7.10 (0) In 1933, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (who later won a Nobel prize in economics) and a group of his associates at Stockholm
University collected a fantastically detailed historical series of prices and price indexes in Sweden from 1830 until 1930. This was published in a book called The Cost of Living in Sweden. In this book you can find
100 years of prices for goods such as oat groats, hard rye bread, salted codfish, beef, reindeer meat, birchwood, tallow candles, eggs, sugar, and coffee. There are also estimates of the quantities of each good consumed by an average working-class family in 1850 and again in 1890.
The table below gives prices in 1830, 1850, 1890, and 1913, for flour, meat, milk, and potatoes. In this time period, these four staple foods accounted for about 2/3 of the Swedish food budget. 2P +4M +6J =