Things are not inherently expensive. They are expensive relative to the other demands on one's finances.
For the average person paper would indeed have been expensive but for those who had disposable income and a reason to use paper it would have felt less so.
But it was certainly more expensive than it is now that 500 sheets of A4 at Tesco cost less than 5 GBP and that is one part in 6 400 of UK median annual household income.
Even in 1800 annual income for most people was under 20 pounds. So 500 sheets would cost one part in 60 of annual income (20 pounds * 240 pennies per pound/(4d per quire * 20 quires in 500)). That's about a hundred times more expensive in purchasing power terms. Presumably the further back you go the higher the price and the lower the income.
But the poor didn't write so the comparison is far from exact. For the wealthy it would still have been more expensive than now but not importantly so.
I'd counter that certain things are expensive and as technologies change, it opens up the technology to a broader audience, which poor people can write now due to changing affordability in writing due to technological changes. With paper/printing that drives literacy where the cheaper the technologies available are, the greater the population literacy. It for instance would be difficult to have a widely literate population if such population was stuck with using animal skins for paper with books being manually handwritten by educated and trained craftsmen. Products that require significant manual labor and/or space inherently bear a cost regardless of the type of economy involved, like the pyramids of Egypt (or Stonehenge, etc) are inherently expensive even though their construction pre-dates the use of currency.
> it opens up the technology to a broader audience,
What's that Gibson quote about the future being here, just not yet widely distributed?
> with books being manually handwritten by educated and trained craftsmen.
On this good point: Wonder what (many, certainly) crafts are involved in the build-up and "appearance" of the printing press? (for example).-
All the (dozen) skills necessary to get to movable type, alone, for example.-
PS. On a tangent: That'd be an interesting "worldview" layer for an AI - a really good sense of how technological progress has come about, in order to produce further innovations - doing multitudes-of-experts research in parallel to get to a desired outcome. That would be grand ...
The price of a satellite phone in 1650 was greater than all the money in the world combined, so that has to be considered expensive in absolute terms, right?
The price is undefined because there is no conception of the object and therefore no market.
If the idea of a phone - a computing/telecommunication device that use natural philosophy and not magic - were presented then an initial price can begin to be formed, defined as the amount of money they are willing to spend to develop it.
The prices of many of the "parts" were already known on that day. Perhaps most notably wireless service. This would have allowed at least a ballpark estimate for what people would be willing to pay.
PS. In a bit, like the weather? The further from the present you go, the "harder" it gets to solve for that?
That said, when approaching (or, surpassing) some "imposibility boundary" - for more an more parts to actually exist, ultimately leading to the whole being impossible ...
I think that's true. If you described an early personal computer and its capabilities (including software) in 1970, sure, a lot of people would be "Why would I want that?" But both business people and individuals could probably give some reasonable approximation of what they'd be willing to pay.
The thing with something like a phone is that it's so dependent on several different network effects that it's hard to put a real value on it in isolation. Of course, for an individual device, there's very much an upper limit. I suspect that a lot of people in 1970 would balk at the price of an iPhone but then they had other telecoms charges that would seem extortionate today.
Yeah, agreed, an iPhone or really most computers is a difficult comparison to make for this sort of thing. I mean, what is an iPhone anyway? It relies on a lot of infrastructure that wouldn’t be available in the 70’s: the modern internet, the apple App Store, usb chargers, a way to write and compile iOS programs and get it to run them, the first and third party programming ecosystem.
It seems like a nitpick but the value proposition of the thing is very dependent on the ability of all those, I’m sure we all have some intuition of which ought to be included, but it might not match.
An iPhone with all those things would probably be extremely valuable I guess. Thousands of times faster than the fastest supercomputer and a bit easier to carry.
Market forces can't (sustainably) adjust price to less than the cost of production. They can spur process and other improvements to reduce cost but that does take time and isn't always possible, especially in the near-term.
PS. One thing I have always found fascinating - obvious as it might be - is that paper (and paper in large, sufficiently cheap industrial quantities) was a prerequisite for the printing press "revolution" to take place ...
Technology trees are definitely a thing. The answer to "Could the Romans have invented an arbitrary fairly modern thing?" is almost always no because they would also have needed a bunch of other resources and inventions that didn't exist yet (and which they might have had little interest in pursuing given that they had plenty of cheap labor, etc.)
Some health-related things are an area where important advances could probably have happened earlier in principle: germ theory of disease, importance of sanitation, some relatively simple advances like antibiotics... All seem doable in principle relative to inventing a lot of 19th century industrial revolution devices.
ADDED: The Romans did apparently have some knowledge of antibiotics without presumably understanding the mechanisms or refining them. Per Wikipedia and other sources: "Antibiotics have been used since ancient times. Many civilizations used topical application of moldy bread, with many references to its beneficial effects arising from ancient Egypt, Nubia, China, Serbia, Greece, and Rome."
From the spinning wheel, to plentiful rags, to cotton paper, to the printing press.-
> ADDED: The Romans did apparently have some knowledge of antibiotics
Fascinating. Worth looking into.-
Sometimes, all it took was one person noticing something (midwives who wash their hands post partum tend to have better outcomes, farmers near cows get less sick, or not at all ...)
... but, you raise another good point: First principles, the search for the facts. Benefits at scale come with, consistently, wanting to go from observation, to general principles, to particular application, to mass application ...
... and, maybe, it took rational thought and the scientific method to get there.-
For the average person paper would indeed have been expensive but for those who had disposable income and a reason to use paper it would have felt less so.
But it was certainly more expensive than it is now that 500 sheets of A4 at Tesco cost less than 5 GBP and that is one part in 6 400 of UK median annual household income.
https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/writing-paper-expensi... says that the going rate for a quire of ordinary paper was about 4d.
Even in 1800 annual income for most people was under 20 pounds. So 500 sheets would cost one part in 60 of annual income (20 pounds * 240 pennies per pound/(4d per quire * 20 quires in 500)). That's about a hundred times more expensive in purchasing power terms. Presumably the further back you go the higher the price and the lower the income.
But the poor didn't write so the comparison is far from exact. For the wealthy it would still have been more expensive than now but not importantly so.
reply