unfortunately due to the government shutdown, the BLS inflation data for September 2025 is delayed from October 15 (as it normally is) until October 24[1], so please check back then to see if he is >109 Cent.
assuming future stability, the site will automatically update on the 15th of every month.
This is a powerful visual representation. I would suggest that the impact could be even stronger if you provided side-by-side images of 50 Cent, where the second is scaled up proportionately.
that’s a good idea. in future versions, i might need to consider multiple renderings as different economists likely prefer alternative visualizations of 50’s monetary adjustments
I think they are rounding a float for the number display and not rounding for the image as you can see different sized image segments for the months where the number remains at 100 cents. You could still be correct, I have no way of verifying.
2. Copy and paste this into your browser location bar: javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 50/prompt("Inflation-adjusted 50 Cent value:"))
3. Enter the inflation-adjusted 50 Cent value, which as we are talking about this today, is 109.
Et voila, inflation-adjusted 50 Cent music, and anyone finding this later can adjust it to their current inflation-adjusted value.
I believe there are limits on how slow the browsers will playback video. This code is not guaranteed to work past any possible hyperinflations or massive deflations that may occur in the future.
If you're curious how that may sound with a more careful job done then the browsers will do with stretching, consider Beethoven's 9th symphony stretched to 24 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSJ9Bkhb1Q4&list=PLMEcbs3sHQ... Some of you may well legitimately love this. Obviously the frequency profile of doing this to a 50 Cent piece will be quite different but it at least gives the idea.
[1]: It is sheer coincidence that this video ID ends in "Ass". This is "50 Cent - In Da Club (Official Music Video)" for those wondering.
Using the first 35,000 words is a bit unfair for a rapper such as Lil Wayne who's been releasing work since he was 14.
Also I wonder if this is including proper nouns and other references. (I'd think it should, but it's hard to account for the fact that referencing seven different Chris's would be counted as one token used seven times. Similarly, many words have many meanings, and those are all being lumped together as well, so no accounting here can probably ever be perfect).
If you had all the lyrics for all the rappers I think I'd
- aggregate word counts
- combine variations
- remove most commonly used words in each language (I, I'm, You, You're, etc)
Then see who came out ahead. You shouldn't get penalized for releasing more.
You could probably do a bunch of cool analysis with that data.
edit: Oh no, there's actually a Genius API isn't there. No no no no. I have no time!
The original author was pretty clear about the limitations of his work. I certainly would like to see an updated version, so I'm glad you got nerd sniped and not me. I look forward to see your super accurate updated version in a few months ;)
I'm surprised Twista isn't much higher, if you listen to his lyrics he's always busting out different words like a thesaurus (I think he's one who mentioned reading one as a kid or something?) but I guess this just means he's not released as many songs. I do like that MF Doom is listed as well, big respect to him, I never listened to him heavily.
One thing to note, you don't need every word on the planet to convey amazing lessons with lyrics, some of the more profound lyrics (I can't remember, but it certainly felt that way to me 15+ years ago) were by artists somewhere in the middle of your graph for me.
Just looked up Tech N9ne on there, really surprised he's in the middle. Immortal Technique more to the right with the list of people who really use an insane amount of words in their lyrics, not surprised honestly.
Edit: Just realized its the first 35,000 words... Man... this needs to do its best to get all of them. Unfortunately, there's songs by artists I can't find on ANY lyrics sites, so I fear this list will never be 100% but a close enough ballpark.
I would argue that valuation of '50 Cent' (real name Curtis James Jackson III) was essentially flat leading up to immediately before the release of Get Rich or Die Tryin', his debut album released February 6, 2003.
Which, undeniable, is an * all-time banger * that substantially increased the valuation of 50 Cent to something far surpassing US dollar inflation.
I was prepared to be absolutely fucking disgusted by such a comment but I.... shit. I mean... this is.... this is wild
I gotta go contemplate 'where we're at' again it seems. If that is truly a straight generative audio diffusion model.... wait, how did they get the same verse by verse chord progressions to match? this has to be professionally post-produced, right? AI models aren't able to do this end-to-end yet, right?
This is backwards. He's still 50 cent, but to have the buying power he had in '94, he'd need to $1.09. But he's still 50 cent, so really, in today's money he's more like 23 cent.
In some sense it's absurd. But historically its normal.
And to be more precise, 25 years to halve is actually less inflation than the historical average of 3.29% from 1914-2025. At that rate it would take 21-22 years to halve.
Actually there is a surprisingly good trick to be able to calculate this called the rule of 72. Take the inflation percentage (2, 3 %) and divide 72 by it. Thats how many years it will take to halve. Not completing accurate but actually very close.
But yeah, inflation is a bitch over long time horizons. It makes me laugh when people say stocks are risky. Say you are 20 years old and want to save $2M USD for your retirement by 65. Expect that to be more like $470k.
Historically - it's actually NOT normal. Link and quote below that examines this with graphs but, the crux is that we have accepted higher inflation in order to achieve stable inflation that is predictable.
"For the pre-Fed period (1790-1913), the average annual inflation was 0.4 percent with a coefficient of variation of 13.2. During the period 1941-2016, these figures changed to 3.5 percent and 0.8, respectively. If we look at the post-Volcker era (1988-2016), annual inflation was 2.2 percent on average with a coefficient of variation of 0.4." -
Also recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years (David Graeber) and Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty) which cover this and more on how current concepts of finance and capital post-1914 are incredibly different from the majority of human civilization.
I think a broader historical/anthropological approach is helpful here to understand why those tradeoffs were made.
If you move to before the central bank was created in 1913, the dollar remained remarkably stable in relation, although it did oscillate, it never deviated more than 50% from the starting point until after creation of the fed.
> It makes me laugh when people say stocks are risky.
I agree 100% with your thought.
However, I've come with an explanation: people save $100k and the amount in itself will not budge unless they use that money. This, of course, is a flawed argument as the amount doesn't matter; what you can buy with it does. With stocks—I prefer ETFs but I digress—you do not know the amount you will have in 40 years (even if, historically, you would have made money in absolutely all cases).
This uncertainty, coupled with lack of economics knowledge, is why people qualify stocks as "risky". However, instead of "risky", I think they mean "volatile". Cash is absolutely the riskiest of assets as it loses value in 100% of cases despite being more stable than stocks.
And my cynic mind tells me that the banking industry has all to gain from telling people that "stocks are very risky", instilling fear and, instead, selling them over-complicated products where the bank is guaranteed to make a profit on the back of their clients. Of course, they tell them it's "100% safe".
Inflation is just what you want when your debt is denominated in the currency that is being inflated, though. The more inflation the easier it will be to service the debt.
Certainly a lot of that inflation was in the last ~8 years. I certainly know what you mean.
Groceries are one of the more discretionary items. Your mortgage is fixed, demand for gas is inelastic, etc. But groceries you respond to the price. And so many staples have become 2,3,4X times more expensive compared to pre-covid. I remember the cheap beef (chuck roast) was about $4/lb and decent steak (ribeye) was about $9/lb. Now its about $10/lb and $22/lb.
So psychologically, now your "splurging" just gets you the "cheap" stuff.
Wages have risen a bit. But 1) not nearly as much as inflation 2) these are very asymetric and 3) the way they rise doesnt feel like wage inflation. Even those who saw wages rise due to inflation probably felt like it was other things. Such as simply changing jobs. Or just normal yearly review. Or maybe they havent switched jobs and have some "unrealized gains" awaiting them still. No one one saw their wages incrementally rise month by month.
Inflation is annoying, but deflation is destructive. When that happens, people hold on to money as an investment and it doesn’t flow in the economy. The Great Depression was caused by deflation. (See Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the US.)
As a result, central banks try to have a little inflation, so that random mistakes don’t push us into deflation. The Fed’s target is 2%. I think it should be a little higher. (See Fischer Black’s “Interest Rates as Options” and the shadow short-term rate.)
No one should be holding inflating dollars over the long term. That money should be invested in loans (bonds, mortgages, …) or equity (stocks, real estate, …). We have good ways of comparing investments over time by removing the inflation. These are CPI or the GDP deflator.
P.S. Half its value over 25 years is extremely stable if you look at the history of money, especially fiat money. It halved in value in 9 years, from 1974 to 1983.
It's not absurd. And there's no automatic way to make money perfectly stable. That's not how money works.
And deflation is much worse. So we target a small 2% yearly inflation so that if it's 1% or 3% it's not a big deal. Whereas if you target 0% and wind up with -1%, you've got problems.
There's that word we again. So you're the crazy gringo who always picks my pocket?
Deflation is only bad for people who hold a lot of debt. For people who are cash positive, deflation means you're richer, you're being paid more to do the same job, etc. all while maintaining your freedom. Deflation actually being good is the central gamble behind bitcoin's design. If more people understood that then they'd probably stop using it for such frivolous purposes. Not everyone is privileged enough to even hold debt, so it's really an exclusionary system. And what do the people who the system trusts to have debt (e.g. private equity firms) do with it? They do leveraged buyouts to rip out the heart and soul of responsible American companies. The only thing inflation is good for is keeping folks running on the hamster wheel and bankrolling entitlements.
Why??? My (very limited) understanding is that we like a small amount of inflation, to incentivize reinvestment into the economy/R&D/etc. If there’s no inflation, you incentivize dragon-hoarding behavior
How would that work? You have a claim to a past output that no longer exists. If the nominal value of the claim stays the same, the real value of the denomination unit must change.
People don't understand that money is a time and location bound object and pretend it is infinitely liquid and fungible when it isn't. Money is kind of like electricity. When you borrow it into existence and spend it, it travels a path through society, but it must then travel along a return path back to the source. Inflation could be thought of as a form of resistive loss, where current stays the same but voltage drops.
There's a reason why demurrage (or its ugly brother inflation) is a necessary bitter pill if you want a working money system. It forces money to travel down the return path sooner than later.
Get a brokerage account that has a sister bank account. Put money in, buy TIPS/gold/equities, pay the 30% tax or whatever on the inflationary difference, then buy your stuff. The point is to force you into buying more stable units of account and then taxing the inflation as a "capital gain."
Pretty genius because it can be framed as taxing greedy capitalists when literally they're just taxing fractional inflation.
I feel like this is the real-life version of my favorite joke from Andy Kindler: "I know they said don't re-invent the wheel, but does it have to be so round?"
Readit News
unfortunately due to the government shutdown, the BLS inflation data for September 2025 is delayed from October 15 (as it normally is) until October 24[1], so please check back then to see if he is >109 Cent.
assuming future stability, the site will automatically update on the 15th of every month.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/bls/092025-cpi-reschedule-notice.htm
I think the area should be scaled proportionally, so the new width and height should be multiplied by sqrt(cents/50)
EG, 109.453452 cent or 109 113363/250000 or some such.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/apr/how-big-m...
cron: '0 13 15 * *'
2. Copy and paste this into your browser location bar: javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 50/prompt("Inflation-adjusted 50 Cent value:"))
3. Enter the inflation-adjusted 50 Cent value, which as we are talking about this today, is 109.
Et voila, inflation-adjusted 50 Cent music, and anyone finding this later can adjust it to their current inflation-adjusted value.
I believe there are limits on how slow the browsers will playback video. This code is not guaranteed to work past any possible hyperinflations or massive deflations that may occur in the future.
If you're curious how that may sound with a more careful job done then the browsers will do with stretching, consider Beethoven's 9th symphony stretched to 24 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSJ9Bkhb1Q4&list=PLMEcbs3sHQ... Some of you may well legitimately love this. Obviously the frequency profile of doing this to a 50 Cent piece will be quite different but it at least gives the idea.
[1]: It is sheer coincidence that this video ID ends in "Ass". This is "50 Cent - In Da Club (Official Music Video)" for those wondering.
It reminds me of another great interactive rapper graph: "rappers, sorted by the size of their vocabulary":
https://pudding.cool/projects/vocabulary/index.html
Also I wonder if this is including proper nouns and other references. (I'd think it should, but it's hard to account for the fact that referencing seven different Chris's would be counted as one token used seven times. Similarly, many words have many meanings, and those are all being lumped together as well, so no accounting here can probably ever be perfect).
If you had all the lyrics for all the rappers I think I'd - aggregate word counts - combine variations - remove most commonly used words in each language (I, I'm, You, You're, etc)
Then see who came out ahead. You shouldn't get penalized for releasing more.
You could probably do a bunch of cool analysis with that data.
edit: Oh no, there's actually a Genius API isn't there. No no no no. I have no time!
One thing to note, you don't need every word on the planet to convey amazing lessons with lyrics, some of the more profound lyrics (I can't remember, but it certainly felt that way to me 15+ years ago) were by artists somewhere in the middle of your graph for me.
Just looked up Tech N9ne on there, really surprised he's in the middle. Immortal Technique more to the right with the list of people who really use an insane amount of words in their lyrics, not surprised honestly.
Edit: Just realized its the first 35,000 words... Man... this needs to do its best to get all of them. Unfortunately, there's songs by artists I can't find on ANY lyrics sites, so I fear this list will never be 100% but a close enough ballpark.
Which, undeniable, is an * all-time banger * that substantially increased the valuation of 50 Cent to something far surpassing US dollar inflation.
Seriously, go listen that that album again; total game changer. Top cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D3crqpClPY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqH-GKVyryM
I gotta go contemplate 'where we're at' again it seems. If that is truly a straight generative audio diffusion model.... wait, how did they get the same verse by verse chord progressions to match? this has to be professionally post-produced, right? AI models aren't able to do this end-to-end yet, right?
And to be more precise, 25 years to halve is actually less inflation than the historical average of 3.29% from 1914-2025. At that rate it would take 21-22 years to halve.
Actually there is a surprisingly good trick to be able to calculate this called the rule of 72. Take the inflation percentage (2, 3 %) and divide 72 by it. Thats how many years it will take to halve. Not completing accurate but actually very close.
But yeah, inflation is a bitch over long time horizons. It makes me laugh when people say stocks are risky. Say you are 20 years old and want to save $2M USD for your retirement by 65. Expect that to be more like $470k.
"For the pre-Fed period (1790-1913), the average annual inflation was 0.4 percent with a coefficient of variation of 13.2. During the period 1941-2016, these figures changed to 3.5 percent and 0.8, respectively. If we look at the post-Volcker era (1988-2016), annual inflation was 2.2 percent on average with a coefficient of variation of 0.4." -
Source: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/s...
Also recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years (David Graeber) and Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty) which cover this and more on how current concepts of finance and capital post-1914 are incredibly different from the majority of human civilization.
I think a broader historical/anthropological approach is helpful here to understand why those tradeoffs were made.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Dollar_v...
I agree 100% with your thought.
However, I've come with an explanation: people save $100k and the amount in itself will not budge unless they use that money. This, of course, is a flawed argument as the amount doesn't matter; what you can buy with it does. With stocks—I prefer ETFs but I digress—you do not know the amount you will have in 40 years (even if, historically, you would have made money in absolutely all cases).
This uncertainty, coupled with lack of economics knowledge, is why people qualify stocks as "risky". However, instead of "risky", I think they mean "volatile". Cash is absolutely the riskiest of assets as it loses value in 100% of cases despite being more stable than stocks.
And my cynic mind tells me that the banking industry has all to gain from telling people that "stocks are very risky", instilling fear and, instead, selling them over-complicated products where the bank is guaranteed to make a profit on the back of their clients. Of course, they tell them it's "100% safe".
If currency halves in purchasing power in 25 yrs, that means inflation is 100% in 25 years, so
That said, I feel like this number is way off, personally, based on changes in housing and food prices between the two times.
Groceries are one of the more discretionary items. Your mortgage is fixed, demand for gas is inelastic, etc. But groceries you respond to the price. And so many staples have become 2,3,4X times more expensive compared to pre-covid. I remember the cheap beef (chuck roast) was about $4/lb and decent steak (ribeye) was about $9/lb. Now its about $10/lb and $22/lb.
So psychologically, now your "splurging" just gets you the "cheap" stuff.
Wages have risen a bit. But 1) not nearly as much as inflation 2) these are very asymetric and 3) the way they rise doesnt feel like wage inflation. Even those who saw wages rise due to inflation probably felt like it was other things. Such as simply changing jobs. Or just normal yearly review. Or maybe they havent switched jobs and have some "unrealized gains" awaiting them still. No one one saw their wages incrementally rise month by month.
Inflation is annoying, but deflation is destructive. When that happens, people hold on to money as an investment and it doesn’t flow in the economy. The Great Depression was caused by deflation. (See Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the US.)
As a result, central banks try to have a little inflation, so that random mistakes don’t push us into deflation. The Fed’s target is 2%. I think it should be a little higher. (See Fischer Black’s “Interest Rates as Options” and the shadow short-term rate.)
No one should be holding inflating dollars over the long term. That money should be invested in loans (bonds, mortgages, …) or equity (stocks, real estate, …). We have good ways of comparing investments over time by removing the inflation. These are CPI or the GDP deflator.
And deflation is much worse. So we target a small 2% yearly inflation so that if it's 1% or 3% it's not a big deal. Whereas if you target 0% and wind up with -1%, you've got problems.
Deflation is only bad for people who hold a lot of debt. For people who are cash positive, deflation means you're richer, you're being paid more to do the same job, etc. all while maintaining your freedom. Deflation actually being good is the central gamble behind bitcoin's design. If more people understood that then they'd probably stop using it for such frivolous purposes. Not everyone is privileged enough to even hold debt, so it's really an exclusionary system. And what do the people who the system trusts to have debt (e.g. private equity firms) do with it? They do leveraged buyouts to rip out the heart and soul of responsible American companies. The only thing inflation is good for is keeping folks running on the hamster wheel and bankrolling entitlements.
People don't understand that money is a time and location bound object and pretend it is infinitely liquid and fungible when it isn't. Money is kind of like electricity. When you borrow it into existence and spend it, it travels a path through society, but it must then travel along a return path back to the source. Inflation could be thought of as a form of resistive loss, where current stays the same but voltage drops.
There's a reason why demurrage (or its ugly brother inflation) is a necessary bitter pill if you want a working money system. It forces money to travel down the return path sooner than later.
Pretty genius because it can be framed as taxing greedy capitalists when literally they're just taxing fractional inflation.
Deleted Comment
I feel like this is the real-life version of my favorite joke from Andy Kindler: "I know they said don't re-invent the wheel, but does it have to be so round?"
Edit: emphasis
Dead Comment
https://www.rateinflation.com/consumer-price-index/uk-histor...
https://www.rateinflation.com/consumer-price-index/usa-histo...
Both approx +110%
Yet over that time UK GDP per capita is up only 46% compared to the US which is up a massive +223%. Depressing.
I see what they did there.