“Subscripts For Citations § Inflation”, Gwern2020-01-08 (similar)⁠:

A typographic proposal: replace cumbersome inline citation formats like ’Foo et al. (201014ya)’ with subscripted dates/sources like ‘Fooet al2020’. Intuitive, easily implemented, consistent, compact, and can be used for evidentials in general.

My general approach of automatically inflation-adjusting dollar/₿ amounts to the current nominal (ie. real) amount, rather than default to presenting ever-more-misleading nominal historical amounts, could be applied to many other financial assets.

As far as almost all financial software is concerned, ‘a dollar is a dollar’, and as long as credits & debits sum to zero, everything is fine; inflation is, somewhat bizarrely, almost completely ignored, and left to readers or analysts to haphazardly handle it as they may (or may not, as is usually the case).

Here are 4 ideas of ‘inflation adjustments’ to make commonly-cited economic numbers more meaningful to our decision-making:

  1. rewrite individual stock returns to be always against a standard stock index, rather than against themselves in nominal terms

  2. annotate stock prices on a specific date with their #1 statistic from that date to ‘today’

  3. rewrite currencies to year-currencies, with ‘real’ currency amounts simply being reported in the most recent year-currency

  4. rewrite year-currencies into the NPV of the next-best alternative investment, which represents the compounding opportunity cost