Isn't Capitalism Great?
This month in 1979 Sony introduced the first Walkman (initially called the Soundabout), a small portable cassette-tape player designed to be used with headphones. It was priced at $199.95. In today’s dollars that’s $540. Today, of course, you will spend considerably less for a product that is considerably better. A Sony CD Walkman at Best Buy costs $50. Lesser-known brands can be had for about 20 bucks. MP3 players are more, but that will be temporary. Par for the course even in a badly hampered capitalist economy.
1 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Isn't Capitalism Great?.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blog.mises.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2216
This is from Sheldon Richman at the LewRockwell.com blog: This month in 1979 Sony introduced the first Walkman (initially called the Soundabout), a small portable cassette-tape player designed to be used with headphones. It was priced at $199.95. In to... Read More
Comments (3)
Steven Kane
And to think, the banksters at the Fed would have us all believe that falling prices are actually a bad thing.
Published: July 26, 2004 11:04 AM
Curt Howland
No kidding! I was astounded, while living in Japan, at the remarkable quantity of hostility printed about the "awful, terrible" fact that the price of a beef-bowl (rice, shredded beef, pretty much the equal of a hamburger in the US) had gone down.
That's right, it seemed a national crisis that people could spend only 400 yen for a beef-bowl instead of 450.
It takes two ignorances to come to this conclusion: One must believe that inflation is something other than the printing of worthless money; One must believe that having money left over is somehow "wasted".
At least in my opinion. The individual Japanese, on the other hand, understand the importance of saving for later, larger purchases. Their overlords constantly complain that they "save too much".
Published: July 27, 2004 7:23 AM
charley hardman
as a music-freak high school senior in 1980/81, i dropped $180 plus tax for the original walkman as soon as it came to town. (was a glorious, full-page ad in time magazine that got me.) have changed the drive belt once, and done some switch cleaning here and there, but except for the surprisingly high-quality headphones biting the dust after many trusty years, it still works well -- a bargain at $180, even considering the $4/hr job that paid for it. been a sony fan since.
Published: July 27, 2004 5:11 PM