Fermi/Channel Markers (2): Levittown

Another thing to check is whether the prices for the cars make any sense using these back of the envelope calculations.

So let's go to Levittown (Billy Joel fans nod along).

The price of the Levittown houses started at 6990 dollars in the late forties, still with the staturory price of gold at 35 dollars per ounce. In the same calculation, then, in today's money a Levittown suburb house was priced at about 250000 dollars.

Which in my neck of the woods is a reasonable price for a new build house in a suburb. We can argue about whether the amenities are more valuable, compared to how much more lot houses built in the 50's had, but the basic scale of the thing is consistent at least.

Minimum wage then was 0.75 dollars per hour, i.e. 75 cents an hour. Using our crude rule, that works out to about 28 dollars per hour. From my retail hell days, that's like getting hired as a manager from day one.

Or, think about a mechanic or plumber's wages today, say 50 dollars an hour. In that sense, a 28 dollar per hour wage is like starting as an apprentice. And at 2000 hours per year, that minimum wage works out to about 56000 dollars per year total income in current equivalent.

So, in fiction terms, your slimy manager is going to offer our beat down hero a salary job as soon as possible, to get her off the hourly books.

Or, maybe "Hey kid, give you a nickle if you'll run this package over to Old Man Smith..." tells you one thing, "give you a dollar" tells you another.

Oh, and gas was about a quarter a gallon, which is just a shade less than 10 dollars a gallon today in this calculation. Now there's a bit of a different look at things...

Incidentally, the Chevy Bel-Air was about 1700 dollars new, or about 63000 dollars in this method of calculation. Maybe that explains why it was so popular later, the guy on the block driving it was driving the equivalent of a high-end Cadillac, and teenagers have a tendency to imprint on the things they can only dream about...