The cost of living luxuriously
In 1904, the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia purchased as a gift for her sister, Queen Alexandra, a fan composed of two-color gold, guilloché enamel, mother-of-pearl, blond tortoiseshell, gold sequins, silk, cabochon rubies, and rose diamonds from the House of Fabergé in Saint Petersburg. The Empress paid 325 rubles for it. At the published rates of exchange for January 1904, this was almost exactly the same as £13 7s ( The Times , February 17, 1904, p. 13) or $64.25 ( New York Times , January 3, 1904, p. 7). Today there are various online tools designed to calculate the equivalent of these prices in 2018, and all are based on formulas of varying degrees of complexity according to which essentially two sets of data—(a) prices (consumer goods, commodities, rent, stocks, bonds, gold, etc.) and (b) earnings (salaries, wages, fees, charges, interest rates, dividends, etc.) are assembled and then indexed or adjusted in the light o...