Inflation and earnings: what is the cost of a pint of beer?

From the Telegraph

"It were all so much cheaper when I were a lad... or was it? Professor Ian Stewart looks at how the money in your pocket has really changed over the years.

The price of a pub pint of beer could soon go up to £4 and ‘has doubled in the last 19 years’ said The Guardian a while back, in an article warning about the soaring price of barley. ‘Car road tax was a mere £10 in 1950 - think of what it is today,’ wrote a motoring journalist in a different paper. Every day we are bombarded with this kind of historical comparison of prices, intended to show how everything is soaring out of control and how badly off we all are.

It sounds plausible. My first house was worth £1100 in 1971, but it would sell for about £230,000 today. That’s a big increase. But how big?"

Location, location and how the West was won

From the BBC

"On his current visit to Beijing, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has said China will soon reclaim its position as the world's biggest economy - a role it has held for 18 of the past 20 centuries. But how did the US, Britain and the rest of Europe interrupt this reign of supremacy? It comes down to location.

Why does the West dominate the world?

Europeans have been asking this question since the 18th Century, and Africans and Asians since the 19th. But there is still not much agreement on the answers."

Roman credit crunch

Oxford historian Philip Kay has discovered what he believes was the first "credit crunch" or at least a major financial crisis in Rome in the early 1st century BCE. He says that in 66BCE Cicero gave a speech where he alluded to events in 88BCE where Mithridates VI of Pontus invaded Roman Asia. The invasion cost Rome so much money that credit was destroyed in Rome. The loss of the monies in Asia having a knock-on effect to Rome said to be similar to how the US sub-prime has had a knock-on effect to the UK economy. Yeah OK well its got Kay in the papers anyway.

Unfortunately Kay continues how Rome got itself out of the financial mess is not yet known.