Thomas Started This Rolly Coaster Story.

[shilala]

Thomas caused me to math, blame this on him. I start poking buttons and it's all over cause there's neat stories in those numbers.
Like this sh!t I tarded together...

Thomas mentioned the value of a nickel in 1884. The cost to ride the new Coney Island Rolly Coaster on this day in history.
A nickel in 1884 wielded the power of $1.25-$75.00 compared to 2015.
But it depends how you look at it. It's where the math gets really fascinating and explains a couple things.

If you were buying a stick of butter or some bacon or riding a rolly coaster, that nickel would have a purchasing power of about a buck and a quarter today.
When someone looked at you jumping on that rolly coaster for a nickel, it seemed like you were tossing down 12 or 13 bucks in today's dollars.
That's why that ride was priced at that point. It was decadent, novel, and out of reach for most of us plebes.

Back to the point...
If you put that nickel to work by building something, it wielded a force equal to about 75 bucks in today's dollars.
This meant, quite literally, that every nickel you used to create would return 1,500 nickels. That's a 150,000% return on your money.
The GDP is the comparative weight that makes that money "real" because it's actually creating and becoming a concrete product of capital. Or something.

That takes you to men like Rockefeller and Carnegie.
Both were genius at taking advantage of this incredible post-civil war advantage.
A country was rebuilding, healing, and expanding industrially and ifrastructurally like no country had ever done in the history of the world.

They could see this economic diamond grow daily. They had faith in it. Economists of the day had their collective thumb up their ass, lacking any empirical evidence to provide a strong, believable forecast. Most men were just flat scared to death to make a move because of this.

Rockefeller built an empire worth around 700 BILLION dollars, literally on the bodies of his workers. The estimates of men who died on the job (or of job-related illness from conditions) in his employ is astronomical.
On the other hand, in his later years he very much devoted himself to philanthropy. He's long been described a Psycopath Angel, which is why most folks are ambivalent about him and the family's name.

Carnegie had been right on Rockefeller's heels for a time, until "his" private lake killed a couple thousand people in Johnstown, and it wrecked him. He switched gears, sold out, and made philanthropy his full time job. He used that same crazy economy to build and give much more than his dollar's worth.

Carnegie at his height was worth around 70 BILLION dollars.
Rockefeller, 700 BILLION dollars.
To put this in perspective, Bill Gates is worth around 80 BILLION today. His net worth has doubled in the last few years.

That seems like Bill Gates is worth more than Carnegie, right?
Not remotely. At Carnegie's peak, when he sold US Steel, he was the richest man in the world, and his wealth accounted for about .75% of the GDP.
At the height of Rockelfeller's wealth, he was worth 1.5% of the GPD. That is unreal.
Here's the perspective...
Bill Gate's 80 BILLION is worth .0005% of our GDP.
If anyone ever reaches John D. Rockefeller's wealth in this day and age, may God have mercy on all our souls. Really.

P.S.
I probably wouldn't turn this in as a report.
Odds are it's brutally wrong, I relied a lot on my brain.