Re: Footloose Finders?

["Patrick G. Sobalvarro" <pgs@sobalvarro.org>]

At 11:57 PM 11/15/97 +0000, dannyg1@IDT.NET wrote:
>> Patrick wrote:
>
>> <<<CDN$90 in 1967 was US$81 (exchange rate then was $0.90CDN/US).
>> Inflation from 1967 until today (as measured by U.S. CPI) has been a factor
>> of 4.83, meaning that those US$81 had the buying power of US$391.23 today.
>> At the current exchange rate of CDN$1.00 = US$0.73, that's
>> CDN$535.93.<<<<<<<
>
>Ok, So why does Conde Naste still pay the same $350 as a standard rate on an 
>assignment. Same amount in '68. Now how does the effective rate add up?
And what 
>does that do to the buying power value when faced with a predicament like
Ted's?

I think this means that photography for Conde Nast no longer pays very
well.  Presumably they have discovered that they don't have to pay very
well at all, because there are not enough photography jobs for all the
people who want to make their living at photography and can do a passably
good job at the sort of photography that Conde Nast buy.

I would be surprised if photography in the U.S. paid as well as it used to
for most photographers: median wages in the United States have declined by
quite a bit since the seventies.  Often these statistics are glossed over
in two ways: first by stating household income instead of individual income
(but nowadays many more households have two wage earners than before), and
second by stating mean income instead of median income.  Mean wages have
indeed increased, but that's only because the wealthiest part of the
populace are making much more money than they used to.  The lower 70% or so
of Americans earn lower wages than they used to.  It seems likely to me
that this would be the case in many other countries in the first world as
well, because the causes are macroeconomic.

So possibly Leicas are less affordable for many people than they used to
be.  But if you compare their price to that of a standard basket of goods
(which is all the usual measure of inflation, the CPI, tells us), they're
not much more expensive than they were in the 60's, if at all.

- -Patrick