Representing Money in Writing

This is an excerpt from a book I was reading:

[They] say that the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is 2.27 trillion dollars (twice India’s gross domestic product). That was at 2004 prices. At today’s prices it would be about four trillion dollars. A trillion has twelve zeroes.

This raises a lot of questions: How much is 2.27 trillion in today’s prices? How much is India’s GDP now? What year was the author referring to by “At today’s prices”?

This is a common pattern found in most literature. And it’s annoying enough that it’s better to assume that the reader has some sense of economics, because almost always the target audience has some grasp of the context.

Is there a better way to represent a quantitative measure of money in the past in terms of some present day reference?

The above example is a lot better, because it provides some scale of reference (value compared to the country’s GDP).

What could be employed instead for smaller values of money?¹ Is there a better way to express it than to do it through food? Even the Economist compares difference currencies through the Big Mac². Something like:

“I got a quarter, which was enough to buy a loaf of bread and a bit of meat.”

“Her weekly allowance was two shillings, just enough to cover her meals and a small candle.”

It would also be annoying, to be spoonfed the details of the money that’s being talked about, which is mostly why the explanation is avoided in most cases. That making sense, it is also better if there was a small section in the preface or the introduction.

However we live in the 21st century and there are more modern ways to read text than on printed paper. We could make the values appear dynamic and its content depending on where the reader is from. Example pseudocode:

(async function() {
    const readerCountry = await API.getReaderCountry(); // e.g., "US"
    const localCurrency = countryToCurrency[readerCountry] || "USD";

    const inrElements = document.querySelectorAll(".inr");

    inrElements.forEach(async el => {
        const inrAmount = parseFloat(el.textContent.replace(/[^\d.]/g,''));
        const exchangeRate = await API.getExchangeRate("INR", localCurrency);
        el.title = `≈ ${ (inrAmount / exchangeRate) } ${localCurrency}`;
        el.style.borderBottom = "1px dotted";
        el.style.cursor = "help";
    });
})();

So a reader from Europe does not have to worry about how much a thousand rupees is, since his reader gives him a context of how much that is in his local currency. Try hovering over the money mentioned:

His monthly salary was about 10,000 INR

And the currency with which the original amount is referenced to can be changed depending on the user’s location.