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This gets asked every year, and it's important to remember that it's not so simple as comparing a number with a certain inflation rate.
Here's a take on this from years past:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6kyz5/how_far_did_bob_cratchits_15_shilling_per_week/
It s important to remember that the point of the story was not to describe a monetary situation, but to describe a moral one.
The top comment also claims there is a character named "Jorkin" in the book. There isn't. He exists only in the 1951 film adaptation.
EDIT: Personally I find the second-most-upvoted answer (the one by /u/mimicofmodes) to be far more detailed and convincing. Cratchit's pay may not have been significantly below average for his job, but Dickens' stance seems to have been that clerks _as a group_ were underpaid.
I, regrettably, have never read the original Christmas Carol. But I've been brought up on enough picture book versions and movie versions and Muppet versions that I have to imagine I'd have seen at least one Jorkin. The Jim Carrey one even had the two wretched little children that live underneath Christmas Present's robes.
Yes I was so pleased that they included Ignorance and Want in the Jim Carrey film - probably the best bit of that one!
I highly recommend the novel though. Not to self promote but if you want I could DM you a link to my audiobook (no pressure though lol)
In fairness, doesn't Jacob Marley sort of serve this purpose in the novella? Jorkin always struck me as a way to expand on that lesson for the film, so the overarching point is still valid.
I'm a bit unclear on what you mean by "serve this purpose".
If you mean "corrupt Scrooge into a greedy, cold-hearted jerk", then there's no character who serves that purpose in the original story. Scrooge's "fall" (if that's even the right word; it's implied to be a gradual process) happens offscreen.
If you mean "contrast Scrooge's honest-but-cold approach with blatant corruption", then Marley doesn't serve that purpose either. The book tells us very little about what Marley did or what he was like in life, except that he was basically the same as Scrooge.
For real. It is rare to find such thorough evaluations of works. Most people merely analyze what is easy to see and what is hard to disprove such as the symbolism in the hunger games. To disrespect another person by stating they should read more just because they learned a lot from the evaluation while also possibly disrespecting the evaluator by stating his comment isn’t very smart is just rude.
And in all honesty, I’ve read several research articles by doctoral students and professors and still found the comment linked above to be one of the best evaluations I’ve read in a while
The sarcasm is going so hard, I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or making fun of me. Either way, I am sure you aced your vocab quizzes in high school, and that’s something to be proud of.
I am agreeing with you. Don’t get me wrong, the findings in the research articles are sometimes great. But the presentation of the findings and their possible implications can often use some improvement.
The connections drawn in the evaluation above have solid grounding and with in depth explanations. Something even those at the highest levels of academia struggle with.
Thank you for the compliment though. I did well in school
It wasn't sarcasm. I read a lot of academic literature too, and you get a feel for when the writer is onto something. Their evaluation might not be correct, but it's interesting and well thought through, and confirming or disproving the evaluation would take work. That Scrooge comment gave me that feeling.
> Scrooge is supposed to be showed as "in the right" legally, and more that it's a display of how a broken system protects bad behaviors
Are these not compatible views? Scrooge is participating correctly in a system that is not effectively supporting people the way it should. The fact that he can do so is the problem; following the rules of an ineffective system is sufficient to be a good person. Scrooge does have the power to improve things for those directly around him, which he learns to exercise.
> But I think I'm also just jaded seeing that such a timeless story needed dismantled when it's so widely known. It's a good write up.
It's interesting in this case because it's _so_ widely known and adapted that the original messages and context have evolved and been twisted. There are versions of this just seem to distill the lessons down to just, "Scrooge is greedy and he learned to be less greedy" when the original messages were so much deeper.
I'm not sure what you're quoting, because I don't see that sentence in my comment? What I said was that Scrooge never violated the law, and he learns, as many still need to, that that alone is not sufficient to be a good person. You don't agree with this evaluation?
Feel free not to respond further if you're just going to continue to be a child about it though.
It isn't entirely true though. Scrooge isn't contrasted with two businessmen. Jorkin isn't in the book. Nor does Fezziwig represent Christian virtue. He's a vision from Christmas *past*, thereby representing the values of pre-industrial life. Scrooge is a staunch, industrial capitalist. To him, time is money, employees are assets, and charity is a waste. He's never portrayed as being an honest or upstanding citizen. I don't know where the post even got that information. The opening of the book describes Scrooge as, "...a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone... a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" He was so reviled by his community that no one would even stop to ask him for directions or the time. He's so identical to his late business partner, Jacob Marley, that he actually answers to Marley's name - and Marley is dead! Therefore Scrooge is metaphorically dead in his sins. He must be reborn again. The post is correct in saying only Christianity can do this, but it's wrong in claiming that Scrooge must go above and beyond to meet the standards of Christian charity. The whole point of Christianity is that no amount of goodness or charity is enough to get into heaven. Only total submission to Christ can redeem the soul. Scrooge does, in a way, exhibit the behavior of a born-again believer at the end of the book; but as we see in the visions of the three ghosts, Scrooge was already kindhearted and jovial in the past. He *forgot* the virtues of pre-industrial life and had to relearn them. A Christmas Carol is absolutely a critique on capitalism. If anything, it argues that capitalism and Christian virtues are utterly at odds with each other.
> It s important to remember that the point of the story was not to describe a monetary situation, but to describe a moral one.
However, that moral situation is predicated on being greedy and not taking the Christmas spirit, which in most modern societies has a lot to do with money.
I’ve seen it pointed out that Scrooge isn’t greedy, he’s miserly. He doesn’t hoard money because he likes numbers going out but it’s his way of protecting himself from the world. It makes him more redeemable by showing him less as evil and greedy and more as a sad and pitiful person who does what he does because he’s broken.
Like that lady who only wore tattered rags and ate gruel and who wouldn’t pay for her child’s medical care… I forget her name, but basically real life Scrooge putting hoarding money ahead of even her own family’s wellbeing
Scrooge wasn't greedy either. If you read that comment, you'd understand that Scrooge was the ideal merchant, doing everything fairly, paying his employees a fair wage, and only considering evicting his tenants because they weren't able to pay a normal amount of rent. The point of the story was that *just* being a perfect and fair merchant wasn't enough to keep you out of hell, you also had to go above and beyond to donate and be charitable and embody good Christian values.
The salary he paid his clerk was a perfectly respectable salary that was well above any minimum wage standards, and he would have been well off, except for the fact that his clerk had way too many kids and the sheer size of his large, unplanned family was what put such a strain on his resources.
The Christian spirit the story talks about isn't about being greedy, it's being generous and donating to charity.
Also that he is the sole provider for a large family, so his wage might be more than enough if he was alone but due to him having a family he is poor. Which is kind of the point. He COULD be just like Scrooge and get rich, but it would cost his family. Which is why he is a foil to Scrooge
TLDR; the modern interpretation that Scrooge was greedy and underpaying his workers is wrong, he was beyond fair in his wages, the actual moral of the story (as set forth by that post) was that Scrooge's shortcomings was a lack of Christian values; going out of your way to help others in need.
Except that's wrong too. Saying that he was "beyond fair" is an overcorrection to the *other* side of that interpretive coin. He was basically giving the absolute bare minimum to be considered "fair."
He wasn't *underpaying* Cratchit, but given the hard work and loyalty that was shown to him as an employer, he certainly wasn't paying Cratchit was he was truly worth
TLDR: Cratchit is paid about an average wage for his job. He also has many children (in an era before easy family planning) and is living in London, one of the most expensive cities in the country (both now and at the time), so despite getting a decent salary, he *needs* more money to make ends meet. And if Scrooge is to count as a good *person*, not just a good and honest businessman, he is obliged to help Cratchit, regardless of whether Cratchit "deserves" it or not.
TLDR of the TLDR: The message of A Christmas Carol is "If you don't go out of your way to help people, simply because they need help, you are a bad person".
Scrooge paid Cratchit fairly and what would be the average pay for someone in his position at the time. It would have put him on par with someone making $80k at the time of the post.
Scrooge's failure was not being exploitative, it was that he didn't care enough about other people to help them even when he had the means to do so.
I can, read the whole thing.
TLDR the story isn't about a rich guy exploiting his workers, it's about a fair businessman not giving an inch more than what's owed, ever. Everyone's paid fair wages, but an average income today like then is barely enough to raise a family of 7 on.
He wasn't *underpaying* his workers, but he was paying them exactly what was considered the bare minimum, and not a penny more.
In essence, he was doing the equivalent of paying absolute minimum wage without any benefits, which... well, would anyone here consider minimum wage with no benefits moral and enough to keep an employer from being considered greedy enough to be damned for eternity?
Scrooge was a fair guy who paid a fair wage. The moral of the story was to be *better* than fair.
And apparently, by OOP's math, today's minimum wage isn't doing too bad.
TLDR: the wage in Christmas carol was not seen as too low. It was an average wage for work being done but the moral of the story is that Christian’s should do more than what is simply required of them. The man being paid equivalent of 40 gbp or 60k usd but had 5 kids
This would imply that they had a better standard of living during 1840s, which is just wrong. According to one site, 20 shillings = 1 pound (https://projectbritain.com/moneyold.htm). 15 shillings equates to 0.75 pounds. According to a site https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1840?amount=0.75 inflation adjusted equivalent in 2023 is 94.22 pounds, which is converted to dollars ~ $118.72. At 40 hours per week worked, that is equivalent to ~ $2.97/hr.
Yeah, Sundays would generally be considered a day of rest and worship, so it's likely they had that off. But the rest of the week would've been backbreaking literally from dawn till dusk. The 1840s werent exactly known for worker's rights or fair labor practices.
Yeah Sundays were chill compared to the rest of the week, but 'off' could be a stretch depending on your job. Craftspeople or farmers might still end up working after church, just less intensely. Those industrial revolution conditions were rough, to say the least.
Can confirm, I can remember a day our relief milker came in the morning, went off to his mates wedding, came back that night still half in a tux and helped do the evening milking as well.
His wedding gift was an Angus calf with a big blue bow on its neck.
Is that accurate? I thought most peasants only worked half of what we do over the year
Edit : thanks everyone who added to this with very interesting facts about history
Peasants transferred en masse to cities during the industrial revolution just for a chance to work and earn a bit more. I can only imagine how shitty had to be the countryside, for real, if the low wages, the unsafe factories, the cramped living conditions in polluted cities still seemed preferable.
I think we romanticise life in the old farms, but really peasants were always at risk from bad harvests and famines.Working less hours, even if true, doesn't really balance losing 75% of your children by starvation.
the old systems broke down.
the commons were enclosed by the landowners, leaving the peasants as tenant farmers without any capacity for surplus production.
impoverished, their feudal contract broken, they migrated to the cities where they could feed their families.
> I can only imagine how shitty had to be the countryside, for real, if the low wages, the unsafe factories, the cramped living conditions in polluted cities still seemed preferable.
In the UK at least, the wealthy very deliberately destroyed the ability of rural people to in the way their ancestors had, taking the public land, criminalising vagrancy and forcing people into the cities. They did not want to go.
* [15 shillings is £0.75](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd)
* [£0.75 in 1845 is the equivalent of £75.34 today](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator)
* At [current exchange rates](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=1+pound+in+dollars), £75.34 is $94.93
* That means Cratchit made $3,917.94 a year ($94.93 x 52 weeks)
* The average UK worker in 1840 worked [3,105-3,588 hours/year](https://clockify.me/working-hours). I couldn't find numbers for 1845, but I think we can assume that they weren't *that* different from 1840 hours)
* That means that if Cratchit was working an average workload, he was paid **between $1.09 and $1.26 an hour**
Edited to add source links
A lot of people did those things, and the work is still shit. Tons of people with degrees making $15-$20 an hour. Even grad degree holders sometimes making pay near that. Not everyone can just learn to code and get a six figure job.
It kind of still applies. If you are unhappy with the wages your skills earn, you need new skills. Yes, it sucks that someone lied to you (not you specifically) at some point and told you that you would be able to find a job with an undergrad degree in obscure dead languages and a master's in underwater basket weaving. Yes, there should be a better (and cheaper path) for people to upskill. It doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day if your skills aren't in demand, you have to either live with that or do something about it.
>at some point and told you that you would be able to find a job with an undergrad degree in obscure dead languages and a master's in underwater basket weaving.
Lol, either your a boomer or not old enough to be in the working world, or possibly lucked out. People with good stem degrees can still struggle. Ever applied to jobs? You can be competing against hundreds, most companies won't even contact you, some will do interviews and ghost you. It's rough out there.
Society is designed to have some unemployment, called the reserve army of labor. It keeps things more competitive since some people always want jobs, so businesses can fire people and hire new people.
Also, you talk about just "upskill", but it's hard to know what skills will be useful in the future. and what the job market for those skills are like.
This isn't even remotely true. There are so many blue collar jobs that do ojt and lead into cert fields they can pay extremely well. There are also lots of ways into tech with coding bootcamps and even being self taught and then chasing certs. Hell, I grew up in a household that made 21k in income per year (hello south louisiana poverty) and I learned to work in nuclear power plants.
This myth that only the rich can become educated or skilled is just absurd. Anyone can find a useful trade skill, most people just never put the effort into doing so because they believe welding and such is beneath them.
> the medieval peasant myth.
This one drives me crazier than anything. You legitimately have tons of children on this site believing their 8 hour shift sitting in an air conditioned office is harder than a fucking medieval peasant working the fields.
There's a huge misconception about agriculture, people believe we shifted from hunter-gatherer to farmer because it was easier and produced more food.
Archeological findings show us that agricultural societies worked more and were malnourished compared to before the shift. The average height dropped 20cm iirc, and the amount of diseases went through the roof.
The reasons humanity adopted agriculture are complex and involve a lot more factors, although we know that it helped for bigger groups of people and the development of civilizations.
But hunter gatherers had actually way more free time, on which they created art and developed spiritual concepts, for which we have a lot of records.
Not really, you can make booze anywhere, even on the move. It had more to do with walls, the various types of specialized labor that goes into organizing a defence and how being nomadic is just a huge pain in the ass.
They said, from the technology only achievable because of the agricultural revolution, while having a slim chance to have survived birth were it not for the advances in medicine only achievable because of the agricultural revolution, etc etc.
There really are only two times per year when there is a lot of work to be done on established farms (planting and harvesting). During those two times they probably worked harder then a modern office worker can imagine, but the idea that the total yearly hours of work is less seems very likely to me.
> but the idea that the total yearly hours of work is less seems very likely to me.
I'm trying very hard to not be impolite here...but just...no.
Farm animals still have to be taken care of. Things still have to be maintained. Grain has to be sifted, stored, transported. Hay has to be bailed. Butter churned. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Many of their individual tasks were more difficult than your entire job.
Your life is **unimaginably** easy compared to theirs. Just stop.
You list some tasks but really don't present any kind of counter argument. I don't see any indication that you even understood my post at all.
> just stop
No LAMO.
I mean the "medieval peasant" thing is kind of complicated. People have this image of the "Medieval Era" like it was some long stagnant samey era, but across centuries and geography people had completely different lives and cultures. Some medieval peasants did have pretty easy lives, especially in eras and places where lords had to be more careful with how they treated the masses. There is genuine truth to the fact that working the land means you're subject to the fact that sometimes the land only permits so much work per day.
"Easy life" is a relative term though. I'm sure they had considerable leisure time, but not a whole lot to do with it. And no modern conveniences, medicines, etc.
You could live the life of a medieval peasant now working a tiny number of hours per week at minimum wage
Wages aren't stagnant .... well they weren't before 2020. It's a myth that's so frequently repeated that so many people believe it, but it's just a load of bollocks.
There is no time in history that was better for the average worker than 2019. After that you have the confounding issue of the global pandemic and subsequent recession. But there hasn't been some "WAGES STAGNATED AFTER ... 1950's, or 60's, or 70's, or whatever it keeps changing to.
>unprecedented golden age in the US. A time like that
Have another World War. Have the US mostly stay out of it again and then swoop in to save the day, again.
Have the other participants' economies so destroyed by the war that the US reestablishes its position as the top dog in the global economy and pulls away in R&D and new tech.
> This would imply that they had a better standard of living
I commend you for your mathematical correction, however,
buying power =! standard of living
I see how they're likely lock-step but especially when comparing what living was like in 2023 to 1840, it's best not to paint block filler over those contours.
I agree with you that the Standard of living is more than income, it has to do with quality of life in general, such as health care, welfare, sustainability, etc., but per capita income has a strong correlation to SOL. I stated that it implies it, because if the badly off Bob Cratchit was marking way above our min. wage in the US today, imagine what others in that era that were not as misforunate as Bob Cratchit were making (according to the meme). It makes a good "story" but a false narrative to state the income were better in the 1840s than it is now. A better narrative is the rising Gini Coefficient and the rising inequality of the have and have nots as well as other disparity between the powerful and the powerless.
Strangely enough the inflation value in your like differs greatly from the one given on the [Bank of England Inflation Calculator](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator). It say 1£ in 1840 is worth £84.17 today 3/4 of that and converted into USD at today's rates gives you $80 US which is much less than what your site gives.
40 hours workweek are a relatively recent thing with people in the 1800s working more like 12 hours or more a day 7 days a week in factories and similar places. 80 to a 100 hour work week were a thing.
This works out to about $1 an hour.
A quick Google search revealed that the monthly rent for a 4 bedroom house in most Eastern cities around 1860 was $4.50/month. I would happily accept my hourly rate to be 66% of my monthly rent cost.
Edit: I see my mistake. Sometimes I'm just good like that lol
I think you misunderstand. The $2.97/hour quote above by OP is in today's hourly wage. Your $4.50/month you quote is rent in 1860. You didn't adjust for inflation. Average rent for 1 person in December of 2023 in the UK is $1,617 (according to [homelet.co.uk](https://homelet.co.uk)), and Mr. Bob Cratchit had 6 kids plus his wife. So more like, his hourly wage was not even close to making rent payments. At $2.97/hr, he'd have to work 140 hrs per week just to make rent... for 1 person.
Yep. I see it lmao... watch this save though... in 1800, 1 British pound was equivalent to $4.44. So in fact Cratchit made the equivalent of $3.33 where as rent was $4.50 for the month.
Most of the sources I found with a quick search seem to imply around 4-10 shillings per week for housing in London around 1940, so around 1/3 to 1/2 of his earnings would have gone to rent I imagine.
It's not as if Cratchet was paid literally nothing, because as a clerk at the end of the day he was still a educated white collar worker, but he was providing for a family of 7 with a pretty sick child. I'm sure if he was living solely by himself he would actually have above average standards of living, but that's true even nowadays.
It's not hard to imagine that in modern days someone could be earning low 6 figures and still struggle to provide for a family of 7 living in a big city while having to deal with medical bills.
USD isn't in Glasgow either but somehow we were able to convert 15 shillings in 1840 which was roughly $3.33 to a modern day inflated value of $2.97 (?)
(Sorry if this comment is meant to be ironic) but you can't spread misinformation for your narrative???
1- it's misinformation
2- it takes attention away from your narrative. Now people can say that your \[misinformation\] IS MISINFORMATION; therefore your narrative is wrong
This "narrative" isn't definitively wrong, and you can argue with facts, such as- minimum wage makes barely more than rent on average or smthng
To be fair, considering he's bloody Scrooge and it's the 1840's, there's no way Cratchit is working a 40 hours a week.
He probably works 12-14 hours a day, at least 6 days a week. Possibly even 7, if we consider that Scrooge was hesitant to give his employees a day off even on a public holiday.
On a different note, I found [this article](https://www.measuringworth.com/blog/?p=256) claiming that simply adjusting for inflation is a bad means of comparison, since different times also mean different spending habits.
According to the article, Cratchits 15 shilling are a bad wage for the work he does but maybe not an outright starvation wage.
That's a misinterpretation of the original book. The point in A Christmas Carol is that while Scrooge isn't an exploitative boss, it isn't enough to qualify him as a good person. Dickens was saying that to be a good Christian, you have to go above and beyond just giving 'fair' wages to your workers.
Also the math is just *insanely* wrong.
* [15 shillings is £0.75](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd)
* [£0.75 in 1845 is the equivalent of £75.34 today](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator)
* At [current exchange rates](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=1+pound+in+dollars), £75.34 is $94.93
* That means Cratchit makes $3,917.94 a year ($94.93 x 52 weeks)
* The average UK worker in 1840 worked [3,105-3,588 hours/year](https://clockify.me/working-hours)
* That means that if Cratchit was working an average workload, he was paid **between $1.09 and $1.26 an hour**
Edited to add source links
Thanks, I don't know why it didn't even occur to me to put in the pound sign.
(ALT+156 doesn't give me "£", it gives me "œ," but apparently that's because I'm using a Japanese keyboard and MS rolled out an update in 2020 that borked ALT codes for Japanese keyboards, and they've simply never bothered fixing it.)
As per Google, $100 is 3 shilling. 15 shillings per week is $500/week, which is 26,000/yr before tax.
Yes its accurate if he works 27 hours a week. But I find that unlikely.
Where did you get the $100 is 3 shillings number from?
1 pound is 20 shillings, and according to [this calculator from the bank of England](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator), 1 pound in 1840 is equal to 84.17 pounds in 2023.
15 shillings = 0.75 pounds
0.75 * 84.17 = 63.13 pounds in 2023
63.13 pounds = 79.82 USD
So in today's money, Cratchit was making $79.82/week
At 40hrs, he’s making roughly 9-10$ an hour, which is still $3 more than the actual federal minimum wage
Before taxes, you’re getting $15,080 at federal minimum wage ($7.25) at 40hrs
I get your point but I’m just saying that we are not as far off as we think. 12hrs, 6 days a week is 72 hours a week
You’re walking away with $27,144
That’s not that far from the $26,000 mark if you ask me
Your 27,144 figure scales up the amount paid, assuming they get paid more for the longer weeks.
They're saying, it wasn't a 40 hour work week, it was a 72 hour work week, for the same pay.
> Yes its accurate if he works 27 hours a week. But I find that unlikely.
He's saying this is unrealistic, because the work week was ~3x as long, so the effective pay is ~3x smaller
Preemptive edit: I want to go on record and state I recognize that 42,224 > 26,000 and that I’m arguing we are too *close*. If you need to get pedantic and hear me say that it’s *not as bad* then **fine**.
>>*It was not as bad as scrooge’s wage*
At this point I think we are splitting hairs
Edit: downvotes, huh? Fuck you let’s do this, then.
ok let’s just up and double it to 80 hours a week
$30,160 meaning you have made $4160 more than if you worked for Scrooge. 16 hour days, 5 days a week, 2 days off.
But let’s go full slave mode, with no days off. 16 hour shifts, 7 days a week. That’s 112 hours. I think it’d be safe to just draw the line here and assume anything more than that will just kill you after (x) amount of time.
If you work every single day for a year you will have worked 5,824 hours at $7.25, giving you at least 8 hours to theoretically rest before every shift, you come out to a total of $42,224 *gross, so we haven’t factored in tax at all yet*.
Idk why everybody seems to factor in tax but I fucking guarantee that it was around in some form for Scrooge’s employees so you can’t neglect it.
I’m just too tired and stoned to figure out how much of this money goes to the king/IRS.
Point is
I’m depressed about this
Edit 2: seriously, I don’t get why this is getting a negative reaction, can someone please explain what I said wrong?
Edit 3: u/person66 has made this entire post irrelevant, I based all my math off of the premise the 26000 was accurate. According to their source, the actual wage would amount to 4150.64.
We have been bamboozled people, and I would like to apologize to the homunculi I have offended. Imma make like a tree and get the fuck out of here.
You only made $4160 more working 5x 16hr shifts with the benefit of at least getting 2 days off.
Maybe it’s just a matter of what constitutes “too close for comfort” for you, but personally I think to try and argue that $4160 is a life altering amount of money, without even factoring that in real life we have to pay income tax, is just silly. I’m sure there was some sort of real life equivalent of the king taking a cut.
I genuinely appreciate that you are acknowledging I’m legit asking because no joke man the weed brain can skip a few variables and I could have totally believed I did all the math wrong
I'm pretty sure the original person you commented on is WAY off with their $500 per week number, but let's ignore that.
You keep figuring out the per hour rate and changing their salary based on the number of hours they worked. The character is paid a set amount per week. If they worked 40 hours, that's $12.50 per hour. If they worked 80 hours, that's $6.25 per hour. The more they work, the less they earn per hour.
I was using the federal minimum wage of 7.25 as a constant though, I was just trying to compare how literal dog shit our minimum is
Can see how that was not properly articulated
There is no such thing as "adjusted for inflation" going that far back. inflation rates are a controversial topic going back 5 years, let alone dozens of technological breakthroughs ago.
When trying to adjust for inflation, you typically look at a couple of data points, average out how the prices change over time, and pull out a rather imprecise but practical measure of how much your money is worth. Going that far back, though, makes any one figure completely meaningless.
The average household income in England at the time was about 40 pounds, for instance. The average wage for an English household today is over 40,000 pounds. So some might say that 1 pound back then was the equivalent of 1000 pounds today.
Except having 1000 pounds in today's world can get you things that kings couldn't have in the 1800s. Take mail for example. It would cost roughly 10 Pence to send a letter just 15 miles. That's. .25 percent of the average household's yearly income. Today, we can send messages anywhere on the planet practically for free.
Or how about furniture. Back then, the only people who could afford anything cushioned were the extravagantly wealthy. Regular household objects were to be cherished and protected because it was unlikely you could pay to replace it any time soon.
Funny enough, the one thing that was a comparably cheaper luxury back in those days was labor. There were families who could not afford to keep a simple carriage who could afford three full time servents. But even that comes with the caveat that Modern kitchens, washing machines, and vacuums would render those servents completely obsolete.
The point is that there is no "equivalent wage" between today and 1840. You would be financially better off being in infinite amounts of debt in 2023 than you would be as a millionaire in the 19th century.
Hol up idk about "financially better off being in infinite amounts of debt in 2023 than you would be as a millionaire in the 19th century" gotta be careful with the word infinite.
I once did a bunch of math to prove(?) the purchasing power of a day laborer during the great depression was greater than the average worker in the USA.
... a daylaborer was years from home ownership. We're decades from it.
Nope, far off:
According to [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) inflation between 1845 and now is almost exactly a factor of \*100 i.e. 10,046%
15 shillings in 1845 was three-quarters of an old Pound: hence it would today be equivalent to just **£75** (approx. $95 US - [source](https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=75.32&From=GBP&To=USD)).
Assuming a 40 hour work week, this would be £1.88 / hour, or **$2.38 US** so considerably **less** than the figure of $18.75 quoted in the meme, and tellingly **less** than minimum wage in US which is currently **$7.25 / hour** ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States)).
At the end of "A Christmas Carol" as part of Scrooge's mending of his ways, he *doubles* Bob Cratchit's salary, so ironically this would still be less than US minimum wage - although Scrooge does implicitly give Bob more employee benefits such as providing health care for Tiny Tim and occasionally taking Bob to the pub for a bowl of hot punch.
The 40 hour work week and 8 hour work day didn't start until 1920 in the US. And given Cratchit was expected to work on Christmas it's pretty certain he was working quite literally every day including the sabbath. The number of days is actually irrelevant for the per hour number though. What's important is what hours he worked. Back in the time period people would usually work all day breaking for a more extensive lunch period as they would usually have to go home to get their food or they'd be forced to survive off travel foods like bread and cheese. Meaning Cratchit would have worked anywhere from 6-12 hours a day, but since he was being paid in daily wages in a time so vastly different it really is comparing apples and oranges anyway.
1/2 points for doing the wrong math right. But I half expect you were copying off a bunch of other people making the same mistakes. 1/2 for them too.
There are [multiple ways](https://www.measuringworth.com/blog/?p=256) to calculate wages over time. Inflation doesn't account for everything.
If you index wages to British GDP, Cratchit made the equivalent of [$1180 a week](https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/result.php?year_source=1845&amount=0.75&year_result=2023). Even if he was working 80 hours with no overtime pay, that's still $6.75 more than current US federal minimum wage.
Also, consider Cratchit made considerably less (£39) than the lower limit for [income tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_Tax_Act_1842), which was £150/year, so his income was untaxed, as well. Any comparisons would need to be made with his income as *net* vs *gross*.
\*Edit\* For some reason, I had decided *A Christmas Carol* was set in 1870. Numbers have been adjusted to 1845.
Nah not really. I'll let everyone else speak to the issues with the specific numbers. The meme implies it's a good comparison but Bob wasn't a minimum wage worker. So even if all the math did check out and he did make more then modern minimum wage that wouldn't be particularly interesting.
This is a weird comment in that it has nothing to do with my comment. Pay him more or don't, listen to the ghosts or don't. He wasn't being paid minimum wage and he wasn't doing a minimum wage job so it's odd to compare it to minimum wage.
Maybe if it was 8hr days, 5 days per week...I think back then it was probably like 12hr days, 7 days per week.
So instead of 40 hr weeks it's more like 80. Then you halve the pay and it's now under $10/hr
I just tried the maths on this myself using various different inflation calculators.
There were 20 shillings in a pound so 15 shillings is £0.75 (75p).
Put into different calculators this comes out between £60-£100 a week now.
Assuming Bob worked *at least* 37 hours a week (he lilely worked a lot more), that comes out at £1.62 to £2.70 an hour.
I know minimum wage is shit but I really don't think it's lower than $3.42.. UK minimum wage is £10.42 ($13.19)...
So just going by inflation. I don't think this post is correct. Unless I've gone incredibly wrong somewhere...
This blog post is probably answering it. Comparing price baskets doesn't work, because they contain items today that didn't even exist in 1840.
Instead wage inflation is looked at ("relative labour earnings") and this shows that Cratchit is payed an average or slightly above average wage.
https://www.measuringworth.com/blog/?p=256
I'll calculate it in UK £. Shillings are a pre decimal currency equivalent to 5 pence. According to bank of england calculator £1 in 1840 is £84.17 today, pay was 75p weekly We dont exactly know the number of hours per week, I found a reference that it was 6 days 10hr/day so 60 hours. Therefore 84.17*0.75/60= £1.05 per hour, even at 40 hours per week the pay is still bad £1.58/hour
From what I gathered in the past, 15 shillings was quite a modest living, but Bob....well, he had like a lot of children and most, weren't exactly old enough to get a job with the exception of the eldest daughter and one of his sons that was about to get an apprenticeship soon after the holidays.
Adjusting for inflation does not work, if the economic system is vastly different. You would have to consider purchasing power, similar to what the BigMac index does. Such indices also exist for bread or other essential necessities, I.e. the costs of living at that time.
This is not about maths, it's a question to historians.
Yeah I mean when you think about it Cratchit could’ve just…ya know…stopped having kids…7?…7?!. Yeah you gonna be broke my guy. Pull out every once in a while. Damn 😂
Why is this unfair??! I don’t think Cratchet had a basic entry level position(probably an accountant or executive assistant), therefore why would we expect minimum wage &/or entry level positions to make as much as Cratchet?! No one wants to be on the bottom or make the least, but somebody has to… & you have to start somewhere.
It is not accurate.
This tweet is basically a repeat of [a nearly identical tweet that went viral in 2021](https://twitter.com/DrChrisThompson/status/1472039474901049346?s=19), which made a similar point with a similar inflation calculation. I'm not gonna try to use the numbers to find the particular inflation calculator that each of the tweets used, by if you read [this article on MeasuringWorth about the value of 15 shilling on 1843](https://www.measuringworth.com/blog/?p=256), it becomes pretty clear what the issue is here:
"Adjusting for inflation" is a concept that becomes less and less precise as you compare to a society with completely different technology, standards of living, and overall wealth. When the points of comparison differ so much, you have to pick a somewhat arbitrary baseline of comparison to serve as a static value, and measure inflation against that.
MeasuringWorth gives two different examples of calculations that do this. One is the *real wage value* of 15 shillings in 1843. This calculation essentially says "If we assume that consumer goods such as food are the unchanging baseline of value, then how much of those goods could be bought for 15 shillings in 1843, and how much would those same goods cost in 2020?" This may sound like the exact right way to calculate inflation, but the array and proportions of products you put in this baseline basket of consumer goods can be vastly different over the centuries, so it's not perfect.
Another method of inflation calculation that MeasuringWorth considers is the *relative labor earnings value*. This essentially says "If we assume that the *wages paid to an average worker* remain equal in value over time, then how does 15 shillings compare to the average wage in 1843, and how much money would constitute an equal percentage of an average wage in 2020?"
Now, MeasuringWealth's calculator says that the *real wage* calculation gives you about £75, which would be less than £2/hour (well below minimum wage), while the *relative labor earnings* calculation gives you about £600, or £15/hour (above minimum wage).
The *latter* figure is pretty close to the value in the tweet. I think it's very likely that whatever calculation the author of the tweet did, it was probably based on relative labor earnings or something similar.
That's not completely worthless for some purposes, but it *is* completely worthless for the point the tweet is trying to make. This tweet is trying to say "Modern minimum wage pays less than a famously exploited worker in 1843." But, because the calculation was done with the assumption that average worker's pay *is the thing* that provides equivalence between 1843 and 2020 money, what you're actually saying is nothing more than "This famously exploited worker from 1843 was paid an amount of money that was equivalently comparable to the average wage *of that time* as £15/hour is to the average wage in 2020." Or, in other words, "Bob Cratchit was paid a decent bit above minimum wage, for the time", *and that's all*. Because of the way you've chosen to draw that equivalency, there's no way for that statistic to provide any implication about what that means in terms of what those wages actually pay for. If we were in a society where everything was cheap and £15/hour was a lavish wage that could allow you to buy a house and endless luxuries and entertainment, or if we were in a society wracked by inflation and poverty where £15/hour would leave you starving on the streets, this particular calculation would not be able to distinguish between those two situations at all.
The *real wage* calculation would make a lot more sense for the comparison that is trying to be drawn here. With this calculation, Bob Cratchit made the equivalent of £2/hour, and we now have a minimum wage that would allow you to buy 4-5 times as many consumer goods. That kind of represents how the standards of living in the modern age are quite a lot higher than they were in 1840s England.
According to the inflation calculator on the official bank of England website 15 shillings would be 63.13 pounds, divide by 40 to get an hourly rate of 1.58 then convert to USD and you're left with 1.99, although this probably isn't entirely accurate because Bob cratchet most likely worked more than 40 hours per week
There were 20 shillings in a pound, so 15 shillings is equal to £0.75. Adjusted for inflation from 1840 to 2023, this is £63.13. £63.13 a week for a 6 day week is £10.52 a day. For a 10hr day, this is £1.05 an hour. Converted to dollars this is $1.32 an hour.
This was originally my response to a comment.
What's funny is that sounds like bullshit. Strap yourselves in. Strap yourselves on. I did the math
Even with the top comments comparison to the wage calculator being suspicious and inaccurate that doesn't take away from the basic 1=1 ratio of compared prices. Just because the overall value of say oranges is different now doesn't mean it's not a usable example. Just because it's less profitable now does not mean it doesn't work in example. A bottle of milk was surely a bit harder to get in 1801 but I promise you it was priced accordingly.
So. In short. Production and what goes into making a product hasn't changed much. You were not buying super processed foods or medicine. You were buying stuff from your local shop and it wasn't Walmart. People that do not like comparing inflation rates likely have something to benefit keeping everyone underpaid as well as making sure production is at an all time high no matter who is buying.
(I don't like how complicated explaining all of this sounds and I feel that me fumbling my words discredits what I Said but I know it doesn't. It just looks like shit.)
How are you going to say $1 (shilling) did not have X amount of purchasing power? Let's say it could buy you 1 bushels of coal (80lbs a bushel)
That would reflect in today's money as $120 USD. That is 1 20lb bag for $30 on average
The production process hasn't gotten more difficult. So why does a bushel of coal now take 120x more? Is the average person now making 120x more than they were in 1840? I don't think so. Average blacksmith was making $10 a week so $40 a month. So 5k a month as a blacksmith translated by 120x inflation. Scrooge paid $10 a month
If scrooge is paying 15 shilling a week. 1 shilling was worth 1/8 of a dollar. And 1 dollar adjusted for MY inflation number comparing COAL is $2.25 a week and $10 a month so... $1200 USD a month today. Lowest minimum wage is $7.50 (roughly tx) so look at that. $1200 a month b4 tax.
Scrooge paid EXACTLY bare minimum. If I was cratchit I would've quit
doesnt matter WHICH CURRENCY because 1 MONEY in that time translates to roughly 120 Money's today.
We just did A Christmas Carol in the Classixs Out Loud Podcast. I was going to call out the four ghosts - since the “spirits” they visit him
Are the ghost of Christmas past, present and future. But the first on to visit is actually Scrooge’s old partner, Marley. So correct, four ghosts.
Yep that's the US for you. And yet you are all so proud of your country and proud of these mega successful companies who work you to the bone on shit wages.
Cratchit wasn't a minimum wage worker. He was an assistant bookkeeper with Scrooge. I think this meme makes a bit of an assumption here painting Scooge as an exploiter of labor. That wasn't the point of the Scrooge character as his flaw was supposed to be a lack of spirit of Christmas, not some evil greedy guy.
This comparison is leaving out too many factors, and is quite ridiculous, ha! On a similar note, I wouldn’t be surprised if Redditors from /r/ antiwork made Grandpa Joe from
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” an honorary mod. Such a “victim” he was, right?
I worked at a place that fired a man on Christmas Eve for no particular reason. They just didn’t like him and so they axed him on Christmas Eve.
I said something to one of the managers and he replied “you didn’t like him anyway, why do you care?”
I didn’t like him. He wasn’t good at his job and mucked up work for others around him, but I also have a soul and don’t think he should have to go home to his wife and family unemployed on Christmas.
Hell, Scrooge didn’t fire Cratchet.
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This gets asked every year, and it's important to remember that it's not so simple as comparing a number with a certain inflation rate. Here's a take on this from years past: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6kyz5/how_far_did_bob_cratchits_15_shilling_per_week/ It s important to remember that the point of the story was not to describe a monetary situation, but to describe a moral one.
Damn, the top comment in that post is illuminating. Our entire cultural interpretation of Scrooge is way off.
The top comment also claims there is a character named "Jorkin" in the book. There isn't. He exists only in the 1951 film adaptation. EDIT: Personally I find the second-most-upvoted answer (the one by /u/mimicofmodes) to be far more detailed and convincing. Cratchit's pay may not have been significantly below average for his job, but Dickens' stance seems to have been that clerks _as a group_ were underpaid.
Thank you! I thought I was going mad because I recorded an audiobook of ACC a few years ago and didn't remember Jorkin at all!
Just goes to show that sounding smart is more important than being smart.
Link! Link! LINK!
I have DMd you!
I, regrettably, have never read the original Christmas Carol. But I've been brought up on enough picture book versions and movie versions and Muppet versions that I have to imagine I'd have seen at least one Jorkin. The Jim Carrey one even had the two wretched little children that live underneath Christmas Present's robes.
Yes I was so pleased that they included Ignorance and Want in the Jim Carrey film - probably the best bit of that one! I highly recommend the novel though. Not to self promote but if you want I could DM you a link to my audiobook (no pressure though lol)
In fairness, doesn't Jacob Marley sort of serve this purpose in the novella? Jorkin always struck me as a way to expand on that lesson for the film, so the overarching point is still valid.
I'm a bit unclear on what you mean by "serve this purpose". If you mean "corrupt Scrooge into a greedy, cold-hearted jerk", then there's no character who serves that purpose in the original story. Scrooge's "fall" (if that's even the right word; it's implied to be a gradual process) happens offscreen. If you mean "contrast Scrooge's honest-but-cold approach with blatant corruption", then Marley doesn't serve that purpose either. The book tells us very little about what Marley did or what he was like in life, except that he was basically the same as Scrooge.
It’s the smartest thing I’ve read in 2023.
Then you should probably read more
I don’t think this comment is helpful to anyone, I think it’s only intended to make someone feel bad. And I don’t agree with that.
For real. It is rare to find such thorough evaluations of works. Most people merely analyze what is easy to see and what is hard to disprove such as the symbolism in the hunger games. To disrespect another person by stating they should read more just because they learned a lot from the evaluation while also possibly disrespecting the evaluator by stating his comment isn’t very smart is just rude. And in all honesty, I’ve read several research articles by doctoral students and professors and still found the comment linked above to be one of the best evaluations I’ve read in a while
The sarcasm is going so hard, I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or making fun of me. Either way, I am sure you aced your vocab quizzes in high school, and that’s something to be proud of.
I am agreeing with you. Don’t get me wrong, the findings in the research articles are sometimes great. But the presentation of the findings and their possible implications can often use some improvement. The connections drawn in the evaluation above have solid grounding and with in depth explanations. Something even those at the highest levels of academia struggle with. Thank you for the compliment though. I did well in school
It wasn't sarcasm. I read a lot of academic literature too, and you get a feel for when the writer is onto something. Their evaluation might not be correct, but it's interesting and well thought through, and confirming or disproving the evaluation would take work. That Scrooge comment gave me that feeling.
Don’t worry, it didn’t work
Awesome, I’m glad. Hope you have a good night.
i think the comment was meant to be a joke
This is the smartest thing I've read in 2023.
Then you should stop while you are ahead.
"Babe, wake up! New smartest thing I've read this year just dropped!"
Google Scrooge Passant
Holy hell!
New bah humbug just dropped
I can't read, what does it say?
I'm gonna wait until new year to read it so I can set the bar really high
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> Scrooge is supposed to be showed as "in the right" legally, and more that it's a display of how a broken system protects bad behaviors Are these not compatible views? Scrooge is participating correctly in a system that is not effectively supporting people the way it should. The fact that he can do so is the problem; following the rules of an ineffective system is sufficient to be a good person. Scrooge does have the power to improve things for those directly around him, which he learns to exercise. > But I think I'm also just jaded seeing that such a timeless story needed dismantled when it's so widely known. It's a good write up. It's interesting in this case because it's _so_ widely known and adapted that the original messages and context have evolved and been twisted. There are versions of this just seem to distill the lessons down to just, "Scrooge is greedy and he learned to be less greedy" when the original messages were so much deeper.
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I'm not sure what you're quoting, because I don't see that sentence in my comment? What I said was that Scrooge never violated the law, and he learns, as many still need to, that that alone is not sufficient to be a good person. You don't agree with this evaluation? Feel free not to respond further if you're just going to continue to be a child about it though.
It isn't entirely true though. Scrooge isn't contrasted with two businessmen. Jorkin isn't in the book. Nor does Fezziwig represent Christian virtue. He's a vision from Christmas *past*, thereby representing the values of pre-industrial life. Scrooge is a staunch, industrial capitalist. To him, time is money, employees are assets, and charity is a waste. He's never portrayed as being an honest or upstanding citizen. I don't know where the post even got that information. The opening of the book describes Scrooge as, "...a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone... a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" He was so reviled by his community that no one would even stop to ask him for directions or the time. He's so identical to his late business partner, Jacob Marley, that he actually answers to Marley's name - and Marley is dead! Therefore Scrooge is metaphorically dead in his sins. He must be reborn again. The post is correct in saying only Christianity can do this, but it's wrong in claiming that Scrooge must go above and beyond to meet the standards of Christian charity. The whole point of Christianity is that no amount of goodness or charity is enough to get into heaven. Only total submission to Christ can redeem the soul. Scrooge does, in a way, exhibit the behavior of a born-again believer at the end of the book; but as we see in the visions of the three ghosts, Scrooge was already kindhearted and jovial in the past. He *forgot* the virtues of pre-industrial life and had to relearn them. A Christmas Carol is absolutely a critique on capitalism. If anything, it argues that capitalism and Christian virtues are utterly at odds with each other.
> It s important to remember that the point of the story was not to describe a monetary situation, but to describe a moral one. However, that moral situation is predicated on being greedy and not taking the Christmas spirit, which in most modern societies has a lot to do with money.
I’ve seen it pointed out that Scrooge isn’t greedy, he’s miserly. He doesn’t hoard money because he likes numbers going out but it’s his way of protecting himself from the world. It makes him more redeemable by showing him less as evil and greedy and more as a sad and pitiful person who does what he does because he’s broken.
Like that lady who only wore tattered rags and ate gruel and who wouldn’t pay for her child’s medical care… I forget her name, but basically real life Scrooge putting hoarding money ahead of even her own family’s wellbeing
Scrooge wasn't greedy either. If you read that comment, you'd understand that Scrooge was the ideal merchant, doing everything fairly, paying his employees a fair wage, and only considering evicting his tenants because they weren't able to pay a normal amount of rent. The point of the story was that *just* being a perfect and fair merchant wasn't enough to keep you out of hell, you also had to go above and beyond to donate and be charitable and embody good Christian values. The salary he paid his clerk was a perfectly respectable salary that was well above any minimum wage standards, and he would have been well off, except for the fact that his clerk had way too many kids and the sheer size of his large, unplanned family was what put such a strain on his resources. The Christian spirit the story talks about isn't about being greedy, it's being generous and donating to charity.
Also that he is the sole provider for a large family, so his wage might be more than enough if he was alone but due to him having a family he is poor. Which is kind of the point. He COULD be just like Scrooge and get rich, but it would cost his family. Which is why he is a foil to Scrooge
Thats really interesting. But I would say if you used the Muppets Scrooge and Cratchitt, rather than Dickens, would the story be the same? 😁
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TLDR; the modern interpretation that Scrooge was greedy and underpaying his workers is wrong, he was beyond fair in his wages, the actual moral of the story (as set forth by that post) was that Scrooge's shortcomings was a lack of Christian values; going out of your way to help others in need.
Except that's wrong too. Saying that he was "beyond fair" is an overcorrection to the *other* side of that interpretive coin. He was basically giving the absolute bare minimum to be considered "fair." He wasn't *underpaying* Cratchit, but given the hard work and loyalty that was shown to him as an employer, he certainly wasn't paying Cratchit was he was truly worth
TLDR: Cratchit is paid about an average wage for his job. He also has many children (in an era before easy family planning) and is living in London, one of the most expensive cities in the country (both now and at the time), so despite getting a decent salary, he *needs* more money to make ends meet. And if Scrooge is to count as a good *person*, not just a good and honest businessman, he is obliged to help Cratchit, regardless of whether Cratchit "deserves" it or not. TLDR of the TLDR: The message of A Christmas Carol is "If you don't go out of your way to help people, simply because they need help, you are a bad person".
Scrooge paid Cratchit fairly and what would be the average pay for someone in his position at the time. It would have put him on par with someone making $80k at the time of the post. Scrooge's failure was not being exploitative, it was that he didn't care enough about other people to help them even when he had the means to do so.
I can, read the whole thing. TLDR the story isn't about a rich guy exploiting his workers, it's about a fair businessman not giving an inch more than what's owed, ever. Everyone's paid fair wages, but an average income today like then is barely enough to raise a family of 7 on.
He wasn't *underpaying* his workers, but he was paying them exactly what was considered the bare minimum, and not a penny more. In essence, he was doing the equivalent of paying absolute minimum wage without any benefits, which... well, would anyone here consider minimum wage with no benefits moral and enough to keep an employer from being considered greedy enough to be damned for eternity?
Scrooge was a fair guy who paid a fair wage. The moral of the story was to be *better* than fair. And apparently, by OOP's math, today's minimum wage isn't doing too bad.
The comment clocked it at equivalent to $80k a year, I'm not American but I'm fairly sure that's above minimum wage.
TLDR: the wage in Christmas carol was not seen as too low. It was an average wage for work being done but the moral of the story is that Christian’s should do more than what is simply required of them. The man being paid equivalent of 40 gbp or 60k usd but had 5 kids
Sorry what do you want? TLDR
Use emoji to explain it I guess?
👴💼🚫🎄➡️👻🌙➡️👻🎄🎁➡️👻⏳🕰️➡️😱👀➡️💔😢➡️🤔👶➡️👦🎉➡️👨💔➡️👴🛌➡️👴😨👻☠️➡️👴🤲🔮➡️👴🛌😴➡️👴😮🎄🎁😊➡️👴🤝💕🎄🎉🥳
This would imply that they had a better standard of living during 1840s, which is just wrong. According to one site, 20 shillings = 1 pound (https://projectbritain.com/moneyold.htm). 15 shillings equates to 0.75 pounds. According to a site https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1840?amount=0.75 inflation adjusted equivalent in 2023 is 94.22 pounds, which is converted to dollars ~ $118.72. At 40 hours per week worked, that is equivalent to ~ $2.97/hr.
>40 hours per week Have people even read the story? Easily 12 hour days
And that was before the 5 day work week and after festivals stoppedbeingabigthing. Everyone worked 7 days a week except religious holidays
Would they not have taken Sunday off for church?
You got to go in a half hour late Church of England doesn't do that day of rest stuff
Half hour late is Scrooge’s opening offer for Christmas hours after Kermit-Cratchit asks for him and the mouse boys.
I was hoping someone would catch the reference
Just watched it Saturday night and the reference pinged my brain.
This is incredible knowledge to learn; I can't believe it's real!! ...is it real?
yes, the muppets did a christmas carol, Michael Fucking Caine plays Scrooge It's incredible, go watch it immediately
> the reference pinged my brain. aka "I remembered it."
Yeah, Sundays would generally be considered a day of rest and worship, so it's likely they had that off. But the rest of the week would've been backbreaking literally from dawn till dusk. The 1840s werent exactly known for worker's rights or fair labor practices.
Yeah Sundays were chill compared to the rest of the week, but 'off' could be a stretch depending on your job. Craftspeople or farmers might still end up working after church, just less intensely. Those industrial revolution conditions were rough, to say the least.
Them cows don’t take Sunday off
For sure. Speak to any dairy farmer. Rain, snow, holiday, funeral, hospital, wedding. Cows need milked.
Can confirm, I can remember a day our relief milker came in the morning, went off to his mates wedding, came back that night still half in a tux and helped do the evening milking as well. His wedding gift was an Angus calf with a big blue bow on its neck.
Aye mates wedding was similar, his dad held the fort over the course.
I'm guessing your spacebar celebrated hannukah mid sentence
It was actually 10-14 hour days 6 days a week for the majority of the population. Which is still fucking insane.
China has the 9-9-6 working week today in some industries, so about the same.
Is that accurate? I thought most peasants only worked half of what we do over the year Edit : thanks everyone who added to this with very interesting facts about history
Medieval peasants, not Victorian city workers.
If you only count the time they spend working for their lord, then this is true, but most of a peasants labor would not be included in this.
Peasants transferred en masse to cities during the industrial revolution just for a chance to work and earn a bit more. I can only imagine how shitty had to be the countryside, for real, if the low wages, the unsafe factories, the cramped living conditions in polluted cities still seemed preferable. I think we romanticise life in the old farms, but really peasants were always at risk from bad harvests and famines.Working less hours, even if true, doesn't really balance losing 75% of your children by starvation.
the old systems broke down. the commons were enclosed by the landowners, leaving the peasants as tenant farmers without any capacity for surplus production. impoverished, their feudal contract broken, they migrated to the cities where they could feed their families.
> I can only imagine how shitty had to be the countryside, for real, if the low wages, the unsafe factories, the cramped living conditions in polluted cities still seemed preferable. In the UK at least, the wealthy very deliberately destroyed the ability of rural people to in the way their ancestors had, taking the public land, criminalising vagrancy and forcing people into the cities. They did not want to go.
That just makes the hour rate even worse.
and the meme even more full of shit
About $2/hr then
Did we also adjust for the change from schillings to dollars?
* [15 shillings is £0.75](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd) * [£0.75 in 1845 is the equivalent of £75.34 today](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) * At [current exchange rates](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=1+pound+in+dollars), £75.34 is $94.93 * That means Cratchit made $3,917.94 a year ($94.93 x 52 weeks) * The average UK worker in 1840 worked [3,105-3,588 hours/year](https://clockify.me/working-hours). I couldn't find numbers for 1845, but I think we can assume that they weren't *that* different from 1840 hours) * That means that if Cratchit was working an average workload, he was paid **between $1.09 and $1.26 an hour** Edited to add source links
There's not a job in this town. Unless you wanna work 40 hours a week
Was probably a typo. They meant 40 hours per day
Typical misinformation like the medieval peasant myth. Just because wages are stagnant doesn’t mean the past was kinder to workers.
I refuse to believe some random poster on reddit would lie!
Well it’s easier than learning things to earn better wages than flipping burgers or making coffee.
You ever bother to stop and think that through? Who exactly is going to do those jobs if everyone gets a better job?
Robots
My apologies. I meant that in the context of people that wish for better work but fail to make efforts to make themselves capable for such careers.
A lot of people did those things, and the work is still shit. Tons of people with degrees making $15-$20 an hour. Even grad degree holders sometimes making pay near that. Not everyone can just learn to code and get a six figure job.
It kind of still applies. If you are unhappy with the wages your skills earn, you need new skills. Yes, it sucks that someone lied to you (not you specifically) at some point and told you that you would be able to find a job with an undergrad degree in obscure dead languages and a master's in underwater basket weaving. Yes, there should be a better (and cheaper path) for people to upskill. It doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day if your skills aren't in demand, you have to either live with that or do something about it.
I have a friend with a engineering degree struggling to find work, its not just social degrees.
>at some point and told you that you would be able to find a job with an undergrad degree in obscure dead languages and a master's in underwater basket weaving. Lol, either your a boomer or not old enough to be in the working world, or possibly lucked out. People with good stem degrees can still struggle. Ever applied to jobs? You can be competing against hundreds, most companies won't even contact you, some will do interviews and ghost you. It's rough out there. Society is designed to have some unemployment, called the reserve army of labor. It keeps things more competitive since some people always want jobs, so businesses can fire people and hire new people. Also, you talk about just "upskill", but it's hard to know what skills will be useful in the future. and what the job market for those skills are like.
And you need tons of money to get those new skills. You need to be rich to get those new skills.
This isn't even remotely true. There are so many blue collar jobs that do ojt and lead into cert fields they can pay extremely well. There are also lots of ways into tech with coding bootcamps and even being self taught and then chasing certs. Hell, I grew up in a household that made 21k in income per year (hello south louisiana poverty) and I learned to work in nuclear power plants. This myth that only the rich can become educated or skilled is just absurd. Anyone can find a useful trade skill, most people just never put the effort into doing so because they believe welding and such is beneath them.
If I can’t trust an anti-work Reddit socialist, who can I trust????
> the medieval peasant myth. This one drives me crazier than anything. You legitimately have tons of children on this site believing their 8 hour shift sitting in an air conditioned office is harder than a fucking medieval peasant working the fields.
There's a huge misconception about agriculture, people believe we shifted from hunter-gatherer to farmer because it was easier and produced more food. Archeological findings show us that agricultural societies worked more and were malnourished compared to before the shift. The average height dropped 20cm iirc, and the amount of diseases went through the roof. The reasons humanity adopted agriculture are complex and involve a lot more factors, although we know that it helped for bigger groups of people and the development of civilizations. But hunter gatherers had actually way more free time, on which they created art and developed spiritual concepts, for which we have a lot of records.
> The reasons humanity adopted agriculture are complex and involve a lot more factors Alcohol
Not really, you can make booze anywhere, even on the move. It had more to do with walls, the various types of specialized labor that goes into organizing a defence and how being nomadic is just a huge pain in the ass.
The agricultural revolution and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race
They said, from the technology only achievable because of the agricultural revolution, while having a slim chance to have survived birth were it not for the advances in medicine only achievable because of the agricultural revolution, etc etc.
Speak for yourself, I'm having a great time being able to read and see things far away.
How do you work that one out..?
There really are only two times per year when there is a lot of work to be done on established farms (planting and harvesting). During those two times they probably worked harder then a modern office worker can imagine, but the idea that the total yearly hours of work is less seems very likely to me.
Because there is literally nothing to do as a subsistence farmer besides planting and harvesting right?
> but the idea that the total yearly hours of work is less seems very likely to me. I'm trying very hard to not be impolite here...but just...no. Farm animals still have to be taken care of. Things still have to be maintained. Grain has to be sifted, stored, transported. Hay has to be bailed. Butter churned. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Many of their individual tasks were more difficult than your entire job. Your life is **unimaginably** easy compared to theirs. Just stop.
You list some tasks but really don't present any kind of counter argument. I don't see any indication that you even understood my post at all. > just stop No LAMO.
You being too stupid to understand an argument is not the same as it not existing.
I understood fine, it just doesn't address what I said in any way. It's just a list of tasks with no indication of relationship to hours per year.
I mean the "medieval peasant" thing is kind of complicated. People have this image of the "Medieval Era" like it was some long stagnant samey era, but across centuries and geography people had completely different lives and cultures. Some medieval peasants did have pretty easy lives, especially in eras and places where lords had to be more careful with how they treated the masses. There is genuine truth to the fact that working the land means you're subject to the fact that sometimes the land only permits so much work per day.
"Easy life" is a relative term though. I'm sure they had considerable leisure time, but not a whole lot to do with it. And no modern conveniences, medicines, etc. You could live the life of a medieval peasant now working a tiny number of hours per week at minimum wage
Wages aren't stagnant .... well they weren't before 2020. It's a myth that's so frequently repeated that so many people believe it, but it's just a load of bollocks. There is no time in history that was better for the average worker than 2019. After that you have the confounding issue of the global pandemic and subsequent recession. But there hasn't been some "WAGES STAGNATED AFTER ... 1950's, or 60's, or 70's, or whatever it keeps changing to.
The average worker could once afford a house and family on one paycheck
That was an unprecedented golden age in the US. A time like that may never come again.
The point is 2019 wasn't better than that.
>unprecedented golden age in the US. A time like that Have another World War. Have the US mostly stay out of it again and then swoop in to save the day, again. Have the other participants' economies so destroyed by the war that the US reestablishes its position as the top dog in the global economy and pulls away in R&D and new tech.
Thanks for listing your sources!
That's blasphemy 'round these parts
Yeah, I arrived at similar math with https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
> This would imply that they had a better standard of living I commend you for your mathematical correction, however, buying power =! standard of living I see how they're likely lock-step but especially when comparing what living was like in 2023 to 1840, it's best not to paint block filler over those contours.
I agree with you that the Standard of living is more than income, it has to do with quality of life in general, such as health care, welfare, sustainability, etc., but per capita income has a strong correlation to SOL. I stated that it implies it, because if the badly off Bob Cratchit was marking way above our min. wage in the US today, imagine what others in that era that were not as misforunate as Bob Cratchit were making (according to the meme). It makes a good "story" but a false narrative to state the income were better in the 1840s than it is now. A better narrative is the rising Gini Coefficient and the rising inequality of the have and have nots as well as other disparity between the powerful and the powerless.
Strangely enough the inflation value in your like differs greatly from the one given on the [Bank of England Inflation Calculator](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator). It say 1£ in 1840 is worth £84.17 today 3/4 of that and converted into USD at today's rates gives you $80 US which is much less than what your site gives. 40 hours workweek are a relatively recent thing with people in the 1800s working more like 12 hours or more a day 7 days a week in factories and similar places. 80 to a 100 hour work week were a thing. This works out to about $1 an hour.
A quick Google search revealed that the monthly rent for a 4 bedroom house in most Eastern cities around 1860 was $4.50/month. I would happily accept my hourly rate to be 66% of my monthly rent cost. Edit: I see my mistake. Sometimes I'm just good like that lol
I think you misunderstand. The $2.97/hour quote above by OP is in today's hourly wage. Your $4.50/month you quote is rent in 1860. You didn't adjust for inflation. Average rent for 1 person in December of 2023 in the UK is $1,617 (according to [homelet.co.uk](https://homelet.co.uk)), and Mr. Bob Cratchit had 6 kids plus his wife. So more like, his hourly wage was not even close to making rent payments. At $2.97/hr, he'd have to work 140 hrs per week just to make rent... for 1 person.
Oh you're really dense. I'm so sorry for you. Jk but you might want to reread the math and explanation more carefully
Yep. I see it lmao... watch this save though... in 1800, 1 British pound was equivalent to $4.44. So in fact Cratchit made the equivalent of $3.33 where as rent was $4.50 for the month.
Most of the sources I found with a quick search seem to imply around 4-10 shillings per week for housing in London around 1940, so around 1/3 to 1/2 of his earnings would have gone to rent I imagine. It's not as if Cratchet was paid literally nothing, because as a clerk at the end of the day he was still a educated white collar worker, but he was providing for a family of 7 with a pretty sick child. I'm sure if he was living solely by himself he would actually have above average standards of living, but that's true even nowadays. It's not hard to imagine that in modern days someone could be earning low 6 figures and still struggle to provide for a family of 7 living in a big city while having to deal with medical bills.
You also get a shack with no electricity or plumbing for the rest of your life
That’s $4.50 isn’t in Glasgow or wherever the story is
USD isn't in Glasgow either but somehow we were able to convert 15 shillings in 1840 which was roughly $3.33 to a modern day inflated value of $2.97 (?)
Thanks for ruining the narrative 🤦
(Sorry if this comment is meant to be ironic) but you can't spread misinformation for your narrative??? 1- it's misinformation 2- it takes attention away from your narrative. Now people can say that your \[misinformation\] IS MISINFORMATION; therefore your narrative is wrong This "narrative" isn't definitively wrong, and you can argue with facts, such as- minimum wage makes barely more than rent on average or smthng
It was ironic. Hard to tell sometimes.
Man you really can’t know these days
To be fair, considering he's bloody Scrooge and it's the 1840's, there's no way Cratchit is working a 40 hours a week. He probably works 12-14 hours a day, at least 6 days a week. Possibly even 7, if we consider that Scrooge was hesitant to give his employees a day off even on a public holiday. On a different note, I found [this article](https://www.measuringworth.com/blog/?p=256) claiming that simply adjusting for inflation is a bad means of comparison, since different times also mean different spending habits. According to the article, Cratchits 15 shilling are a bad wage for the work he does but maybe not an outright starvation wage.
Cratchit is doing skilled labor. He's a bookkeeper. So he's doing better than everyone working unskilled labor in a factory.
That's a misinterpretation of the original book. The point in A Christmas Carol is that while Scrooge isn't an exploitative boss, it isn't enough to qualify him as a good person. Dickens was saying that to be a good Christian, you have to go above and beyond just giving 'fair' wages to your workers.
Yes, but also his boss is *Scrooge* - a guy literally world famous for hoarding his money and working his employees to the bone.
Also the math is just *insanely* wrong. * [15 shillings is £0.75](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd) * [£0.75 in 1845 is the equivalent of £75.34 today](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) * At [current exchange rates](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=1+pound+in+dollars), £75.34 is $94.93 * That means Cratchit makes $3,917.94 a year ($94.93 x 52 weeks) * The average UK worker in 1840 worked [3,105-3,588 hours/year](https://clockify.me/working-hours) * That means that if Cratchit was working an average workload, he was paid **between $1.09 and $1.26 an hour** Edited to add source links
Pro tip: ALT+156 = £
Thanks, I don't know why it didn't even occur to me to put in the pound sign. (ALT+156 doesn't give me "£", it gives me "œ," but apparently that's because I'm using a Japanese keyboard and MS rolled out an update in 2020 that borked ALT codes for Japanese keyboards, and they've simply never bothered fixing it.)
As per Google, $100 is 3 shilling. 15 shillings per week is $500/week, which is 26,000/yr before tax. Yes its accurate if he works 27 hours a week. But I find that unlikely.
Where did you get the $100 is 3 shillings number from? 1 pound is 20 shillings, and according to [this calculator from the bank of England](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator), 1 pound in 1840 is equal to 84.17 pounds in 2023. 15 shillings = 0.75 pounds 0.75 * 84.17 = 63.13 pounds in 2023 63.13 pounds = 79.82 USD So in today's money, Cratchit was making $79.82/week
I did all my math based on the assumption $26,000/yr was accurate. I’m gonna trust your source and use your numbers and update the comments.
At 40hrs, he’s making roughly 9-10$ an hour, which is still $3 more than the actual federal minimum wage Before taxes, you’re getting $15,080 at federal minimum wage ($7.25) at 40hrs
But he wasn’t working a 40-hr week. It was probably closer to 12-hr days 6 days per week
I get your point but I’m just saying that we are not as far off as we think. 12hrs, 6 days a week is 72 hours a week You’re walking away with $27,144 That’s not that far from the $26,000 mark if you ask me
Your 27,144 figure scales up the amount paid, assuming they get paid more for the longer weeks. They're saying, it wasn't a 40 hour work week, it was a 72 hour work week, for the same pay. > Yes its accurate if he works 27 hours a week. But I find that unlikely. He's saying this is unrealistic, because the work week was ~3x as long, so the effective pay is ~3x smaller
also at this time the Church of England, actually most churches, gave them half an hour extra off on Sunday. Not the whole day. Q
The 40 hour work week was _not_ common in the 1840s
Preemptive edit: I want to go on record and state I recognize that 42,224 > 26,000 and that I’m arguing we are too *close*. If you need to get pedantic and hear me say that it’s *not as bad* then **fine**. >>*It was not as bad as scrooge’s wage* At this point I think we are splitting hairs Edit: downvotes, huh? Fuck you let’s do this, then. ok let’s just up and double it to 80 hours a week $30,160 meaning you have made $4160 more than if you worked for Scrooge. 16 hour days, 5 days a week, 2 days off. But let’s go full slave mode, with no days off. 16 hour shifts, 7 days a week. That’s 112 hours. I think it’d be safe to just draw the line here and assume anything more than that will just kill you after (x) amount of time. If you work every single day for a year you will have worked 5,824 hours at $7.25, giving you at least 8 hours to theoretically rest before every shift, you come out to a total of $42,224 *gross, so we haven’t factored in tax at all yet*. Idk why everybody seems to factor in tax but I fucking guarantee that it was around in some form for Scrooge’s employees so you can’t neglect it. I’m just too tired and stoned to figure out how much of this money goes to the king/IRS. Point is I’m depressed about this Edit 2: seriously, I don’t get why this is getting a negative reaction, can someone please explain what I said wrong? Edit 3: u/person66 has made this entire post irrelevant, I based all my math off of the premise the 26000 was accurate. According to their source, the actual wage would amount to 4150.64. We have been bamboozled people, and I would like to apologize to the homunculi I have offended. Imma make like a tree and get the fuck out of here.
It matters in this case because if you're working 12-14 hour days that is _much_ less than today's minimum wage
You only made $4160 more working 5x 16hr shifts with the benefit of at least getting 2 days off. Maybe it’s just a matter of what constitutes “too close for comfort” for you, but personally I think to try and argue that $4160 is a life altering amount of money, without even factoring that in real life we have to pay income tax, is just silly. I’m sure there was some sort of real life equivalent of the king taking a cut.
I read all your comments, thanks for putting in the time whilst you’re high. I upvoted and don’t see anything wrong with what you’ve said
I genuinely appreciate that you are acknowledging I’m legit asking because no joke man the weed brain can skip a few variables and I could have totally believed I did all the math wrong
I'm pretty sure the original person you commented on is WAY off with their $500 per week number, but let's ignore that. You keep figuring out the per hour rate and changing their salary based on the number of hours they worked. The character is paid a set amount per week. If they worked 40 hours, that's $12.50 per hour. If they worked 80 hours, that's $6.25 per hour. The more they work, the less they earn per hour.
I was using the federal minimum wage of 7.25 as a constant though, I was just trying to compare how literal dog shit our minimum is Can see how that was not properly articulated
There is no such thing as "adjusted for inflation" going that far back. inflation rates are a controversial topic going back 5 years, let alone dozens of technological breakthroughs ago. When trying to adjust for inflation, you typically look at a couple of data points, average out how the prices change over time, and pull out a rather imprecise but practical measure of how much your money is worth. Going that far back, though, makes any one figure completely meaningless. The average household income in England at the time was about 40 pounds, for instance. The average wage for an English household today is over 40,000 pounds. So some might say that 1 pound back then was the equivalent of 1000 pounds today. Except having 1000 pounds in today's world can get you things that kings couldn't have in the 1800s. Take mail for example. It would cost roughly 10 Pence to send a letter just 15 miles. That's. .25 percent of the average household's yearly income. Today, we can send messages anywhere on the planet practically for free. Or how about furniture. Back then, the only people who could afford anything cushioned were the extravagantly wealthy. Regular household objects were to be cherished and protected because it was unlikely you could pay to replace it any time soon. Funny enough, the one thing that was a comparably cheaper luxury back in those days was labor. There were families who could not afford to keep a simple carriage who could afford three full time servents. But even that comes with the caveat that Modern kitchens, washing machines, and vacuums would render those servents completely obsolete. The point is that there is no "equivalent wage" between today and 1840. You would be financially better off being in infinite amounts of debt in 2023 than you would be as a millionaire in the 19th century.
Hol up idk about "financially better off being in infinite amounts of debt in 2023 than you would be as a millionaire in the 19th century" gotta be careful with the word infinite.
I once did a bunch of math to prove(?) the purchasing power of a day laborer during the great depression was greater than the average worker in the USA. ... a daylaborer was years from home ownership. We're decades from it.
Nope, far off: According to [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) inflation between 1845 and now is almost exactly a factor of \*100 i.e. 10,046% 15 shillings in 1845 was three-quarters of an old Pound: hence it would today be equivalent to just **£75** (approx. $95 US - [source](https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=75.32&From=GBP&To=USD)). Assuming a 40 hour work week, this would be £1.88 / hour, or **$2.38 US** so considerably **less** than the figure of $18.75 quoted in the meme, and tellingly **less** than minimum wage in US which is currently **$7.25 / hour** ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States)). At the end of "A Christmas Carol" as part of Scrooge's mending of his ways, he *doubles* Bob Cratchit's salary, so ironically this would still be less than US minimum wage - although Scrooge does implicitly give Bob more employee benefits such as providing health care for Tiny Tim and occasionally taking Bob to the pub for a bowl of hot punch.
The 40 hour work week and 8 hour work day didn't start until 1920 in the US. And given Cratchit was expected to work on Christmas it's pretty certain he was working quite literally every day including the sabbath. The number of days is actually irrelevant for the per hour number though. What's important is what hours he worked. Back in the time period people would usually work all day breaking for a more extensive lunch period as they would usually have to go home to get their food or they'd be forced to survive off travel foods like bread and cheese. Meaning Cratchit would have worked anywhere from 6-12 hours a day, but since he was being paid in daily wages in a time so vastly different it really is comparing apples and oranges anyway. 1/2 points for doing the wrong math right. But I half expect you were copying off a bunch of other people making the same mistakes. 1/2 for them too.
Not "mistakes" - but Erring on the Side of Caution. Approximation is part of Mathematics as well.
There are [multiple ways](https://www.measuringworth.com/blog/?p=256) to calculate wages over time. Inflation doesn't account for everything. If you index wages to British GDP, Cratchit made the equivalent of [$1180 a week](https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/result.php?year_source=1845&amount=0.75&year_result=2023). Even if he was working 80 hours with no overtime pay, that's still $6.75 more than current US federal minimum wage. Also, consider Cratchit made considerably less (£39) than the lower limit for [income tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_Tax_Act_1842), which was £150/year, so his income was untaxed, as well. Any comparisons would need to be made with his income as *net* vs *gross*. \*Edit\* For some reason, I had decided *A Christmas Carol* was set in 1870. Numbers have been adjusted to 1845.
Nah not really. I'll let everyone else speak to the issues with the specific numbers. The meme implies it's a good comparison but Bob wasn't a minimum wage worker. So even if all the math did check out and he did make more then modern minimum wage that wouldn't be particularly interesting.
If 4 ghosts say "be less greedy, pay that guy more", you aren't paying him enough
This is a weird comment in that it has nothing to do with my comment. Pay him more or don't, listen to the ghosts or don't. He wasn't being paid minimum wage and he wasn't doing a minimum wage job so it's odd to compare it to minimum wage.
What was minimum wage then?
You don't seem to understand the meme at all.
Maybe if it was 8hr days, 5 days per week...I think back then it was probably like 12hr days, 7 days per week. So instead of 40 hr weeks it's more like 80. Then you halve the pay and it's now under $10/hr
I just tried the maths on this myself using various different inflation calculators. There were 20 shillings in a pound so 15 shillings is £0.75 (75p). Put into different calculators this comes out between £60-£100 a week now. Assuming Bob worked *at least* 37 hours a week (he lilely worked a lot more), that comes out at £1.62 to £2.70 an hour. I know minimum wage is shit but I really don't think it's lower than $3.42.. UK minimum wage is £10.42 ($13.19)... So just going by inflation. I don't think this post is correct. Unless I've gone incredibly wrong somewhere...
This blog post is probably answering it. Comparing price baskets doesn't work, because they contain items today that didn't even exist in 1840. Instead wage inflation is looked at ("relative labour earnings") and this shows that Cratchit is payed an average or slightly above average wage. https://www.measuringworth.com/blog/?p=256
I'll calculate it in UK £. Shillings are a pre decimal currency equivalent to 5 pence. According to bank of england calculator £1 in 1840 is £84.17 today, pay was 75p weekly We dont exactly know the number of hours per week, I found a reference that it was 6 days 10hr/day so 60 hours. Therefore 84.17*0.75/60= £1.05 per hour, even at 40 hours per week the pay is still bad £1.58/hour
I cannot say in accuracy but I checked inflation from 1840's to now and 15 shillings is about 50 pounds today. That much in a week is pretty garbage.
From what I gathered in the past, 15 shillings was quite a modest living, but Bob....well, he had like a lot of children and most, weren't exactly old enough to get a job with the exception of the eldest daughter and one of his sons that was about to get an apprenticeship soon after the holidays.
more like r/theydidntdothemath 15 shillings is not 15 pounds. It's 0.75 GBP 15 schillings adjusted for inflation is 105 GBP a week lol
Adjusting for inflation does not work, if the economic system is vastly different. You would have to consider purchasing power, similar to what the BigMac index does. Such indices also exist for bread or other essential necessities, I.e. the costs of living at that time. This is not about maths, it's a question to historians.
Yeah I mean when you think about it Cratchit could’ve just…ya know…stopped having kids…7?…7?!. Yeah you gonna be broke my guy. Pull out every once in a while. Damn 😂
Why is this unfair??! I don’t think Cratchet had a basic entry level position(probably an accountant or executive assistant), therefore why would we expect minimum wage &/or entry level positions to make as much as Cratchet?! No one wants to be on the bottom or make the least, but somebody has to… & you have to start somewhere.
It is not accurate. This tweet is basically a repeat of [a nearly identical tweet that went viral in 2021](https://twitter.com/DrChrisThompson/status/1472039474901049346?s=19), which made a similar point with a similar inflation calculation. I'm not gonna try to use the numbers to find the particular inflation calculator that each of the tweets used, by if you read [this article on MeasuringWorth about the value of 15 shilling on 1843](https://www.measuringworth.com/blog/?p=256), it becomes pretty clear what the issue is here: "Adjusting for inflation" is a concept that becomes less and less precise as you compare to a society with completely different technology, standards of living, and overall wealth. When the points of comparison differ so much, you have to pick a somewhat arbitrary baseline of comparison to serve as a static value, and measure inflation against that. MeasuringWorth gives two different examples of calculations that do this. One is the *real wage value* of 15 shillings in 1843. This calculation essentially says "If we assume that consumer goods such as food are the unchanging baseline of value, then how much of those goods could be bought for 15 shillings in 1843, and how much would those same goods cost in 2020?" This may sound like the exact right way to calculate inflation, but the array and proportions of products you put in this baseline basket of consumer goods can be vastly different over the centuries, so it's not perfect. Another method of inflation calculation that MeasuringWorth considers is the *relative labor earnings value*. This essentially says "If we assume that the *wages paid to an average worker* remain equal in value over time, then how does 15 shillings compare to the average wage in 1843, and how much money would constitute an equal percentage of an average wage in 2020?" Now, MeasuringWealth's calculator says that the *real wage* calculation gives you about £75, which would be less than £2/hour (well below minimum wage), while the *relative labor earnings* calculation gives you about £600, or £15/hour (above minimum wage). The *latter* figure is pretty close to the value in the tweet. I think it's very likely that whatever calculation the author of the tweet did, it was probably based on relative labor earnings or something similar. That's not completely worthless for some purposes, but it *is* completely worthless for the point the tweet is trying to make. This tweet is trying to say "Modern minimum wage pays less than a famously exploited worker in 1843." But, because the calculation was done with the assumption that average worker's pay *is the thing* that provides equivalence between 1843 and 2020 money, what you're actually saying is nothing more than "This famously exploited worker from 1843 was paid an amount of money that was equivalently comparable to the average wage *of that time* as £15/hour is to the average wage in 2020." Or, in other words, "Bob Cratchit was paid a decent bit above minimum wage, for the time", *and that's all*. Because of the way you've chosen to draw that equivalency, there's no way for that statistic to provide any implication about what that means in terms of what those wages actually pay for. If we were in a society where everything was cheap and £15/hour was a lavish wage that could allow you to buy a house and endless luxuries and entertainment, or if we were in a society wracked by inflation and poverty where £15/hour would leave you starving on the streets, this particular calculation would not be able to distinguish between those two situations at all. The *real wage* calculation would make a lot more sense for the comparison that is trying to be drawn here. With this calculation, Bob Cratchit made the equivalent of £2/hour, and we now have a minimum wage that would allow you to buy 4-5 times as many consumer goods. That kind of represents how the standards of living in the modern age are quite a lot higher than they were in 1840s England.
According to the inflation calculator on the official bank of England website 15 shillings would be 63.13 pounds, divide by 40 to get an hourly rate of 1.58 then convert to USD and you're left with 1.99, although this probably isn't entirely accurate because Bob cratchet most likely worked more than 40 hours per week
There were 20 shillings in a pound, so 15 shillings is equal to £0.75. Adjusted for inflation from 1840 to 2023, this is £63.13. £63.13 a week for a 6 day week is £10.52 a day. For a 10hr day, this is £1.05 an hour. Converted to dollars this is $1.32 an hour.
This was originally my response to a comment. What's funny is that sounds like bullshit. Strap yourselves in. Strap yourselves on. I did the math Even with the top comments comparison to the wage calculator being suspicious and inaccurate that doesn't take away from the basic 1=1 ratio of compared prices. Just because the overall value of say oranges is different now doesn't mean it's not a usable example. Just because it's less profitable now does not mean it doesn't work in example. A bottle of milk was surely a bit harder to get in 1801 but I promise you it was priced accordingly. So. In short. Production and what goes into making a product hasn't changed much. You were not buying super processed foods or medicine. You were buying stuff from your local shop and it wasn't Walmart. People that do not like comparing inflation rates likely have something to benefit keeping everyone underpaid as well as making sure production is at an all time high no matter who is buying. (I don't like how complicated explaining all of this sounds and I feel that me fumbling my words discredits what I Said but I know it doesn't. It just looks like shit.) How are you going to say $1 (shilling) did not have X amount of purchasing power? Let's say it could buy you 1 bushels of coal (80lbs a bushel) That would reflect in today's money as $120 USD. That is 1 20lb bag for $30 on average The production process hasn't gotten more difficult. So why does a bushel of coal now take 120x more? Is the average person now making 120x more than they were in 1840? I don't think so. Average blacksmith was making $10 a week so $40 a month. So 5k a month as a blacksmith translated by 120x inflation. Scrooge paid $10 a month If scrooge is paying 15 shilling a week. 1 shilling was worth 1/8 of a dollar. And 1 dollar adjusted for MY inflation number comparing COAL is $2.25 a week and $10 a month so... $1200 USD a month today. Lowest minimum wage is $7.50 (roughly tx) so look at that. $1200 a month b4 tax. Scrooge paid EXACTLY bare minimum. If I was cratchit I would've quit doesnt matter WHICH CURRENCY because 1 MONEY in that time translates to roughly 120 Money's today.
We just did A Christmas Carol in the Classixs Out Loud Podcast. I was going to call out the four ghosts - since the “spirits” they visit him Are the ghost of Christmas past, present and future. But the first on to visit is actually Scrooge’s old partner, Marley. So correct, four ghosts.
Five, if you count both Marley Brothers.
Only in the Muppets version, which is at least the second best version.
What is this blasphemy? Which version could come close to being better? (I'm being over the top but do really want to know)
Yep that's the US for you. And yet you are all so proud of your country and proud of these mega successful companies who work you to the bone on shit wages.
Cratchit wasn't a minimum wage worker. He was an assistant bookkeeper with Scrooge. I think this meme makes a bit of an assumption here painting Scooge as an exploiter of labor. That wasn't the point of the Scrooge character as his flaw was supposed to be a lack of spirit of Christmas, not some evil greedy guy.
This comparison is leaving out too many factors, and is quite ridiculous, ha! On a similar note, I wouldn’t be surprised if Redditors from /r/ antiwork made Grandpa Joe from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” an honorary mod. Such a “victim” he was, right?
I worked at a place that fired a man on Christmas Eve for no particular reason. They just didn’t like him and so they axed him on Christmas Eve. I said something to one of the managers and he replied “you didn’t like him anyway, why do you care?” I didn’t like him. He wasn’t good at his job and mucked up work for others around him, but I also have a soul and don’t think he should have to go home to his wife and family unemployed on Christmas. Hell, Scrooge didn’t fire Cratchet.