Value of $100 in 1927, adjusted to 1960

What happened to prices between 1927 and 1960

Between 1927 and 1960, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.4 to 29.6. Cumulatively, prices increased 70.1%, which works out to an average of 1.62% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1927 bought what $0.59 buys in 1960.

Consumer prices fell 1.7% in 1927, a mild retreat after three years of gradual increases and part of a shallow up-and-down pattern that ran through the second half of the decade. Aviation delivered the year’s signature moment: Charles Lindbergh departed Roosevelt Field, New York, on May 20 and landed at Le Bourget Field outside Paris roughly 33.5 hours later, the first person to fly the Atlantic solo and nonstop. Detroit closed a chapter of its own that May, when Ford halted the Model T’s production line after nearly 19 years and more than 15 million cars sold, idling tens of thousands of workers while its factories retooled for the Model A. The Federal Reserve, meeting with European central bankers that summer, cut its discount rate to ease pressure on currencies still recovering from the war, a move later cited by economists including Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz as fuel for the stock market speculation that built through the following two years. First-class postage held at 2 cents.

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The destination year: 1960

Consumer prices rose 1.7% in 1960, up from 1959’s 0.7% even as the economy slipped into recession that April, a downturn that would prove the shortest since World War II. The year’s defining political moment came that November, when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, decided by roughly two-tenths of a percentage point in the popular vote. Television played a new role in the race: the first-ever televised presidential debate that September, watched by an estimated 70 million people, was widely seen as favoring the telegenic Kennedy. Civil rights protest took a new form that February, when four Black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University sat down at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro and refused to leave; the sit-in tactic spread to dozens of Southern cities within weeks. Cold War tensions flared that May, when a Soviet missile downed an American U-2 spy plane deep inside Soviet airspace. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive, embarrassing the Eisenhower administration and collapsing a Paris summit called to ease relations with Moscow. Consumer prices finished 1960 199.0% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 4 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.00 an hour.

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