Between 1959 and 2020, the Consumer Price Index went from 29.1 to 258.811.
Cumulatively, prices increased 789.4%, which works out to an average of
3.65% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1959 bought what
$0.11 buys in 2020.
Consumer prices rose 0.7% in 1959, down sharply from 1958’s
2.8% as the economy recovered briskly from the year before’s recession,
with output and employment both rebounding through the year. The map of
the country changed that year for the first time since 1912: Alaska
joined the union January 3, and Hawaii followed August 21, completing the
50-state United States. Ninety miles from Florida, Cuba changed hands
that January, when Fidel Castro’s guerrilla forces overthrew President
Fulgencio Batista, who fled the country on the 1st; Castro entered Havana
on the 8th, beginning a Communist government that would define Cold War
tensions in the hemisphere for decades. Labor and management fought their
longest battle of the postwar era that summer: the United Steelworkers
walked out July 15 in a dispute over work rules, the longest strike in the
industry’s history, before a federal court granted the Eisenhower
administration a Taft-Hartley back-to-work order that November. Consumer
prices finished the decade 193.9% above their 1913 level,
up 20.7% from where they stood in 1950. First-class
postage held at 4 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.00 an hour.
The headline number is an average. Individual categories moved very differently over this
period. Here is what $100 of 1959 spending costs in 2020, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1959 →
All items (CPI-U)
3.65%
$889
Medical care
5.36%
$2,413
Food
3.67%
$900
Energy
3.67%
$899
Core (all items less food & energy)
3.64%
$886
Transportation
3.18%
$676
Apparel
1.59%
$262
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1959: housing (1967–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Long periods are sampled every 5 years; the calculator above covers any pair of years.
The destination year: 2020
2020 was the year the pandemic rewired the price data without triggering the
inflation spike that followed it. Consumer prices rose just 1.2% for the
year, the mildest pace since 2015, as COVID-19 lockdowns emptied roads,
closed airports, and crushed energy demand. Oil told the starkest story: on
April 20, U.S. crude futures fell to about negative $37 a barrel, the first
negative settlement in the market’s history, as storage capacity ran out and no one
wanted the physical barrels. Gasoline followed it down, falling to about
$1.80 a gallon nationally that month before recovering to average $2.17 for
the year. Grocery prices moved the other way: pantry stocking and
meatpacking-plant disruptions pushed food-at-home costs up faster than
usual, a rare case of food and energy pulling the index in opposite
directions. Washington answered with the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, signed
March 27, which sent $1,200 payments to most adults and added $600 a week
to unemployment benefits as states ordered widespread business closures.
The Federal Reserve cut its policy rate to near zero in two emergency moves
that same month and pledged to buy Treasury and mortgage bonds “in the
amounts needed” to keep credit markets working, an open-ended commitment
beyond even its 2008 response. None of it showed up in the CPI yet: the
stimulus, the supply shocks, and the reopening whiplash that followed would
build into the fastest inflation in four decades over the next two years.
MLA: “Inflation from 1959 to 2020: $100 is worth $889 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1959-to-2020/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1959 to 2020. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1959-to-2020/