Horizon

Alas for those days.

While we're at it,

Is A Baseballer Worth Nearly The Entire Front Page Of This Morning's San Francisco Chronicle?

I mean, Congress has done some genuinely unspeakable things within the week, but what gets the damn inch-high caps is "Congress Slams Baseball's Integrity." Why not, "Congress To Debtors, Caribou, et al.: Drop Dead"?

What's 12 (don't know how to make the symbol) in today's U.S. dollars?

It would be about $55 in 1946 dollars - anyone want to take it from there?

OK, thanks to the cool inflation calculator, I worked out that it would be $537.56 in 2003 dollars.

Another more detailed assessment (and an illustration of how difficult this kind of exercise is) here:

In 2002, £12 0s 0d from 1946 is worth:
£304.27 using the retail price index
£320.97 using the GDP deflator
£943.32 using average earnings
£1,047.60 using per capita GDP
£1,260.24 using the GDP

Uhm, and your average ball player makes, what, 500 times that today?

The answer is, of course, that footballers (or soccer players for our American friends) are worth what somebody is prepared to pay them. I long ago gave up wondering why people thought certain footballers were worth paying so much money to and why, why, why, any footballer is put on a long term contract when they can lose their touch in a week is a complete mystery to me. But at the end of the day there are only two things sillier than the salaries of football players and that is complaining about them or idolising the recipients

I dunno about stuff being worth what people are prepared to pay for it. What was Enron stock "worth" on the day before it collapsed? What's a used car "worth" before it starts belching oil?

No point in getting tied up in knots over definitions of 'value'. Plenty of folks have beaten you to it.