Amazing how difficult it is to compare prices, wages and cost of living from one era to another, isn’t it?
The more you study the subject, the murkier it becomes.
I’ve given some thought to a universal metric.
Median income for a year divided by 2000 (50 forty-hour weeks).
The cost of food, housing, medical care (or slaves) could then be compared in “medians” from one year or century to another. I’ve never thrashed this out with 1860 due to inability to locate accurate median income figures.
One of the interesting things you find when looking into this subject is the way the price differential between things changes.
Food, for instance, used to cost a LOT more on a relative basis than today, at least if you compare staple foods. People think food has gotten more expensive largely because they insist on eating mainly processed and restaurant foods.
What do you think about my metric?
In post #178 above, those numbers came directly from the site I linked to, and what it tells us clearly is that direct comparisons between today and any long-ago period will produce a variety of results.
Two of those numbers correspond to your metric: unskilled labor wages and production worker wages.
In this example of $500 in 1860 those equate to $89,000 and $176,000 respectively.
Based on that, I said $500 in 1860 could equal anything from $100,000 to...
The higher number of $1 million is based on the site's "relative share of GDP", plus known farmland values then & now.
Based on those, I picked a high number of $1 million in today's values for $500 in 1860.
Bottom line: because everything is different today, there is no way to make a single valid comparison with 1860.
But, if we say that $500 then was the value of a large farm, or a nice house, then that should convey pretty well what we're talking about, don't you think?