Aren't you then making the correction twice?

It appears it would have been between 1 and 3 weeks wages for someone in a job where they would carry a gun:

http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2012/01/wh...

A somewhat decent low skill job these days pays $30,000-35,000, which puts the comparison in the ballpark of $500, not $5,000.

No.

I experienced this when I went to Colombia. Their peso generally goes for a quarter to a third of a dollar. But prices are also cheaper. Something that costs a dollar here will cost one or two pesos there. So there's the multiplier of currency / price difference.

There's also the multiplier of the amount of money people make. This one's harder to nail down, but just because something costs $600 in real money doesn't mean that that will feel like $600 coming out of your pocket when you spend it. I can spend $600 weekly without batting an eye, but someone at my relative social station in Colombia probably wouldn't be able to, their salary would be less even accounting for the currency difference.

There's also access to credit. A purchase is much easier to make when you can get someone to finance it for you.

There's a lot more to relative value than just currency differences.

I feel like you only read the first sentence of my comment. "2 weeks wages" should feel somewhat similar across time and place.

Why would you expect that? If the purchasing power of that wage isn't the same, then it will feel different. If the only thing changing is the currency value, then sure, it will feel similar. Currency exchange rates != purchasing power.

The reason there's a difference between the two is that currency exchange rates are calculated using different inputs than purchasing power rates are. Purchasing power compares things like milk and eggs and gas whereas currency exchange is mostly limited to fairly liquid financial instruments like bank notes and bond instruments.

Making such corrections is interesting. I'd like to hear more comments on it.

Whether it's equivalent current value is $600 (as posted elsewhere) or $5400, both numbers are believable. The functional difference between a modern $600 rifle and a $5400 one is, to most casual observers, minimal - though the owner may have reason to pay $4800 for that difference.

In modern terms, anyone selling a $5,400 rifle would be hard pressed to sell 2,500 of them, let alone 25,000 to the civilian market. And while we're making adjustments, the US population in 1900 was just a hair over 75m, meaning that one of these was produced for every 3k people.

Don't let the raw numbers fool you - this was an everyman's gun. A good one, yes. Still though, an everyman's gun.

If you'd really like to make price-corrections look at a place like http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ that has a bunch of indexes.