>>>I saw an episode of Little House on the Prarie today, and Charles Ingalls bribed Albert into going to school by offering him 25 cents per week. This was in 1880. He accepted the bribe of course. Opie does all manner of chores each week for that same 25 cents, yet it's ca lled an "allowance". Was Charles being extravagant or was Andy being cheap??<<<
Jeff, your question intrigued me, so I did a little research via Google to find out what kind of income the Ingalls family might have had. A few minutes of perusing resulted in the following: Per the 1880 census, the average median net income for landowning farmers in Tennessee (couldn't find the info for Minnesota) was $185. That breaks down to $3.56 per week, which means $0.25 per week for Albert would have been approximately 7% of the Ingalls family's income. The median annual household income for 1964 was $6,569, or about $126 weekly. Twenty-five cents would have been less than 0.2%! By contrast, 7% of that would be $8.82. Opie would think he was rich (and rightly so)! For comparison, the median annual household income for 2007 in the U. S. was $50,233, or $966 weekly. Seven per cent of that is $67.62, whereas 0.2% is $1.93. Obviously, Charles was quite extravagant in what he gave Albert. Twenty-five cents weekly would not have been realistic for someone of Charles's modest means. I think what Andy gave Opie as an allowance was quite reasonable, especially when you consider what he could have bought with it (five candy bars, two or three comic books). I grew up in the 60's and 70's. I had to beg my parents for an allowance, which they finally agreed to give me -- a whopping five cents per week! When I got into my teens, they grudgingly raised it to ten cents. You can imagine how long it took me to save up for anything! Now, don't get me wrong -- I have wonderful parents, but they grew up in poor farming families during the depression, so the very idea of an allowance was completely foreign to them. But, bless their hearts, even though I thought they were such tightwads at the time, I found out later that they had been putting away every penny they could into savings so that we three kids could all go to college. So I got over my deprived childhood. However, as a kid, I would have envied Opie his grand allowance of a whole quarter! Thelma Lou (Janet) _______________________________________________ WBMUTBB mailing list [email protected] http://www.mayberry.com/tagsrwc/wbmutbb/
