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Mr. Darcy's wealth was ten thousand a year
Nobody in the novel asks for a discounted cash flow on Mr. Darcy. Nobody wonders whether he has a margin loan against his estate. The estate is not counted as an asset with a price, because he would never sell it, so its market value never comes up.
Today net worth works as points on a leaderboard, since you can't spend most of it. Billionaire has become a label that can be handed out: people on the timeline get called billionaires when they are not rich at all, because they carry the traits and associations. Millionaire went the same way. It once carried the weight billionaire does now, and today it means an upper middle class, well-to-do person with a house, whether they hold 5 million dollars or 800,000.
As the currency gets devalued, both literally and in what it can buy, the word loosens into a class marker.
How did people measure wealth in Austen's day?
In Regency England, wealth was usually stated as annual income from land or government bonds, not as a lump sum. Jane Austen's own novels follow the habit, so Mr. Bennet has 2,000 pounds a year and Mr. Bingley has 4,000 or 5,000. Income of that kind came from rents paid by tenants on the estate. A figure of 10,000 pounds a year placed Mr. Darcy among the wealthiest landowners in the countryside.
When did net worth lists become a thing?
Forbes published its first Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans in 1982. Magazines before that had printed occasional rankings of fortunes. The Forbes list estimated the value of stakes in companies, property, and other holdings. Its yearly publication helped make net worth the standard way of ranking wealth.
Why did the word millionaire change in meaning?
The word millionaire entered English in the early nineteenth century, when a million of any currency was an extraordinary sum. Inflation has steadily reduced what a million dollars can buy. A dollar in 1950 purchased roughly the same as ten dollars today, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index. A seven-figure net worth is now common among households that own a home in many cities.
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