ABSTRACT
William Fleetwood, in 1707, took a bundle of goods a, which he supposed represented the life-style of a student, and calculated its cost A1 in his day, and the coat A0 in “H. IV days”, 400 years earlier. If p0,p1 were the prices in those periods, we have5
A0 = p0a, A1 = p1a. One can understand these to be the incomes needed in the two periods that have the desired purchasing power, or maintain the standard of living or life-style precisely represented by the commodity bundlea.With the considerations to follow, it should be appreciated that Fleetwood had no significance to give to the ratio A1/A0.
