Inflation in the United States in the late 1970s

Inflation in the United States in the late 1970s enters this diary not as an economic statistic but as a sudden change in the scale of everyday prices. On a trip from New York to the District of Columbia, Andy Warhol tallies routine expenses and discovers that costs have risen so sharply that the dollar no longer feels like a stable unit of value.

A travel day becomes an economic record

The entry records a succession of small payments: $3 for magazines and newspapers, $81 for shuttle tickets for Warhol and Fred Hughes, $6.50 for a cab to the Madison Hotel, $3 to check the baggage, and another $4 cab fare. The accumulation makes the journey feel expensive before Warhol identifies why it has caught his attention: even the hotel menu seems to have doubled in price.

The shrinking dollar

Warhol gives the change a concrete measure through a minute steak that once cost $7.50 and now costs $15. The comparison prompts a broader reflection on the money scale he had grown up with, in which inflation had seemed to arrive by pennies. Now, he observes, prices rise by dollars, while a dollar feels almost as negligible as a penny once did. The passage captures inflation as a disruption of familiar judgment: the figures are legible, but the value they represent has shifted.