Do you remember when a cup of coffee didn’t cost $3? Or when ten dollars bought you enough gasoline to drive for a week? How about buying a pack of baseball cards for 25 cents and getting a piece of gum in the pack too? I remember those days. My money seemed to go a lot farther then. Or did it? You can figure out the answer to that question and other economics questions by using the Measuring Worth calculators.
Applications for Education
Measuring Worth provides excellent data sets, calculators, and graphs that students can use in an economics course or a consumer mathematics course. A simple assignment that you could have students do with Measuring Worth is to have students pick their favorite food and figure out how much it would have cost when their parents were the same age. Students could also ask parents how much their first car cost and calculate what that cost would be today.
