The Price of Distinction
Monetary units from past economies often have little meaning for modern readers. This website translates historical monetary amounts—income, expenses, and wealth—into a consistent and interpretable metric: an individual's position in the income or wealth ladder of the time.
Explaining the Income Ladder Approach
To capture the exclusivity of a monetary amount \(y\) in location \(\ell\) at time \(t\), we characterize income by the share of the population earning at most that amount:
where \(F(\cdot)\) denotes the cumulative income distribution in location \(\ell\) at time \(t\). For example, an income level \(\bar{y}\) corresponding to the top-1% of the population satisfies \(P\left(Y \leq \bar{y}\right)=0.99\).
However, the high exclusivity of many incomes and expenses reported in cultural production makes this representation difficult to interpret. We therefore apply a logarithmic transformation to the upper tail of the distribution:
This income ladder approach relies on recent advances in the measurement of inequality, as captured by estimates of the distribution function \(F\). By construction, it yields a unit-free and time-invariant measure of economic position that is directly comparable across periods and locations.
Income distributions are estimated by fitting a Burr distribution to match key moments of the income distribution as reported in the World Inequality Database.
Wealth distributions are estimated by fitting a generalized Pareto distribution.
Limits. Given our parsimonious approach, a small number of distributional moments is sufficient to recover population ranks with reasonably high accuracy over most of the distribution, making the approach applicable to historical settings with limited data. Measurement error becomes increasingly systematic, however, for very exclusive amounts located in the extreme upper tail. Importantly, this error does not appear to vary systematically across countries or to increase as we move further back in time. We better qualify these statements in Section 3.2 of the paper.
Estimates cover 35 countries from 1820 to 2024 for income; wealth coverage varies by country. Population ranks count adults aged 20 and over. From 1950, adult populations come from the UN World Population Prospects. Before 1950, they come from the Human Mortality Database where it is available (France from 1820, Norway from 1900); elsewhere, total population estimates from Gapminder are combined with each country’s 1950 adult share, which likely overstates adult populations in the nineteenth century, when populations were younger. Population ranks are therefore approximate, while percentiles are not affected.
The full approach is described in this working paper (and associated online appendix).
Finally, note that in the Examples section the x-axis uses a split scale: linear up to a threshold, then compressed logarithmically for the upper tail.
Other Ways to Value Historical Money
Several tools already convert historical monetary amounts into present-day equivalents:
- MeasuringWorth converts historical amounts using several measures of relative worth, including relative income, labour earnings, and purchasing power—thereby covering many of the approaches discussed in the literature.
- The Inflation Calculator by the Bank of England adjusts amounts in pounds for changes in consumer prices.
- The Currency Converter by the UK National Archives expresses old sums of English money in terms of what they could buy.
These tools rest on two broad families of approaches. The simplest expresses an amount as a ratio to a reference amount at the time—for example, the wage of a low-skill worker or the average adult income. By this measure, £500 in England in 1810 represented roughly fifteen times the average adult income (about £35). Because it normalizes an amount within its own context, the income ratio is robust to changes in economic structure and in the goods available, but it has no clear welfare interpretation.
The second family converts amounts into consumption units: the cost of a typical basket of goods, as in the Consumer Price Index and purchasing-power adjustments, or the number of “bare-bones” subsistence baskets an amount could buy, as in the welfare ratio of economic historians. These measures compare amounts against a fixed benchmark across contexts and are well suited to questions about living standards—for example, how much richer a teacher is today than 150 years ago.
The income ladder answers a different question: how exclusive an amount was in its own society. Like the income ratio, it situates an amount among its contemporaries, but relative to all income groups rather than one reference group, so the shape of the distribution matters. Earning fifteen times the average income may be unremarkable in a highly unequal society such as nineteenth-century France, yet exceptional in France in 1970. The two views can diverge sharply. The welfare ratio of an entry-level French teacher rose from about 1.7 in 1850 to 8.6 in 2020, a large gain in living standards; on the income ladder, the same salary slipped from the top {{top|France|1900|1100}} percent in 1900 to the top {{top|France|2020|21930}} percent in 2020, a decline in relative position. Both are informative; they measure different things.
For a fuller discussion, see Section 2 of the working paper.
Examples
Pride and Prejudice (2005 film)
Converter
Input an amount, location, and date, and receive the corresponding (top) percentile and population rank. Enter amounts in the currency of the time. If the date is uncertain, give a range: the conversion then uses the average date of the range, interpolating between annual estimates.
Historical examples
Batch Conversion
One row per observation: year, country, amount, type, frequency
— type: income / expense / wealth frequency: annual / monthly / weekly / daily (default: annual).
Amounts are in the currency of the time; see the table of countries below. For an uncertain date, write a range such as 1820-1830 in the year column: it is converted at the range’s average date.
Amounts must be expressed in the unit used by the World Inequality Database for that year. Where the series changes unit, the converter shows the unit for the year you choose, along with average income per adult as a check on scale. Country names can also be written as England, UK, USA, Russia, Vietnam, South Korea, or Ivory Coast.
| Country | Income | Wealth | Currency unit |
|---|
Text Extraction
Paste a passage (up to 500 words) from a novel, a newspaper, or an archival record. A language model finds every monetary reference and records its amount, currency, type, country, and year. Review and correct the results, then calculate the corresponding ranks, as in the batch converter.
Passages are sent through our server to a language model (OpenAI’s API) to extract the amounts; we do not store them. Automatic extraction can make mistakes—always review the rows before calculating.
Narratives
Explore social structure and wealth inequality in classic literature through the income ladder framework.
During the industrialization of the nineteenth century, new forms of inequality emerged, gradually replacing the aristocratic order of the eighteenth century and profoundly reshaping French society and literature. This transformation lies at the heart of the Realist movement associated with Honoré de Balzac. His Comédie humaine portrays French society between 1815 and 1848 through a vast collection of interconnected novels. Le Père Goriot is among the most emblematic of these works, contrasting the ambitious rise of Rastignac with the gradual downfall of Père Goriot.
While the novel vividly illustrates the gulf in wealth separating the highest echelons of society from the lowest, the magnitude of these differences may escape contemporary readers. Early in the narrative, we learn that Rastignac—the young protagonist—receives an annual income of 1,200 francs from his family. This amount is portrayed as insufficient by the ambitious Rastignac, who asks his family for an additional 1,200 francs, noting that "two nicely tailored pairs of trousers could win a marriage worth 20,000 francs a year." How large is an income of 1,200 francs in this context, and how much more exclusive is an income of 20,000 francs?
That said, Rastignac is not mistaken in lamenting his distance from the very top of society. The income distribution in France around 1830 is highly skewed, with a pronounced upper tail. Advancing further up the income ladder requires far more than a marginal increase: reaching the top 0.1 percent would require an annual income of roughly {{quantile|France|1830|0.1}} francs, and the marriage worth 20,000 francs a year he dreams of would place him in the top {{top|France|1830|20000}} percent—among the richest {{people|France|1830|20000}} adults out of {{adults|France|1830}}.
This highly skewed income distribution is a central premise of the Comédie humaine and of many other nineteenth-century novels, as our approach illustrates.
Eugene de Rastignac (left), in discussion with Vautrin (Le Père Goriot, 1830)
Unequal access to opportunity is also central to Pride and Prejudice, where inequality manifests in another defining feature of such societies: the primacy of capital over labor. Elizabeth Bennet's precarious financial outlook sets the stage for the novel. Upon her father's death, her income would fall to approximately £40 per year. With a median income of about £{{median|United Kingdom|1820}}, this amount would still place her in the top {{top|United Kingdom|1820|40}} percent of the income distribution, above most of the population but far removed from the upper classes.
In such unequal societies, one of the few avenues for upward mobility is marriage. Elizabeth considers—and rejects—several suitors. Simply maintaining her standard of living—remaining in the top 0.1 percent, roughly the position of her father, Mr. Bennet, whose £2,000 placed him in the top {{top|United Kingdom|1820|2000}} percent—would require an annual income of about £{{quantile|United Kingdom|1820|0.1}}, far more than the rejected Mr. Collins, whose £700 would only reach the top {{top|United Kingdom|1820|700}} percent.
Figures use the income distribution of the United Kingdom in 1820, the earliest year available.
The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of a more realist literature in France, driven by the work of Balzac, as well as Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue, often serialized in newspapers. A similar movement emerged in painting, notably in the work of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet (see below).
The premise of Les Misérables rests on the arrest of Jean Valjean for stealing a loaf of bread—the most basic consumption good. In the context of the economic conditions surrounding the French Revolution of 1830 and the associated high inflation, such a loaf could cost 12-13 sous (around 0.60 francs), making it unaffordable for many poor workers (A New Look at the French Revolution of 1830, David H. Pinkney, The Review of Politics, 1961, 23-4). At that price, a loaf a day for a year (about 219 francs) was within reach of only {{top|France|1830|219}} percent of French adults. Another important episode in the novel is Valjean's rescue of Cosette, for which he pays the Thénardiers 1,500 francs.
The sum of 1,500 francs is used by Victor Hugo to illustrate the greed of Monsieur (and Madame!) Thénardier. The context is similar to that of Rastignac at the start of Le Père Goriot: the median income in France in 1830 was approximately {{median|France|1830}} francs, and 1,500 francs corresponds to an annual income earned by only {{top|France|1830|1500}} percent of the adult population. This is a substantial amount. Yet:
"When the man and Cosette had taken their departure, Thénardier allowed a full quarter of an hour to elapse; then he took her aside and showed her the fifteen hundred francs. "Is that all?" said she.""
Cosette (Les Misérables, 1862)
Des glaneuses (Jean-François Millet, 1857)
About
Research
This website builds on research by Regis Barnichon (San Francisco Fed) and Yanos Zylberberg (University of Bristol).
Contributors
The development of the website also benefited from the contributions of Katie Bartlett, Jacob Colbeck, and Faith Woodruffe-Peacock, students at the University of Bristol.