Foreword | April 23, 2026

The Cost of Living 

The rise in cost of living throughout much of the world is a current concern for good reasons, though the value of money in the United States has been a persistent issue since Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who funded the American Revolution by kiting loans between international banks and issuing nearly worthless “Morris notes” to soldiers. For later partaking in the wild land speculation that resulted in the Panic of 1796, Morris was thrown into our country’s first real penitentiary, the Walnut Street Prison, where he was visited by our first president and other luminaries. The US economy went on to suffer more than a century of price surges and declines, leading up to the biggie in the 1930s. In my working life, prices have increased during all but three brief periods. A person who went to work in 1992 on an income of $50,000 needs to make $124,000 now to be paid an equivalent amount; that salary in 1982—no true raises—would be $181,000 today. 

The MC in Cabaret stands in a spotlight and sings the iconic “Money Makes the World Go Round.” Cabaret is set in the Weimar Republic, Germany’s fledgling democratic government, where money became so devalued that violence flourished and Berliners were consumed by loss of savings, chaotic bartering, and social unrest. The source for Cabaret was Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin, which is chock-full of characters on the make, shabby boarding houses, shuttered banks, and escapist nightclubs. While 1920s and ’30s Germany is an extreme case hyperinflation and society under stress, the story’s broad themes are hardly unique to that place and time: instability, ambition, material and relational hardship, and moral compromises that can sometimes be necessary for survival. 

Though cost of living is a statistic calculated by tracking broad swaths of data, its impact can feel acutely personal. I am almost embarrassed to admit the emotional effect that I experienced when reading one of the many books concerning the themes of aspiration and scarcity. Some of those books are more distant in time and setting, such as Zola’s Germinal or Lahiri’s The Namesake, or they use more intellectual or experimental approaches, such as McCarthy’s The Road. Others are more like horror tales, dealing with the systemic destruction or consumption of human beings—Morrison’s Beloved, Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. It was the plain old 1949 American play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller that caused me to break down and cry the first time I read it, and not just a tear or two. As is usually the case with such responses to literature, I felt that way because the protagonist, Willy Loman, reminded me of someone close to me: my own father. He had lived through the Great Depression, toiled seemingly every waking hour, worked his way through college, and eventually built a business, selling on the road, agonizing over his employees’ satisfaction—to the point that he almost seemed to lose his bearings at times. Miller’s play hit close to home, whether due to my own projections or not. It remains a classic because it powerfully demonstrates how to value but retain a healthy suspicion of the American Dream.