In 1834, Commodore Uriah Levy bought Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello for $2,700. In the 1880s, the Harmony Borax Works paid Chinese immigrants $1.30 per day to mine borax in the often-brutal heat of Death Valley, California. In 1961, Ray Kroc strong-armed Mac and Dick McDonald into selling their restaurant chain, later worth billions, for $2.7 million.
The shock-and-awe these isolated facts elicit are off-kilter, thanks to the perceptual distortions of inflation and altered standards of well-being. The effect is to generate spurious narratives of villains and victims.
The real messages of these factoids are far less startling. Commodore Levy paid lots for a dilapidated, not-very-old celebrity house with a clouded title. Borax workers did grueling work but earned well above what most Americans received at the time. And Ray Kroc took a big risk to pay a small fortune to a couple of guys with a hamburger stand. We’ll come back to these three cases below. But as inflation gathers steam in 2022, it’s important to remember that it will make our national conversation even less coherent than before.
