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> As a result of this upward redistribution, most workers have seen little improvement in living standards from the productivity gains over this period. I beli

> As a result of this upward redistribution, most workers have seen little improvement in living standards from the productivity gains over this period. I believe this to be a myth caused by lamp-posting. The world is a much better place than it was 30 years ago, we just haven't found the right way to quantify exactly how much value 'high technology' has brought to their lives. Measurable wealth might have been redistributed upwards, but everyone is still better off regardless. I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago.

siavosh 11y ago
Can you elaborate on why you'd rather be poor today than rich 20 years ago (~1995) ?
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Essentially, it boils down to how effective I can be with my time. I can be far more productive today, using modern information tools, than I ever could have in the mid-nineties. It's not just a function of experience, in 1995 I'd already had like 8 years of exposure to computers and programming. The main barriers I had to success were in knowing what to do and how to do it. Now, there are practically no informational barriers at all. I've shifted from looking for options to take to sifting through all the available, great ones. The quality of what you can find on the Internet these days is just mind-bogglingly better. What this means is that time spent 20 years ago is worth less than time spent now. And since time is far more valuable than money, there isn't an amount of money you could throw at me to make me yearn for those old days. I use the similar logic to come to the conclusion that I'd rather be a lower-class American than a Chinese billionaire. I'd actually rather be a middle class Chinese than a Chinese billionaire, if only because that means I could move to the States. Everything I've read about these people indicate myopic, ugly personalities. The social fluidity of the US is worth more money than I could ever imagine, as increasing the value of time spent is worth more than any amount of money.
ssalenik 11y ago
> I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. This makes it sound like rich people 20 years ago had it pretty bad... What did technology add to their lives aside from convenience?
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Nothing so drastic. I'm saying that if I had to be 30 and rich 20 years ago or 30 and poor today, I'd pick the latter. Some days I feel like I've won the 'history lottery'. Right age at the right time in the right country. I'm not certain I would choose the same thing twenty years from now. I think the essential reason why I would make that choice today isn't going to be all that much more compelling in the future, meaning the money is going to play a bigger role. All-in-all, I think we vastly underestimate what the Internet has done for us. Like by a factor of millions.
mortenjorck 11y ago
I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. Try volunteering at a soup kitchen sometime. You will rethink this sentiment.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  I was poor for the first 7 or so years of my life. I've moved to a new city with nothing but a few hundred bucks keeping me from homelessness. The condition isn't permanent, or at least, it doesn't have to be.
  - phil248 11y ago
    Sure, there can just be 150 million jobs in the United States that all pay more than $100k/year, right? Everyone can be rich!
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  Poor in this country (the US) is totally different than other countries. Most "poor" people have TV's, VCR's computers and smartphones. Most poor people can find places to sleep or crash or get groceries and handouts to survive. With all of the government plans, it's actually pretty easy to be poor in America: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishing-numbers-americas-poor-still-live-better-than-most-of-the-rest-of-humanity/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishi... You want to see real poverty? Go to Hati, go to Panama, Cuba or go to nearly any South African country ravaged by centuries of war. People literally have NOTHING. They're thankful for clean water, and a small meal. Forget about clean clothes, basic hygiene and other multiple things we take for granted every single day.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    Yes, the picture changes drastically if I'd have to consider being anywhere other than the US.
daniel-cussen 11y ago
> I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. Poor today means homelessness or working several jobs. Rich in 1995 meant flying around the world and eating really well, great company...lap of luxury, really. You must really like your iPad.
- gozur88 11y ago
  Depends on your definition of poor. By the official poverty standards, which except income from government programs, poor people in the US can be quite comfortable in the material sense.
  - beatpanda 11y ago
    You should spend time with actual poor people and tell them about how comfortable they are.
    - isolate 11y ago
      Poverty certainly aggravates things like mental illness and drug addiction, and is strongly correlated with homelessness, but I think he means it is possible to be materially comfortable in the sense of food/clothes/shelter, at least relative to places in the world where that isn't possible. But... welfare could stand to be higher, as could the minimum wage.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      Yes, yes, this wouldn't be HN without someone chiming in to say how much better they know poor people than the rest of us. Thanks.
arca_vorago 11y ago
You know, I hear this quit a bit but I really don't like this position because it ignores all the very real issues and seemingly justifies the current state of things through some strange "the greater good" lens. Sure, we are better off as a percentage, because we now have 7 billion plus people in the world. 20 years ago there were only 5 billion... but the actual numbers of people with poor living standards is, I would venture, actually higher. There were only 2 billion in 1927... As to your original point that little improvement in living standards being a "myth caused by lamp-posting"... I don't know how you can ignore the actual numbers regarding lack of living standards reflecting productivity gains for the lower-middle class... It's not a myth at all, it's a fact that we work longer hours, for less pay adjusted for inflation, with higher-costs of living. The industrial revolution was supposed to be about giving man the time to pursue more noble goals, but instead it became a notch in the capitalists belt of exploitation of the workers. In short, I think your post is nonsensical.
VikingCoder 11y ago
> I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. The most generous restatement of this that I can imagine is, "I'd rather be middle-class today than rich twenty years ago." Because poor is poor. Not knowing where you're going to eat next, not knowing where you're going to sleep, not having money for formula or diapers, there's no time where that's good. But even with the generous form, I still disagree. Having a Blu-Ray player and a flat screen today... versus a Laserdisk and a Projector twenty years ago... An Android today... versus a Car Phone back then... A house today... versus 4 homes, one of which is overseas back then... Hell, you can't fly a Concorde today.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  > Because poor is poor. Not knowing where you're going to eat next, not knowing where you're going to sleep, not having money for formula or diapers, there's no time where that's good. There are many shades of 'poor-ness'. I'd model them as various forms of insecurity. Poor is not just one thing. The main thing that hurts the most is loss of hope. If you have no hope that things will ever get better, then you'll stop trying to find jobs, you'll stop standing up for yourself, you'll settle for whatever security you can find, be it in the arms of a psychopath or not. With the Internet, you can find out about the larger world. You can talk to people that are not part of your tiny social circle. It's a life raft that you can hold on to. I met this older lady at the bar once who was in a real rough spot, she had a fixed income that she thought was so small that she couldn't afford her own space, and no access to the Internet to look for anything and no ability to do so even if she had, old people are scared of Internet. She was living with several other women in the house of a man who I'd gathered was at least being emotionally if not physically abusive to. He was charging them rent and coercing favors out of them and being controlling. It was all this lady could do to get out of the house once a week. I happened to have my laptop with me, so I asked her what her income was, then went on Craigslist and found her several neighborhoods she could move to that fit all her criteria. The next time I saw her at the bar, she had managed to secure a rental using the information I'd given her. She was a million times happier and effusively grateful for my pointing her in the right direction. What she had told me pissed me off to the point of being willing to consider violence to rectify her situation, but all she really needed was a few minutes on Craigslist to radically transform her life. Never underestimate the value of information. The rest of the tech can jump off a cliff, but you will have to pry the Internet from my cold, dead fingers.
drumdance 11y ago
If you were rich twenty years ago, many of our modern conveniences could be purchased via labor. Uber? Pay for a private chauffeur Travel? Pay a top-tier travel agent Technology has pushed more luxuries to the masses but rich in 1995 was still pretty awesome. Maybe if you'd said 50 years ago I'd be more in agreement. Plus, there is the downside of technology. More distraction, easier for competitors know more about your business and thus catch up with you, easier for your employer to outsource your job overseas etc.
brightball 11y ago
> I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. Since everybody else is commenting I'll join in too. :-) Rich twenty years ago meant that instead of an iPhone, you had a secretary. Your TV was smaller. Your music was better. You talked to people in person. Oddly enough, the world at that time was a lot less crazy than it is today too. Being poor in any era is in no way desirable compared to being rich in any era. A statement like that assumes poor means "I could probably live really cheap if I had to today" similar to tiny-housers. The reality is closer to being uncertain of whether you will eat every day, where you will sleep and not to mention a feeling of hopelessness that can very easily come from feeling stuck in such a situation. When you're worried about having enough money to survive, things like getting a better education or job training go out the window. Just by saying "I'd rather be poor..." you're getting the theoretical ability to CHOOSE it.
twoodfin 11y ago
It's not even that mysterious: Productivity gains haven't been evenly distributed any more than income gains have been. Even discounting demographic changes like substantially increased rates of immigration, it's statistically suspect to compare the median wage (typically of only non-supervisory workers) or living standard with the sum total productivity of the economy. The disparity in income growth rates across households can be related in part to productivity. Changes in technology do not have an equal impact on all workers in the economy. Over the past 30 years, improvements in technology, such as computer innovations, have led to increases in labor productivity for workers with technical skills ... These high-skilled workers experienced greater increases in compensation than lower-skilled workers. ... For a select group of “economic superstars,” technological innovations have expanded the size of audiences, leading to strong increases in income ... The rapidly growing demand for video games has resulted in similar income growth in a narrow segment of the software industry. In the late 1990s, creators of video game software experienced average annual income growth rates estimated to be 6 percentage points higher than workers creating non-entertainment software products, such as for computer databases. https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/1q07will.pdf https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/1q07will.... The whole paper is well worth perusing. You'll be surprised how much of the total income gain in the U.S. is attributable to movie stars and pro athletes, and that is nearly entirely (economically speaking) a result of their exceptional "productivity". That is, being one of only a thousand or so people capable of producing something people will collectively pay billions for.
maxxxxx 11y ago
How old are you? The world wasn't really fundamentally different twenty years ago. Maybe try a hundred years.
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
I'm with vinceguidry here. I can be poor enough that I have to walk to the library to use a computer. Once there, though, I can Google basically all of the world's information. (20 years ago, I could have tried to look it up in the library's card catalog, I suppose, and hoped that they had a relevant book, and that I was looking under the right topic, and that the book, if it existed in the catalog, was listed under the right topic, and that the book wasn't checked out or misplaced...) 20 years ago, if you were poor and unemployed, you went through the help-wanted ads in the newspaper. Today, you can look at those same ads on-line, or you can go to craigslist. 20 years ago, if you were poor and the cops beat you up, you whined about The Man to your buddies. Today, you hope one of your buddies got a video of it, and you post it online and bring down public outrage on the PD. (Whether the PD changes or not as a result, at least your voice can be really heard - to the point that sometimes the president starts putting pressure on the PD.) I could go on. The point is something that PG has said: Technology is a multiplier. If you've got something you want to do, technology can make it take much less effort. But if you're hopeless and adrift, with nothing you're aiming for, all the technology can do is fill your time with fluff so that you don't feel so bad. That's not much of a win for those people.

siavosh 11y ago

Can you elaborate on why you'd rather be poor today than rich 20 years ago (~1995) ?

vinceguidry 11y ago
Essentially, it boils down to how effective I can be with my time. I can be far more productive today, using modern information tools, than I ever could have in the mid-nineties. It's not just a function of experience, in 1995 I'd already had like 8 years of exposure to computers and programming. The main barriers I had to success were in knowing what to do and how to do it. Now, there are practically no informational barriers at all. I've shifted from looking for options to take to sifting through all the available, great ones. The quality of what you can find on the Internet these days is just mind-bogglingly better. What this means is that time spent 20 years ago is worth less than time spent now. And since time is far more valuable than money, there isn't an amount of money you could throw at me to make me yearn for those old days. I use the similar logic to come to the conclusion that I'd rather be a lower-class American than a Chinese billionaire. I'd actually rather be a middle class Chinese than a Chinese billionaire, if only because that means I could move to the States. Everything I've read about these people indicate myopic, ugly personalities. The social fluidity of the US is worth more money than I could ever imagine, as increasing the value of time spent is worth more than any amount of money.

ssalenik 11y ago

> I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. This makes it sound like rich people 20 years ago had it pretty bad... What did technology add to their lives aside from convenience?

vinceguidry 11y ago
Nothing so drastic. I'm saying that if I had to be 30 and rich 20 years ago or 30 and poor today, I'd pick the latter. Some days I feel like I've won the 'history lottery'. Right age at the right time in the right country. I'm not certain I would choose the same thing twenty years from now. I think the essential reason why I would make that choice today isn't going to be all that much more compelling in the future, meaning the money is going to play a bigger role. All-in-all, I think we vastly underestimate what the Internet has done for us. Like by a factor of millions.

mortenjorck 11y ago

I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. Try volunteering at a soup kitchen sometime. You will rethink this sentiment.

vinceguidry 11y ago
I was poor for the first 7 or so years of my life. I've moved to a new city with nothing but a few hundred bucks keeping me from homelessness. The condition isn't permanent, or at least, it doesn't have to be.
- phil248 11y ago
  Sure, there can just be 150 million jobs in the United States that all pay more than $100k/year, right? Everyone can be rich!
at-fates-hands 11y ago
Poor in this country (the US) is totally different than other countries. Most "poor" people have TV's, VCR's computers and smartphones. Most poor people can find places to sleep or crash or get groceries and handouts to survive. With all of the government plans, it's actually pretty easy to be poor in America: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishing-numbers-americas-poor-still-live-better-than-most-of-the-rest-of-humanity/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishi... You want to see real poverty? Go to Hati, go to Panama, Cuba or go to nearly any South African country ravaged by centuries of war. People literally have NOTHING. They're thankful for clean water, and a small meal. Forget about clean clothes, basic hygiene and other multiple things we take for granted every single day.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Yes, the picture changes drastically if I'd have to consider being anywhere other than the US.

daniel-cussen 11y ago

> I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. Poor today means homelessness or working several jobs. Rich in 1995 meant flying around the world and eating really well, great company...lap of luxury, really. You must really like your iPad.

gozur88 11y ago
Depends on your definition of poor. By the official poverty standards, which except income from government programs, poor people in the US can be quite comfortable in the material sense.
- beatpanda 11y ago
  You should spend time with actual poor people and tell them about how comfortable they are.
  - isolate 11y ago
    Poverty certainly aggravates things like mental illness and drug addiction, and is strongly correlated with homelessness, but I think he means it is possible to be materially comfortable in the sense of food/clothes/shelter, at least relative to places in the world where that isn't possible. But... welfare could stand to be higher, as could the minimum wage.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    Yes, yes, this wouldn't be HN without someone chiming in to say how much better they know poor people than the rest of us. Thanks.

arca_vorago 11y ago

You know, I hear this quit a bit but I really don't like this position because it ignores all the very real issues and seemingly justifies the current state of things through some strange "the greater good" lens. Sure, we are better off as a percentage, because we now have 7 billion plus people in the world. 20 years ago there were only 5 billion... but the actual numbers of people with poor living standards is, I would venture, actually higher. There were only 2 billion in 1927... As to your original point that little improvement in living standards being a "myth caused by lamp-posting"... I don't know how you can ignore the actual numbers regarding lack of living standards reflecting productivity gains for the lower-middle class... It's not a myth at all, it's a fact that we work longer hours, for less pay adjusted for inflation, with higher-costs of living. The industrial revolution was supposed to be about giving man the time to pursue more noble goals, but instead it became a notch in the capitalists belt of exploitation of the workers. In short, I think your post is nonsensical.

VikingCoder 11y ago

> I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. The most generous restatement of this that I can imagine is, "I'd rather be middle-class today than rich twenty years ago." Because poor is poor. Not knowing where you're going to eat next, not knowing where you're going to sleep, not having money for formula or diapers, there's no time where that's good. But even with the generous form, I still disagree. Having a Blu-Ray player and a flat screen today... versus a Laserdisk and a Projector twenty years ago... An Android today... versus a Car Phone back then... A house today... versus 4 homes, one of which is overseas back then... Hell, you can't fly a Concorde today.

vinceguidry 11y ago
> Because poor is poor. Not knowing where you're going to eat next, not knowing where you're going to sleep, not having money for formula or diapers, there's no time where that's good. There are many shades of 'poor-ness'. I'd model them as various forms of insecurity. Poor is not just one thing. The main thing that hurts the most is loss of hope. If you have no hope that things will ever get better, then you'll stop trying to find jobs, you'll stop standing up for yourself, you'll settle for whatever security you can find, be it in the arms of a psychopath or not. With the Internet, you can find out about the larger world. You can talk to people that are not part of your tiny social circle. It's a life raft that you can hold on to. I met this older lady at the bar once who was in a real rough spot, she had a fixed income that she thought was so small that she couldn't afford her own space, and no access to the Internet to look for anything and no ability to do so even if she had, old people are scared of Internet. She was living with several other women in the house of a man who I'd gathered was at least being emotionally if not physically abusive to. He was charging them rent and coercing favors out of them and being controlling. It was all this lady could do to get out of the house once a week. I happened to have my laptop with me, so I asked her what her income was, then went on Craigslist and found her several neighborhoods she could move to that fit all her criteria. The next time I saw her at the bar, she had managed to secure a rental using the information I'd given her. She was a million times happier and effusively grateful for my pointing her in the right direction. What she had told me pissed me off to the point of being willing to consider violence to rectify her situation, but all she really needed was a few minutes on Craigslist to radically transform her life. Never underestimate the value of information. The rest of the tech can jump off a cliff, but you will have to pry the Internet from my cold, dead fingers.

drumdance 11y ago

If you were rich twenty years ago, many of our modern conveniences could be purchased via labor. Uber? Pay for a private chauffeur Travel? Pay a top-tier travel agent Technology has pushed more luxuries to the masses but rich in 1995 was still pretty awesome. Maybe if you'd said 50 years ago I'd be more in agreement. Plus, there is the downside of technology. More distraction, easier for competitors know more about your business and thus catch up with you, easier for your employer to outsource your job overseas etc.

brightball 11y ago

> I'd rather be poor today than rich twenty years ago. Since everybody else is commenting I'll join in too. :-) Rich twenty years ago meant that instead of an iPhone, you had a secretary. Your TV was smaller. Your music was better. You talked to people in person. Oddly enough, the world at that time was a lot less crazy than it is today too. Being poor in any era is in no way desirable compared to being rich in any era. A statement like that assumes poor means "I could probably live really cheap if I had to today" similar to tiny-housers. The reality is closer to being uncertain of whether you will eat every day, where you will sleep and not to mention a feeling of hopelessness that can very easily come from feeling stuck in such a situation. When you're worried about having enough money to survive, things like getting a better education or job training go out the window. Just by saying "I'd rather be poor..." you're getting the theoretical ability to CHOOSE it.

twoodfin 11y ago

It's not even that mysterious: Productivity gains haven't been evenly distributed any more than income gains have been. Even discounting demographic changes like substantially increased rates of immigration, it's statistically suspect to compare the median wage (typically of only non-supervisory workers) or living standard with the sum total productivity of the economy. The disparity in income growth rates across households can be related in part to productivity. Changes in technology do not have an equal impact on all workers in the economy. Over the past 30 years, improvements in technology, such as computer innovations, have led to increases in labor productivity for workers with technical skills ... These high-skilled workers experienced greater increases in compensation than lower-skilled workers. ... For a select group of “economic superstars,” technological innovations have expanded the size of audiences, leading to strong increases in income ... The rapidly growing demand for video games has resulted in similar income growth in a narrow segment of the software industry. In the late 1990s, creators of video game software experienced average annual income growth rates estimated to be 6 percentage points higher than workers creating non-entertainment software products, such as for computer databases. https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/1q07will.pdf https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/1q07will.... The whole paper is well worth perusing. You'll be surprised how much of the total income gain in the U.S. is attributable to movie stars and pro athletes, and that is nearly entirely (economically speaking) a result of their exceptional "productivity". That is, being one of only a thousand or so people capable of producing something people will collectively pay billions for.

maxxxxx 11y ago

How old are you? The world wasn't really fundamentally different twenty years ago. Maybe try a hundred years.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

I'm with vinceguidry here. I can be poor enough that I have to walk to the library to use a computer. Once there, though, I can Google basically all of the world's information. (20 years ago, I could have tried to look it up in the library's card catalog, I suppose, and hoped that they had a relevant book, and that I was looking under the right topic, and that the book, if it existed in the catalog, was listed under the right topic, and that the book wasn't checked out or misplaced...) 20 years ago, if you were poor and unemployed, you went through the help-wanted ads in the newspaper. Today, you can look at those same ads on-line, or you can go to craigslist. 20 years ago, if you were poor and the cops beat you up, you whined about The Man to your buddies. Today, you hope one of your buddies got a video of it, and you post it online and bring down public outrage on the PD. (Whether the PD changes or not as a result, at least your voice can be really heard - to the point that sometimes the president starts putting pressure on the PD.) I could go on. The point is something that PG has said: Technology is a multiplier. If you've got something you want to do, technology can make it take much less effort. But if you're hopeless and adrift, with nothing you're aiming for, all the technology can do is fill your time with fluff so that you don't feel so bad. That's not much of a win for those people.