It's not quite accurate. The population was over 2500 at the time, they've just marked large important estates and buildings.

I mean he was renting a very large house and inflation doesn't mean a 1:1 correspondence when real prices of goods got cheaper with mass production and there's other economic phenomena going on.

US Dollars were not the established principle currency until 1792. Before and for decades after people would use standard or localized British units (so a Pennsylvania pound was different from a Massachusetts pound, each different from the British pound sterling) equivalent to whatever they had on hand (like Spanish bullion for example).

Like even in the 1820s, John Quincy Adams reported that the dime was “utterly unknown,” whereas a Spanish reale would be accepted as a shilling in New York, nine pence in Boston and eleven pennies in Philadelphia, all based on the “absurd” application of English denominations to Spanish coins.

Tbh I'm not quite sure what coinage or paper money Knox was actually being paid in. Certainly not continental dollars as that money collapsed and was replaced with usd at at a 1000:1 conversion in 1792.

New York was using a localized Pound that had mixed sterling and devalued paper money but he probably was not using that localized rate when writing down expenses (everything would be worth 1/3 as much which doesn't quite make sense to me).

He would have been used to using pounds, shillings etc and that's probably why he wrote the list like that but whether the physical money he was paid in and used was pound sterlings or local NY pounds or some other coin like Spanish reales, not sure.

About 120 years later and inflation from the 1700s is really hard to meaningfully measure but there's a document from the US's first secretary of war where he averaged out his living expenses in New York City in 1785-87.

He spent 215 pounds a year on rent, in today's dollars it's almost exactly 5 grand a month(assuming Knox was denoting things in British pounds sterling, otherwise it's less if he was using New York Pounds, currency in the colonial and early republic period gets weird). On that he rented a house for himself, his brother, his wife, 5 children, two hired servants, one unpaid girl, and two indentured boy servants. The house rent included a stables for two horses. They spent less on the rent than they did on food, which was about 280 2023 dollars a day. They spent just about half of what they paid in rent for the year on wine.

Here's the link.

Edit: If he's using NY Pounds, divide everything by 3 when using an inflation calculator but again inflation doesn't really tell the whole story.

Yeah they do that on purpose to force people to use cards and phones.

For London that's mainly because of the way fares work and the reduced number of stations and hours even though there's slightly more track. The system is divided up into zones encircling central London and depending on between which zones you are traveling and whether you are traveling at a peak hour, the fare goes up.

It would be like if within the bottom half of Manhattan, and within each borough the fare was 2.75 but then if you crossed between them you'd get charged an extra two dollars. There are also daily and weekly caps that depend on zones and peak times. It's a pretty complicated fare system.

The weekly cap for the largest zone travel is like 90 dollars, way more than the 33 dollar cap the MTA has.

The buses in London also work differently and some are much cheaper than the London Underground (and MTA) and have daily caps of like 5 dollars while others are more expensive.

Buses in London are also subsidized, unlike the trains. Makes sense considering there are over 700 lines and like 20 thousand bus stops in London, double that of the MTA.

The Tokyo metro also has ticket price tiers that depend on distance traveled (they still use paper tickets where you get a source and destination station iirc). These actually cap out at like $2.50 USD. Again though, beyond the cost of operation being cheaper in Japan, there are reduced hours and fewer stations and daily ridership is actually higher than the NYC subway.

All this is to say, these self funded systems depend on pretty different conditions from the MTA. The MTA to self fund like this would have to do a combination of hour reductions and tiered distance and congestion pricing.

It would be very expensive just to to make the logistical changes to how swipes work for that, but imo is also just not socially worth it. I'd rather have a progressive percentage tax on all city residents and businesses (to hit the commuters out of city) and make the whole system free than do some chicanery of "well we'll target 50 percent self funded so raise fares x amount, spend this much to do cross-borough pricing, and reduce hours by y".

We should also transition the MTA to being fully state owned, not the current public benefit corporation model.

Key Food is the absolute worst.

It's going to still be under 5 dollars for delivery. Cheaper than commuting to get it.

The absolute bullshit that goes on in this city with food prices is ridiculous. Saw cereal for 9 dollars recently. I have a couple small deli's near me I trust but order Aldi for most of my grocery shopping (and it's cheaper than going to any of the nearby super markets for anything not randomly on sale).