From “License to Dine: 007 and the Real Exchange Rate,” a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which compares the evolution of James Bond’s salary with that of French and British restaurant prices.

At the start of his career as a Double-0, James Bond was paid reasonably well, perhaps very well. In Moonraker (1955), Ian Fleming tells us that Bond “earned 1,500 pounds a year, the salary of a Principal Officer in the Civil Service, and he had a thousand a year free of tax on his own.” That was well above the average annual earnings…