
  
  No one said anything about boomers?
  
  Lol, this is like the people who get themselves worked up because everything is "woke"... when no one but them mentioned it.
how was this possible? was there a deflation?
or was it the specificity of the product sugar that was made so expensive due to wartime restrictions on maritime trade?
- The sign says "O.P.A. Ceiling Prices," so WWII-era price controls were probably the subject.
  
  Between taxing the wealthy, nationalisation of key companies and assets, and this, seems like they had some really good policies back then.
  
  Beltalowda na animals!
- The answer is in the photo (well the reason I guess)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Price_Administration
  
  Its so funny how the US despises socialism when its best economic time period had full on government controlled industry production and pricing requirements.
  
  i was so busy looking at the prices that my adhd brain didn’t register the opa part! thanks for the explanation
- In addition to the WWII rations and OPA stuff that others have mentioned, there was a fair amount of general deflationary pressure during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
  I haven't looked at what happened to sugar specifically.
  
  Later on, after the Cuban Revolution I know we subsidized sugar partly out of spite for Cuba. That would not be at play here though.
I wonder why, its not like any major events happened around 1918 and 1945
- nope, just the invisible hand of the free market!
  
  I still find it crazy that this modern-quality video clip + set is from the 1930s
  
  Inflation is caused by the Wizard of Oz.
it only took a market crash and two world wars.
I'm still mad that we measure inflation as the price of goods instead of the money supply and people have the audacity to say greed doesn't play a role.
Today that list would be 16 euros or something.
- Yeah you're close. Ball park for Lidl where I do most of my shopping:
  5lbs of sugar €5
  Bread €1
  2 quarts of milk €2.50
  6 oranges €2.50
  Oatmeal €1.80
  Coffee €4
  
  In the US bread is 3 even at aldi, 5 at big box stores at label.
Man I wish i lived back in 1940 times and my husband beat me for having polio
- And back then your therapist was also your bartender.
  
  Same as it ever was...
  
  If you were lucky...
  
  So free therapy?
Can we get something like that again, please?
BTW in 1918 1.34$ was around 31 bucks today, and in 1945 it was around 24.5 or so.
- To be clear, you're requesting a great depression?
  
  Can we just have the bit where speculators got wiped out?
  
  Let's have more purchasing power WITHOUT a depression! BTW 1945 was just when WW2 was going to end, and during WW2 the US and Canadian economies were booming because they were far away from the fighting and everyone who wasn't fighting could get a job helping those that did. So people were working.
Unfortunately this comes about from a depression which is when most folks have zero of close enough to it to be zero. then suddenly bread goes for a few cents because most people cannot get enough cents together to buy bread and those with money don't need anymore bread they have plenty.
- It comes from price ceilings. When there's no capitalist making money for doing nothing, and their buddies in overplayed management positions making money doing almost nothing, you can produce sugar real cheap.
  
  pretty sure there were plenty of owners still making money for nothing during the depression. They jumped out of windows because. OMG! LESS MONIES!!!
so it's 1/2 milk then?
- Or how I like to call it, 1+2 milk
Wasn't that the time when money was based on precious shiny metals instead of imaginary garbage and farts?
- Kinda, but not for domestic transactions.
  https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2017/november/why-us-no-longer-follows-gold-standard

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