I had a fun idea for a small project this weekend, and so I quickly put it together over the couple of days. The result is Price Perspective.
Humor me: have you ever bought something, considered the price, and wondered how that price would look to someone else? Someone in the developing world, or a billionaire, or just your friend in Australia? In other words, can we develop an intuition for purchasing power?
The Price Perspective add-on answers these questions. Let’s consider an example: my income is sufficient to buy myself a delivery pizza for dinner without a second thought. How much work does it take for someone in Afghanistan to buy the same pizza? I can fire up Price Perspective to check:
The results are pretty shocking.
How about another example: say I’m looking to buy a house in the Netherlands. I fire up funda.nl and look at a few places in Amsterdam. After a few minutes wondering if I’ll ever be in an economic position to actually afford any of these homes (and speculating on if that day will come before or after I have spent this much money on rent over my lifetime), I wonder what these prices look like from the other side. Let’s see what it’d take for the Zuck to buy this apartment I fancy:
Well… that’s depressing. Let’s experiment with Price Perspective to see what it would take to make a dent in Zuck’s wallet. Let’s add some zeroes.
So, Zuckerberg over-bidding this apartment to the tune of €6.5B would cost him a proportion of his annual income which is comparable to me buying it for €5,000.
How about the reverse? How long would I have to work to buy, say, Jeff Bezos’s new mansion?
Yep. That level of wealth inequality is a sign of a totally normal, healthy, well-functioning society.
Curious to try it out for yourself? Get Price Perspective from addons.mozilla.org, tell it where you live and how much money you make in a year, and develop your own sense of perspective.