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The lack of smart phones is only the tip of the iceberg of what makes the 1950s dreadful. There is a lot more tech which has made live more bearable since these days. Medicine is a big one, dying of something which we could cure in 2025 will severely impact your QoL. Social techs are another, unless his daughter wants to be a tradwife, I think it highly unlikely that raised on SJP (like everyone is, to some degree), she will appreciate the roles which 1959 can offer to her. For me personally, even the idea of going back to an age where indoor smoking in public buildings was normal would be a hard no. The ability to own property in a somewhat desirable location without being a millionaire would be nice, though.
Unlike in South Park, there is no immigration to the past or future or exchange of goods with other times in the real world. Inflation is typically tied to a basket of reference consumer goods, and there is certainly some leeway in what you consider equivalent.
On reflection, I think that the utility of having 12.5$ in 1959 is dwarfed by the requirement of having to live in that time. Another consideration would be to simply ask "would you rather have invested 12.5k$ in 1959 or 100k$ in 2025?" That one is not even worth debating, because the stock market has increased 60fold since then.
The problem is that (long-term) historically speaking the big human prosperity question of "can you reliably feed your family now and in the medium future" was the benchmark, occasionally missed entirely, and that has ceased to be relevant for quite a while now. So any other measure is in some sense 'unnatural' and artificial.
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Yeah, the quality question is really quite a wrench in the idea of comparing inflation adjusted GDP.
Or maybe the other way around, if you want to truly compute inflation there’s no principle way to do so that it counts for the difference in quality. Who knows how much healthcare has inflated in real dollars, in terms of like for like treatment.
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