Hi, all,
Thanks for the reply, Howard. The Beethoven stuff was interesting; I'll take a look at the archive. Actually, thought, what I was trying to get at is this; who was buying those hundreds of lutes under construction, or at least with parts made/bought, in the death inventories, and how much were they paying for them? Granted, this has little or nothing to do with what's going on now, but I'm just curious. The part about the Florentine ducats was intended as a joke (and I believe Howard took it as such). Clearly you can't correct an extinct currency for inflation in any meaningful way, and I agree a cost-of-living comparison would be near-useless, but I think a percentage of income comparison would be interesting and fairly easy. I can tell you off the top of my head (and without a calculator), for example, that the beloved and maligned $5,000 lute of the "cost of a lute" thread is just around 20% of my individual annual gross income, and just under 9% of my family gross income. (That's rough, and excludes the value of bennies. There, now you know how much my wife and I make!) I'm currently agonizing over $1800 for a Larry Brown 6-course (love that Francesco!). As it seems, from iconographic evidence and the testimony of all those lutes by all those builders, that in the 16th-17th centuries lutes were not particularly luxury items (though certainly what we would call "discretionary purchases"), I wonder how much were people were willing to pay for them. There must be a fair number of ledger or diary entries scattered about. For the record, I suspect it would come pretty close to my figures, if not exceed them. In an all-hand-work economy, people pay more and have fewer possessions, I'd bet. Another thing: IMO, an artist lute builder doesn't have hundreds of bellies, worked and unworked, lying around (in Venetian boxes!) when he dies, even if he's been sick and not working for awhile. Sounds like a factory to me! By the way, Howard; I'm still formulating my well-thought-out response to your "pseudo-science" remark. Talk later. (Please insert a yet-to-be invented emoticon indicating humorous self-deprecation here.) Best, and keep playing, Chris. >>> howard posner <howardpos...@ca.rr.com> 9/30/2009 7:17 PM >>> On Sep 30, 2009, at 2:35 PM, Christopher Stetson wrote: > As a percentage of median income, in Florentine ducats > corrected for inflation, whatever? Good luck trying. It's pretty much impossible to correct Florentine ducats of 1600 for inflation. These days we can concoct a cost-of- living index with the prices of products and services, but most of what we use didn't exist in 1600. So your index would consist of lots of things for which the relative cost may have moved in opposite directions: clothes are cheaper, labor mostly more expensive (assuming a developed Western economy) and automobiles and hamburgers out of consideration. Try to figure the relative value of United States dollars between 1980 and now using a) the cost of Los Angeles real estate and b) the cost of a kilobyte of computer memory, and you'll get the picture. We had a discussion on this list about this a few years ago, with Beethoven and chicken figuring prominently. You can find some of it, though apparently not my brilliant contributions, at: [1]http://www.mail-archive.com/lute@cs.dartmouth.edu/msg01058.html Here's one paragraph: > A one bedroom spacious apartment in San Francisco similar to Beethoven's > expensive Vienna apartment in 1808 rents for about $1,800 today, so you > could say that he earned about $10,800 in rent money for contemporary US > dollars for the Fifth Symphony. (As is still true, apartments inside what > became the ring in Vienna were much more expensive that ones outside the > wall.) A chicken in the Bay area costs about $4-6, which means that he > earned $284 in food money. This gap shows the problem with trying to say > what 25 gold ducats would be today, since what money is worth is of course > related to what things cost. > > Bill Meredith -- To get on or off this list see list information at [2]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. http://www.mail/ 2. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute
