Kurt Busiek: Whuff. — Subium • Bluesky web client

Whuff.

This gets shared around every so often way more often than the debunking does, which points out that Cratchit makes closer to $2.50 modern if you assume a normal work week, so it's even less than that. Screenshot guy is just wrong

What are you using as a normal work week?

I'm just remembering the debunk I saw yesterday. lemme dig it up

There are so many different debunks of this that I can't find the specific one I saw yesterday, but it went like this link: look4rainbowslearned.blogspot.com/2013/12/how-...

How much money did Bob Cratchit make?look4rainbowslearned.blogspot.com Bob Cratchit made 15 shillings a week. That would be in today's money $93.66 a week, or $2.34 an hour at 40 hours a week. http://ww...

there are a lot of different ways to calculate inflation so not everybody comes up with exactly the same numbers but it's pretty consistently true that cratchit did not in fact make more than modern minimum wage www.reddit.com/r/theydidthe...

[Request] Accounting for inflation, did Bob Cratchit really make more than an Ameican who works 40 hrs/wk on minimum wage? : r/theydidthemathwww.reddit.com

and in the book it specifies cratchit works *60* hours a week, so any calculation that takes his weekly salary and divides by 40 to get his hourly salary will get too high of a number

I know. I've read many of them.

You can get wildly divergent estimates for how to adjust for inflation that far back, there really isn't any apples to apples. But the point wasn't that he was destitute. He was if anything above average and had a 'good' job. He just had a large family and was poor relative to Scrooge's wealth.

The price of an iPad back then was astronomically high.

Couldn't afford the surgery for Tiny Tim's leg though. Where's the NHS when you need it? 60-70 years in the future is it?

105 years. But you definitely don't want to think too hard about how that surgery went after Scrooge got generous. No anesthesia, no antibiotics. Tiny Tim would have suffered through it biting on a stick and then been lucky to not die of infection.

You guys know it’s a fictional account, right?

"Fiction"? You mean LIES!

Except for the ghosts. The ghosts are real.

And necessary as a mechanism for the milk going sour.

The milk is fictional, Kip.

1 don't know what inflation calculator they are using but 15 shillings is £0.75 and the Bank of England CPI calculator says that's equivalent to £63.13 today, or about $80. Even allowing for some differences in the price index used, I'm very puzzled how they got the figure quoted

seems like he's also assuming Cratchit worked a 39-hour week

Rectally sourced.

Except that that was the point. Dickens wasn't talking about the conditions for the proletariat, who he didn't know or understand and tended to use as backdrop or argument, not real people. The point of the story is that it's awful that a respectable white-collar worker is paid like a proletarian.

Less. Skilled tradesmen made 5s a day in 1840. Clerk could still be a working-class role. Punch in 1845 wrote 'There are almost as many varieties of clerks, as there are different sorts of cloth, from the extra superfine government official down to the coarse copying article in an attorney's office'

Doesn't matter what Dickens' intention was. The fact that a man portrayed as being poor, barely able to afford food or proper winter clothing for his family, & has a disabled son who will die b/c he can't afford healthcare is working a skilled job & still making more than minimum wage today.

Minimum wage or just barely above is often offered to ppl in Bob's position today

From this link if you want to see the full calculation methodology. I'm very sympathetic to arguments to raise minimum wage, the current levels of inequality are horrible. But I'm just not sure the OP's claims are true www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-pol...

https://bsky.app/profile/beijingpalmer.bsky.social/post/3kgbkfor5ag24

apparently we're doing the bad Christmas Carol discourse again so ...

The only part of this that’s correct is the 15 shillings a week

Bob needs to stop spending all his money on Victorian Costa lattes and avocado on toast. Maybe then he’d be able to buy his own house /s

We love when people just lie about monetary conversion rates because no one will fact check them

Hah I love seeing this because Chris is a friend of mine in real life. He’ll never live this down.

Fully fuck this fucking shit.

www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-pol...

I don't think this is accurate. According to the National Archives currency converter, 15s in 1840 was equivalent in purchasing power to £45.31 in 2017 (obviously somewhat more now). 5s was the daily wage of a skilled tradesman. 15s per week was a (grimly) comically low salary in the context of 1843

Sure, but Dickens is before NHS in the UK and tiny Tim needed treatments. And surely every rich country has single-payer healthcare now, right?

You’d think!

Bob Cratchit would have made £39 per year, or £4,094 adjusted to 2023, which is the equivalent of $5,148 US. Assuming a work week of 6 days, 12 hours per day (typical.of a clerk then), he would have earned $1.38/hour.

We are $1.38 We are $1.38 We are $1.38

Whoa your math is quite different!

So running the numbers, it's actually ~$100 a week now.

And his last raise was only three years prior.

But his income rose pretty well if you consider he's an accountant

Adjust it for 2023 inflationary numbers... Bet ole Bob is nearly to 40k a year by now.

And I wonder what his rent was...

and Bob supported a wife and three kids on that.

Awesome 😎

Holy shit I make a quarter than

Even worse down here in Mexico jesus

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For anyone feeling the urge to fight this. An unskilled worker in the 1840's would have earned 14.5 shilling a week, if assumed a 6-day work week. Which was about 84% of a living wage (if I read the real wage table correctly). www.jstor.org/stable/10.10...

He also had to wear a suit to work, those things don’t come cheap.

Wow!

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