It’s incredibly confusing when I’m trying to get a understanding of what the actual value of money was from the past and people use inflation as some sort of yardstick. You’ll hear

“and that would be 3500 in 2021 dollars”

But you can’t just take an arbitrary amount and inflate it to show how the value of money, I’m assuming that it’s the equivalent to having 3000 dollars in Sydney is going to be far different then having 3000 dollars in rural India.

So why haven’t historians or economists devised away you can translate the value of what say one dollar was in the mid 1850s and make it comparable to what we can buy today?

Thank you and apologies for my poorly worded question I’m not sure how to articulate it better.