4 ms·

> They earned very little, travelled little, had little in the way of material or aspirational opportunities. That is some extraordinary revisionism you've com

> They earned very little, travelled little, had little in the way of material or aspirational opportunities. That is some extraordinary revisionism you've come up with there. It is the 1960s, not the 1600s. > We chose' what we have now, and at least in material terms, it's a whole lot better. There's a lot of opportunity out there. Real wage growth stalls half way through the 70s, just five years later.

jomamaxx 10y ago
In the 1960's people did not travel. Commercial air was for the rich. People might have had a family outing, by car, to Disneyland or something. Now people travel worldwide. "Real wage growth stalls half way through the 70s, just five years later." This is completely false - and is a function of how we calculate inflation. In fact, it's laughably false. A 'medium wage earner' today has a significantly improved material situation than in the 1960's. Everything is significantly better for the common person on a common wage. The average person today has multiple TV's, cable, internet, smartphone, 'apps', 500 channels, amazing healthcare, amazing cars (have you ever driven a car from the 1960's), travel possibilities, educational possibilities. The notion that real wages have been stagnant is one of the most laughable economic fallacies of the modern era. Anyone alive in that time knows exactly the truth. Financial concerns aside (aka debt), a good measure of wealth is 'what you can buy with it'. The average person is significantly wealthier than the average person in the 1960s.
- ethanbond 10y ago
  So how about sources then?
  - internaut 10y ago
    I can tell you the answer they typically give. They, and this is not a joke, put a 'hedonic adjustment' for quality of life into inflation. The criteria is not measurable, it's about feeling, not seeing. It is the same answer the Fed gives to the government. They definitely do not believe it, but we're talking about people effectively employed to be the Wizard of Oz here. We didn't do that for the transition from gas lamps to electric or for horse drawn buggy to car. It is bullshit. When real wages go up people can actually tell. I don't believe in democracy and thereby take polling with sacks of salt, but I do believe in the wisdom of crowds when they have knowledge or experience, and boy are Westerners pessimistic about both the economy and the government since around 2008. Every Gallup poll and Pew survey shows it.
    - jomamaxx 10y ago
      XBox One is better than Nintendo 64 and it's not just a 'feel good thing'. Tomatoes that you can buy - any time of year - instead of just when they are 'in season' is a material thing, not a fantasy improvement. Cars that drive better, get 3x better mileage, are significantly more safe, and have tons more features - are better - it's not some crap fantasy.
      - internaut 10y ago
        I don't deny that quality of life improvements exist. The proposition I make is that wage growth halted for the average (median average) American in the 70s. The same phenomenon spreads to other Westernized countries too later on, most dramatically evident in the island of Japan which has spent 30 years keeping up maintenance. Alongside this I proposed (here or elsewhere on HN) that we were and are yet presently living in a stagnant period. The thesis is well laid out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4 Stagnation is not a plateau or a halt to growth, but a slowdown in the rate of change. So there is some change, just not much relative to former periods. The economist Robert Gordon has written a life's work on the subject. He may be wrong, but it is not a stupid idea. The items you mention are examples of incremental improvements in existing technology. This is not unimportant, it is at least half the battle since what is the point of high technology if nobody can access its utility. However my worry, and that of Levchin, Page, Gordon, Musk and Thiel is that we are not seeing breakthrough technologies able to scale up and this is a very troubling sign for the future. Energy production and storage, space travel (Musks's entire rationale is reasoned on the Stagnation Hypothesis), biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials technology, central coordination, many important areas in our society are in some form of decay, diminishing returns are evident. Lots of PR and press releases but no impacts. Investors have gone bust in many of these areas, esp. in biotech, nanotech and cleantech. If everything is improving that shouldn't be happening. Again, the benchmark is not no change. The benchmark is the past history of those areas. You can pick bright spots in each industry and high achievements but we do not see things like technologies to make heart attacks impossible or cheap aerogel insulation, the kinds of leaps we made in the past that really lifted all boats. This can be difficult to believe if you live in a modern western city, but if you go to the peripheral of our world you can visibly see it rotting away. This is because it is not the center of the system that fails first, it is the peripheral. In a period of rapid true growth you see whole new fields of development opening up from what used to be small niche fields (like computation used to be). It is not about having faith in the future or technology, it is that we have to come up with business plans and ideas that make things happen or it is entirely plausible they never will happen. Believe me, I want a better future as well, I'm not trying to drag you down because I have a cynical personality or something like that.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    "So how about sources then?" Are you kidding me? You must be young :). Don't you have grandparents? Ask them. Look at their photos. Are you too young to remember a time without smartphones, internet? Have you ever driven a car from the 1960s? Would you dare say that a Nintendo 64 is 'the same as' an XBox one? You do realize that commercial air has exploded since the 1960's - it was once a 1%-er activity? You do know that the number of people attending post-high school education is about tripled, right? Do you remember a time when 'open heart surgery' was extremely rare and probably meant you died? It's common now. They can do hip replacements with a little slit. If you can't get a hard-on - there's a pill for that. Do you realize that 'there was no TV' in the early 1950's for all intents and purposes? That a large number of people, on farms and rural areas did not have plumbing (i.e. toilets?). My eldest uncle used an outhouse until he was 16. And they were the 'rich' family in town - with the first colour TV! Do you realize that this very discussion could not even happen in the 1970's? And that basically nobody envisioned that it could have? Man - not even long ago - about the late 1990's - 'cell phones' were still a 'rich person' thing. Zero kids had cellphones. There was a meme of 'rich dicks' on their large cellphones talking loudly to brag that they had them. Life expectancy is way up. Almost every measure. You have to be very young if you're asking that question. Every single facet of material life has improved, except maybe 'time spent in traffic' and 'debt load'. And since 2008 the average home size and cars/person ratio has gone down a little bit.

jomamaxx 10y ago

In the 1960's people did not travel. Commercial air was for the rich. People might have had a family outing, by car, to Disneyland or something. Now people travel worldwide. "Real wage growth stalls half way through the 70s, just five years later." This is completely false - and is a function of how we calculate inflation. In fact, it's laughably false. A 'medium wage earner' today has a significantly improved material situation than in the 1960's. Everything is significantly better for the common person on a common wage. The average person today has multiple TV's, cable, internet, smartphone, 'apps', 500 channels, amazing healthcare, amazing cars (have you ever driven a car from the 1960's), travel possibilities, educational possibilities. The notion that real wages have been stagnant is one of the most laughable economic fallacies of the modern era. Anyone alive in that time knows exactly the truth. Financial concerns aside (aka debt), a good measure of wealth is 'what you can buy with it'. The average person is significantly wealthier than the average person in the 1960s.

ethanbond 10y ago
So how about sources then?
- internaut 10y ago
  I can tell you the answer they typically give. They, and this is not a joke, put a 'hedonic adjustment' for quality of life into inflation. The criteria is not measurable, it's about feeling, not seeing. It is the same answer the Fed gives to the government. They definitely do not believe it, but we're talking about people effectively employed to be the Wizard of Oz here. We didn't do that for the transition from gas lamps to electric or for horse drawn buggy to car. It is bullshit. When real wages go up people can actually tell. I don't believe in democracy and thereby take polling with sacks of salt, but I do believe in the wisdom of crowds when they have knowledge or experience, and boy are Westerners pessimistic about both the economy and the government since around 2008. Every Gallup poll and Pew survey shows it.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    XBox One is better than Nintendo 64 and it's not just a 'feel good thing'. Tomatoes that you can buy - any time of year - instead of just when they are 'in season' is a material thing, not a fantasy improvement. Cars that drive better, get 3x better mileage, are significantly more safe, and have tons more features - are better - it's not some crap fantasy.
    - internaut 10y ago
      I don't deny that quality of life improvements exist. The proposition I make is that wage growth halted for the average (median average) American in the 70s. The same phenomenon spreads to other Westernized countries too later on, most dramatically evident in the island of Japan which has spent 30 years keeping up maintenance. Alongside this I proposed (here or elsewhere on HN) that we were and are yet presently living in a stagnant period. The thesis is well laid out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4 Stagnation is not a plateau or a halt to growth, but a slowdown in the rate of change. So there is some change, just not much relative to former periods. The economist Robert Gordon has written a life's work on the subject. He may be wrong, but it is not a stupid idea. The items you mention are examples of incremental improvements in existing technology. This is not unimportant, it is at least half the battle since what is the point of high technology if nobody can access its utility. However my worry, and that of Levchin, Page, Gordon, Musk and Thiel is that we are not seeing breakthrough technologies able to scale up and this is a very troubling sign for the future. Energy production and storage, space travel (Musks's entire rationale is reasoned on the Stagnation Hypothesis), biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials technology, central coordination, many important areas in our society are in some form of decay, diminishing returns are evident. Lots of PR and press releases but no impacts. Investors have gone bust in many of these areas, esp. in biotech, nanotech and cleantech. If everything is improving that shouldn't be happening. Again, the benchmark is not no change. The benchmark is the past history of those areas. You can pick bright spots in each industry and high achievements but we do not see things like technologies to make heart attacks impossible or cheap aerogel insulation, the kinds of leaps we made in the past that really lifted all boats. This can be difficult to believe if you live in a modern western city, but if you go to the peripheral of our world you can visibly see it rotting away. This is because it is not the center of the system that fails first, it is the peripheral. In a period of rapid true growth you see whole new fields of development opening up from what used to be small niche fields (like computation used to be). It is not about having faith in the future or technology, it is that we have to come up with business plans and ideas that make things happen or it is entirely plausible they never will happen. Believe me, I want a better future as well, I'm not trying to drag you down because I have a cynical personality or something like that.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "So how about sources then?" Are you kidding me? You must be young :). Don't you have grandparents? Ask them. Look at their photos. Are you too young to remember a time without smartphones, internet? Have you ever driven a car from the 1960s? Would you dare say that a Nintendo 64 is 'the same as' an XBox one? You do realize that commercial air has exploded since the 1960's - it was once a 1%-er activity? You do know that the number of people attending post-high school education is about tripled, right? Do you remember a time when 'open heart surgery' was extremely rare and probably meant you died? It's common now. They can do hip replacements with a little slit. If you can't get a hard-on - there's a pill for that. Do you realize that 'there was no TV' in the early 1950's for all intents and purposes? That a large number of people, on farms and rural areas did not have plumbing (i.e. toilets?). My eldest uncle used an outhouse until he was 16. And they were the 'rich' family in town - with the first colour TV! Do you realize that this very discussion could not even happen in the 1970's? And that basically nobody envisioned that it could have? Man - not even long ago - about the late 1990's - 'cell phones' were still a 'rich person' thing. Zero kids had cellphones. There was a meme of 'rich dicks' on their large cellphones talking loudly to brag that they had them. Life expectancy is way up. Almost every measure. You have to be very young if you're asking that question. Every single facet of material life has improved, except maybe 'time spent in traffic' and 'debt load'. And since 2008 the average home size and cars/person ratio has gone down a little bit.