November 5, 2014

Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science | Volume 1 | HARD 1

Calvin's damage updated for inflation

One of the most common criticisms of our Calvin and Hobbes paper is that we didn't adjust for inflation (e.g., see here). In other words, all the damage occurred between 1986 and 1996, yet we estimated damage using prices of objects and service in 2014. To see how much damage Calvin would have caused at the time he was causing the damage, we'd have to adjust for inflation.

Now, we have a tenuous grasp on the concept of inflation (how can the value of a dollar increase over time? It's still just one dollar, right? Are my quarters dated 1986 now worth $0.54 each?), so we had help in calculating our inflation-adjusted cost estimates. Below is a link to an MS Excel spreadsheet that contains our orignial data, as well as an adjustment for inflation provided by Kerbal Experts. They used this website to get the values. All damages were adjusted, except for the values in which an estimate was given in the comic.

[CLICK HERE FOR EXCEL SPREADSHEET]

We also updated our Figure:

Another common criticism is that we didn't include the Noodle Incident. We've ignored those people, because they clearly haven't read the entire paper.