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In real dollars, US per capita income has more than quintupled since 1929. http://www.demographia.com/db-pc1929.pdf http://www.demographia.com/db-pc1929.pdf (20

In real dollars, US per capita income has more than quintupled since 1929. http://www.demographia.com/db-pc1929.pdf http://www.demographia.com/db-pc1929.pdf (2016 is higher than 2008, to fill in the missing info). So even if you want a rising standard of living, work hours could conceivably be shorter. That said, the fundamental point that most of us wouldn't accept 1929 lifestyles for any amount of leisure is right.

vivekd 10y ago
It's not like we're ever given the option right, society poses a narrowly defined set of options as to how we can live and the lives of a 1929 person is never presented. If when I was in primary school or high school someone had presented that as an option I might have foregone university and lived simpler
- snrplfth 10y ago
  Okay, but that means no fridge, no car, no air conditioning, no television or computer, no air travel, only a few sets of clothing, and many other things missing besides. That's what's being offered as the "1929 life". Not the life of the 1929 affluent, but the life of the 1929 average. I know a number of people who've intentionally decided to live pretty much like that. Mostly they don't do it anymore after a few years, but it's totally an available option if you really want it. Saying "society poses" an expensive standard of living is not much proof that you're being forced to do anything.
  - MrZongle2 10y ago
    Actually, refrigeration existed by the 1920s, as did evaporative cooling ("swamp coolers").
    - zokier 10y ago
      In middle/working class urban homes?
      - MrZongle2 10y ago
        I would defer to a period expert at that point. But iceboxes were certainly common, as were fans. I guess my point being: the people of the 1920s weren't savages, and while it's obvious that they didn't enjoy the same comforts we enjoy today there were still many conveniences that did exist. The past is a strange place, with odd customs, but it's not totally alien or barbaric.
    - banku_brougham 10y ago
      yep cars too, in fact there were many quite stylish cars back then.
      - snrplfth 10y ago
        Again, my point is that the average home probably wouldn't have had a car, and if it did, it was far worse in terms of efficiency, safety and performance than all but the cheapest used cars today. This is the mis-perception I'm talking about - people imagine living in the 1930s as though they'd have been in the top 5% or 10% of the population in terms of income, but what we have to look at is the overall level. Just because some people could zip around in a sleek Plymouth Phaeton doesn't mean that everybody, or even many people, could.
        bhandziuk 10y ago
        Safely maybe but early cars were comparatively fuel efficient. Look at the Model T, close to 20 mpg. That's not far off modern cars.
        snrplfth 10y ago
        The curb weight of a Model T is 540 kg and its engine produces 20 horsepower, while a Honda Civic is 1150 kg, produces over 160 horsepower, and gets 35 mpg. It's moving twice as much car, with better efficiency, much faster, over a longer lifespan, with a much higher top speed. The performance of nearly all 30s cars would today be considered terrible in nearly every respect.
        Godel_unicode 10y ago
        Then consider useful lifetime of the car. Ford used to recommend an engine rebuild around 50,000 miles.
        bhandziuk 10y ago
        At a fraction of the price though. The cost of a Model T at the end of production was like 1/6 that of a Civic. For the price it doesn't seem so bad. With an extra 3 days of leisure every week I'd think I could handle not driving 80 mph on the highway. There are pictures of these 20s and 30s cars at the top of dirt roads in the rocky mountains so what ever power they had still let them go places. Do I really need all the car that the civic is?
    - snrplfth 10y ago
      It existed, but was quite expensive, and mostly not used in homes. People generally purchased ice blocks to put in small iceboxes. Not like the refrigeration that exists now.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  I find that very hard to believe. Do you say that in the full knowledge that you'd be giving up roughly 20 years of life expectancy? In 1929, life expectancy was late 50s for men, it's now almost 80 for men. That's roughly a 34% increase, and it's even higher when you consider all of those extra years are adult, master-of-your-fate years.
  - vivekd 10y ago
    That life expectancy equation is a bunch of malarky. It means average time a person is expected to live based on death rates. So if you have a high infant mortality rate, it will affect the numbers. For example, in Sri Lanka during my grandparents time the life expectancy was abysmal but both they and most of the people around them lived healthy into old age, probably much healthier than the average elderly person now. The language is misleading because "life expectancy" is a statistic used to measure how likely you are to die not how long you are expected to live.
    - MarkMc 10y ago
      Your grandparents and their friends may have simply been lucky. You also have to be careful of survivorship bias. Yes, a high infant mortality rate skews the figures. Still, I'd be willing to bet that the average 40 year old in 1929 had a life expectancy at least 10 years less than the average 40 year old in 2017. Edit: Table 21 in this report is informative: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf Expected years remaining for a 40 year old in 1929-31 was 29.67. In 2011 it was 40.58.
guaka 10y ago
Thanks to abundant wasted resources you hardly need any money to get a much better lifestyle than what 1929 had to offer, in Western societies at least. Some folks even go completely moneyless for a while.
rtpg 10y ago
But given more efficient means of production, isn't it likely our current lifestyles are "easier" than 1929 lifestyles? Washing machines, for example, use less water than dish washing by hand. Laundry machines similarly. I bet printing presses have gotten better too. If you accept that maintaining a 1929 lifestyle you can do 16 hour weeks: the price of food alone has dropped immensely, I bet fridges are more efficient than they were in the 30s, not even to talk about automation... Shouldn't we be able to do our current lifestyle with less than 16 hours
- roncoRonson 10y ago
  Probably yes, but then that might mean total standstill, no? So, if 16 hours of donating effort to society, in exchange for a standard of living means status quo, would investing in 32 hours now, mean improvements that move the needle forward? Or... is it possible that we wouldn't be able to exactly measure when 16 real hours are logged, because it would require totalitarian surveillance? Every office I've worked in is filled with people blathering innanely about things that have nothing to do with finishing up our shared miserable toil, and getting the fuck away from my personal nightmare dungeon. Then there's the meetings. The meetings where you sit in a room with people who do almost nothing but talk in meetings. To them? That's what work actually is. Pointless meetings. Hours long meetings. Reading emails. Emails upon emails. Alerts for alerts. Noise without signal. And why? For what? Somewhere in all this, there's probably a reason for it, but honestly, I get the feeling that half the people with white collar day jobs serve no purpose other than to dress nice and demostrate headcount to rival departments, to justify budgets and win BIGNESS perception contests among "executives." (my staff meeting is bigger than yours, so who's more important?) If you started extracting "work that matters" from these kinds of corporate heirarchies, I get the feeling we'd start hemorhaging employment rate, and so it must be prevented because people need boondoggles to feel useful, and have a reason to dress nice and belong somewhere for some reason or whatever.
- collyw 10y ago
  Yet in 1929 it was only one person working to provide for a family. Now it is two.
xg15 10y ago
> In real dollars, US per capita income has more than quintupled since 1929. If it's per-capita income, is there any weighting done for different groups of income? I feel if the statistics group together Silicon Valley CEOs and Starbucks waitresses, it's easy to get a non-representatively high (though technically correct) per-capita income. Also, how much of the increase is from the economy simply recovering from the 1929 crisis back to normal levels? > So even if you want a rising standard of living, work hours could conceivably be shorter. 2) That assumes that jobs that provide such increased wages are also flexible enough that you can freely choose how many hours per week you want to work. That assumption doesn't seem to be the case in practice.
notahacker 10y ago
Disproportionate growth in housing costs and the impossibility of opting for 1929 healthcare are other factors making it difficult for the average person to afford a 1929 lifestyle on part time work in most developed countries, even if they're happy with cycling and gramophones.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  It's also often illegal to opt for 1929 building standards. There's minimum lot sizes, minimum apartment sizes, and other zoning standards that almost make me believe they were deliberately designed to raise housing prices.
  - vacri 10y ago
    Historically, working- and middle-class people have spent all and almost all of their money respectively on 'just living'. House prices are really high now, but other things have dropped. Whatever the combination of prices, 'just living' will always consume all of the income of the poor... unless something truly unusual happens.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Disproportional growth in housing costs is probably ( best bet here; no assertion of TRVTH ) a combination of land rents and subsidy. It's perfectly possible to opt for 1929 levels of health care.
- ksec 10y ago
  Housing Cost being the root of all evil in multiple countries.

vivekd 10y ago

It's not like we're ever given the option right, society poses a narrowly defined set of options as to how we can live and the lives of a 1929 person is never presented. If when I was in primary school or high school someone had presented that as an option I might have foregone university and lived simpler

snrplfth 10y ago
Okay, but that means no fridge, no car, no air conditioning, no television or computer, no air travel, only a few sets of clothing, and many other things missing besides. That's what's being offered as the "1929 life". Not the life of the 1929 affluent, but the life of the 1929 average. I know a number of people who've intentionally decided to live pretty much like that. Mostly they don't do it anymore after a few years, but it's totally an available option if you really want it. Saying "society poses" an expensive standard of living is not much proof that you're being forced to do anything.
- MrZongle2 10y ago
  Actually, refrigeration existed by the 1920s, as did evaporative cooling ("swamp coolers").
  - zokier 10y ago
    In middle/working class urban homes?
    - MrZongle2 10y ago
      I would defer to a period expert at that point. But iceboxes were certainly common, as were fans. I guess my point being: the people of the 1920s weren't savages, and while it's obvious that they didn't enjoy the same comforts we enjoy today there were still many conveniences that did exist. The past is a strange place, with odd customs, but it's not totally alien or barbaric.
  - banku_brougham 10y ago
    yep cars too, in fact there were many quite stylish cars back then.
    - snrplfth 10y ago
      Again, my point is that the average home probably wouldn't have had a car, and if it did, it was far worse in terms of efficiency, safety and performance than all but the cheapest used cars today. This is the mis-perception I'm talking about - people imagine living in the 1930s as though they'd have been in the top 5% or 10% of the population in terms of income, but what we have to look at is the overall level. Just because some people could zip around in a sleek Plymouth Phaeton doesn't mean that everybody, or even many people, could.
      - bhandziuk 10y ago
        Safely maybe but early cars were comparatively fuel efficient. Look at the Model T, close to 20 mpg. That's not far off modern cars.
        snrplfth 10y ago
        The curb weight of a Model T is 540 kg and its engine produces 20 horsepower, while a Honda Civic is 1150 kg, produces over 160 horsepower, and gets 35 mpg. It's moving twice as much car, with better efficiency, much faster, over a longer lifespan, with a much higher top speed. The performance of nearly all 30s cars would today be considered terrible in nearly every respect.
        Godel_unicode 10y ago
        Then consider useful lifetime of the car. Ford used to recommend an engine rebuild around 50,000 miles.
        bhandziuk 10y ago
        At a fraction of the price though. The cost of a Model T at the end of production was like 1/6 that of a Civic. For the price it doesn't seem so bad. With an extra 3 days of leisure every week I'd think I could handle not driving 80 mph on the highway. There are pictures of these 20s and 30s cars at the top of dirt roads in the rocky mountains so what ever power they had still let them go places. Do I really need all the car that the civic is?
  - snrplfth 10y ago
    It existed, but was quite expensive, and mostly not used in homes. People generally purchased ice blocks to put in small iceboxes. Not like the refrigeration that exists now.
Godel_unicode 10y ago
I find that very hard to believe. Do you say that in the full knowledge that you'd be giving up roughly 20 years of life expectancy? In 1929, life expectancy was late 50s for men, it's now almost 80 for men. That's roughly a 34% increase, and it's even higher when you consider all of those extra years are adult, master-of-your-fate years.
- vivekd 10y ago
  That life expectancy equation is a bunch of malarky. It means average time a person is expected to live based on death rates. So if you have a high infant mortality rate, it will affect the numbers. For example, in Sri Lanka during my grandparents time the life expectancy was abysmal but both they and most of the people around them lived healthy into old age, probably much healthier than the average elderly person now. The language is misleading because "life expectancy" is a statistic used to measure how likely you are to die not how long you are expected to live.
  - MarkMc 10y ago
    Your grandparents and their friends may have simply been lucky. You also have to be careful of survivorship bias. Yes, a high infant mortality rate skews the figures. Still, I'd be willing to bet that the average 40 year old in 1929 had a life expectancy at least 10 years less than the average 40 year old in 2017. Edit: Table 21 in this report is informative: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf Expected years remaining for a 40 year old in 1929-31 was 29.67. In 2011 it was 40.58.

guaka 10y ago

Thanks to abundant wasted resources you hardly need any money to get a much better lifestyle than what 1929 had to offer, in Western societies at least. Some folks even go completely moneyless for a while.

rtpg 10y ago

But given more efficient means of production, isn't it likely our current lifestyles are "easier" than 1929 lifestyles? Washing machines, for example, use less water than dish washing by hand. Laundry machines similarly. I bet printing presses have gotten better too. If you accept that maintaining a 1929 lifestyle you can do 16 hour weeks: the price of food alone has dropped immensely, I bet fridges are more efficient than they were in the 30s, not even to talk about automation... Shouldn't we be able to do our current lifestyle with less than 16 hours

roncoRonson 10y ago
Probably yes, but then that might mean total standstill, no? So, if 16 hours of donating effort to society, in exchange for a standard of living means status quo, would investing in 32 hours now, mean improvements that move the needle forward? Or... is it possible that we wouldn't be able to exactly measure when 16 real hours are logged, because it would require totalitarian surveillance? Every office I've worked in is filled with people blathering innanely about things that have nothing to do with finishing up our shared miserable toil, and getting the fuck away from my personal nightmare dungeon. Then there's the meetings. The meetings where you sit in a room with people who do almost nothing but talk in meetings. To them? That's what work actually is. Pointless meetings. Hours long meetings. Reading emails. Emails upon emails. Alerts for alerts. Noise without signal. And why? For what? Somewhere in all this, there's probably a reason for it, but honestly, I get the feeling that half the people with white collar day jobs serve no purpose other than to dress nice and demostrate headcount to rival departments, to justify budgets and win BIGNESS perception contests among "executives." (my staff meeting is bigger than yours, so who's more important?) If you started extracting "work that matters" from these kinds of corporate heirarchies, I get the feeling we'd start hemorhaging employment rate, and so it must be prevented because people need boondoggles to feel useful, and have a reason to dress nice and belong somewhere for some reason or whatever.
collyw 10y ago
Yet in 1929 it was only one person working to provide for a family. Now it is two.

xg15 10y ago

> In real dollars, US per capita income has more than quintupled since 1929. If it's per-capita income, is there any weighting done for different groups of income? I feel if the statistics group together Silicon Valley CEOs and Starbucks waitresses, it's easy to get a non-representatively high (though technically correct) per-capita income. Also, how much of the increase is from the economy simply recovering from the 1929 crisis back to normal levels? > So even if you want a rising standard of living, work hours could conceivably be shorter. 2) That assumes that jobs that provide such increased wages are also flexible enough that you can freely choose how many hours per week you want to work. That assumption doesn't seem to be the case in practice.

notahacker 10y ago

Disproportionate growth in housing costs and the impossibility of opting for 1929 healthcare are other factors making it difficult for the average person to afford a 1929 lifestyle on part time work in most developed countries, even if they're happy with cycling and gramophones.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago
It's also often illegal to opt for 1929 building standards. There's minimum lot sizes, minimum apartment sizes, and other zoning standards that almost make me believe they were deliberately designed to raise housing prices.
- vacri 10y ago
  Historically, working- and middle-class people have spent all and almost all of their money respectively on 'just living'. House prices are really high now, but other things have dropped. Whatever the combination of prices, 'just living' will always consume all of the income of the poor... unless something truly unusual happens.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Disproportional growth in housing costs is probably ( best bet here; no assertion of TRVTH ) a combination of land rents and subsidy. It's perfectly possible to opt for 1929 levels of health care.
ksec 10y ago
Housing Cost being the root of all evil in multiple countries.