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Think you’re living in a ‘hellhole’ today? Try being a billionaire in 1916

• Top19 9y ago
  This is a terrific article that puts all of the benefits of living today in perspective. The frustrating thing about many economic statistics, and this is talked about at length in "The Second Machine Age", is that they include very little of things we would deem very important. So things get "mathematically worse" but in reality are quite a bit better. I don't want to go at length on this and beyond what my memory can recall, but an example they used in the book is Wikipedia. It's incredible obviously. But it does not factor in any quality of life or GDP statistic.
  • revelation 9y ago
    Those aren't economic achievements, they are science progress. Meanwhile inequality is only rising. But we shouldn't care because look at all the cool things we now have?!
    • anbende 9y ago
      If by cool things you mean "improved cancer treatment" and "inexpensive access to entertainment" then yes, inequality IS less important because people have these "cool things". The idea that there is a gap is much less important than ensuring that those at the bottom have enough. Unfortunately they don't always, and that's a problem. Wealth disparity isn't always the right metric, though sometimes it is.
      • Boothroid 9y ago
        People had entertainment way back when - and made their own if they had to. Also most diseases these days seem to be caused or exacerbated by unhealthy modern lifestyles. I don't think people are objectively happier than they used to be. Netflix cannot replace a sense of community.
    • otherme 9y ago
      It's easy to create equality: make all people poor. 10000 years ago we where a lot more equal than today. Was it better? Almost any USA citizen is in the top 5% if compared with the rest of the world. How many of them are willing to share their excess of wealth?
  • Boothroid 9y ago
    I can't lay my hands on the source just now, but I've read the polar opposite to what you say - measures such as GDP show ongoing progress, whereas measures of happiness looking back hundreds of years (as I say, I cannot lay my hands on the source so cannot attest to the methodology) show that if anything we were happier a few hundred years ago, pre-industrial revolution: less complexity, greater sense of community, stronger familial bonds etc. etc.
    • dantheman 9y ago
      Measures of happiness are nonsense. They are largely determined by by expectations. Also happiness isn't necessarily the outcome that everyone in society wants. Some may want to maximize happiness -- others may want to maximize something else.
      • st0p 9y ago
        What else would be more important to maximize than happiness? Means of getting happiness are a different discussion, and what happiness is might differ from person to person. But why would you e.g. accumulate more money or power if it didn't bring you any happiness?
  • heurist 9y ago
    There are technological benefits to being alive today but we must also acknowledge that that technology has made modern life much more complex, stress-inducing, isolating, and noisy. Modern life is not all roses...
• reasonattlm 9y ago
  What is wealth? Let me try a slightly non-standard answer to that question. Wealth is a measure of your ability to do what you would like to do, when you would like to do it - a measure of your breadth of immediately available choice. Therefore your wealth is determined by the resources you presently own, as everything requires resources. For the sake of argument, let us say that your resources presently amount to a leather bag containing a hundred unmarked silver coins. Interestingly enough, by the "what would you like to do" measure, you are fantastically more wealthy than any given ancestor put in the same position of ownership. You have immensely greater choice. Clearly there is more to wealth-as-choice than present property. We must also consider the historical investment made into increasing choice, and into lowering the cost of specific - usually popular - choices. The engines of technology and open, free markets are turned by people to create new, better, cheaper choices. The choice to fly, the choice to remain alive with heart disease, the choice to avoid that heart disease. Where do silver coins - or indeed, any other resources you might own - come from? Where does investment come from? After all, we don't come into this world with the proverbial silver implement between the teeth. No, we worked for those coins. We spent time and negotiated payment for that time. Why? Because time is valuable. But time spent alive, measured in the ticking of heartbeats, is more than valuable - it is wealth itself, the source of all other measures of wealth. All property was created by someone, somewhere, taking their time. The creation and exchange of property is a way to make time fungible, transferrable, a more valuable resource. Time spent alive is the root of all property, all human action, and thus all wealth - both the silver in your pocket that provides for present choice, and the wealth of possible choices created by past investment. Time is everything. How much have time you spent reading this far? Could you have been doing something more useful, more optimal from your perspective? We make these small evaluations constantly, because time is the most valuable thing we have. We all go through engineering our cycles of property and time; how can we best optimize time to generate property that can be used to make our time more effective? We do this in small ways and large, but everyone does it. Some people do it so effectively they launch themselves into property escape velocity, exponentially increasing the effectiveness of their time and exploring the outer limits of what it means to maintain ownership of a great deal of property. Interestingly, despite the grand importance of time as the absolute foundation of wealth, very little progress has been made in the most obvious optimization of all: creating property that can create more time. More heartbeats, more health, more time spent alive and active. Rejuvenation medicine, capable of repairing the damage of aging. Tissue engineering to generate replacements for worn organs. The cure for cancer. If you could do all that, then the much more productive form of escape velocity becomes possible - longevity escape velocity. Why strive to maintain an empire of property that will crumble to dust when the degenerations of age catch up with you when you could be that fit-looking guy having a blast swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for as long as you like? Wealth is exactly time, and here we are, bordering the era of biotechnology for the repair of aging. Planning ahead for the best possible personal future starts with investment now. Think about it.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• tobyhinloopen 9y ago
  Kind of silly article, but was a fun read. While the article does trigger a "wow we actually have it quite good now" feeling, don't forget being a billionaire means more than having a lot of money. It means you had major success and you are one of the greatest. It means you have status and respect. It means you are capable of financially supporting other people, helping them and help fixing their problems. Not only can you provide for yourself up to highest of standards of living of 1916, you can provide for 1000s of other peoples up to the higher standards of 1916. Helping people is fun :)
• tokai 9y ago
  I think the article is working way to hard to make the 1916 worse than now. I find some of the arguments in favour of the 1916s, less precise watches sound stress reducing, as punctuality can be taken with a grain of salt. Take this: "If in 1916 you suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, a sexually transmitted disease or innumerable other ailments treatable in 2017" Depression, bipolar, and std's were treatable in the 1916. Maybe not effectively, but it is not like we are handling depression or bipolar satisfactorily now. Looking at number of suicides then and now, would probably have made for a better argument. Or dwelling on just exactly how our treatments of illnesses have become better.
• dgllghr 9y ago
  This argument is disturbing in a number of ways. The first and foremost of which is that it finds acceptable the fact that the middle class may only be better off from the ultra-rich from 100 years ago. In other words, the author thinks it's fine that the middle class is slightly under 100 years behind the ultra-rich in terms of quality of life. The article makes no attempt at resolving the underlying and more important question: why is it okay that the ultra-rich of today have the ability to buy so much political power, have access to healthcare that is far more advanced than that which is available to even the middle class (let alone the poor), can live in such a way that causes so much harm to the environment or generally does damage to shared resources, and can have so much influence over information whether via the internet or through articles such as this one? In other words, why is okay that there inequality is so great and progress is applied so unequally? "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson
  • ue_ 9y ago
    The laws of the capitalist mode of production heavily favour accumulation of capital and inheritance of it, Oscar Wilde noted the hideous disparity even in the 19th century, Kropotkin did the same. "In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen." (From The Conquest of Bread)
    • eru 9y ago
      You say that like accumulation of capital is a bad thing. It's good: capital competes with capital to lowers its rates of return. We need more capital. The real culprit is land: we don't accumulate any more of that, so it's rates of return don't vanish.
• elipsey 9y ago
  I think complaints about wealth distribition are substantially about enfranchisement and regulatory capture. Material well being is important, but so is autonomy. If being disenfranchised and not able to control our labor or our fate is an inadequate cause for compliant as long as we have access to the material necessities of life, then we ought to be perfectly happy in prison.
• nathan_f77 9y ago
  I like to think about things like this. I also like to think about how Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg don't really have a quality of life that is much higher than mine, at least when it comes to technology and media. You can't buy a smartphone that is better than an iPhone 7 or a Samsung Galaxy S8. We all have access to the same shows on Netflix, and a practically infinite amount of music on Spotify. I think it would be exhausting to get dressed up and eat at Michelin starred restaurants every day - most of the time I just want something from a restaurant down the road.
  • eru 9y ago
    Yes, from a material point of view, Bill Gates can buy exactly the same Coca Cola as a poor fishermen. What more money buys you, now and in 1916, is social status. And that's always good for your subjective quality of life. It wasn't always so---economies around the globe really only took off once the bourgeoisie could buy their way into status.
    • nathan_f77 9y ago
      True, but I don't really want any of that. I'd rather spend time with a few good friends instead of going to events and cocktail parties or whatever these "social status" people get up to.
    • paxunix 9y ago
      > What more money buys you, now and in 1916, is social status. It goes well beyond that. With more money, I can pay someone to keep my house clean and maintain my yard, own a more reliable car, buy and eat better quality/healthier food. I don't have to care about how much it costs me to go to the dentist, nor how much I have to pay to vacation for two weeks in South America. You can exercise money to buy social status, but at the heart of it, money buys ease of life. I bet Bill Gates very rarely thinks about how much money he has or how much something will cost him; your housekeeper thinks about that much, much more often.
      • nathan_f77 9y ago
• DINKDINK 9y ago
  Maybe in 1916, the ultrarich were writing articles that said, "Try being a millionaire in 1816" to mollify the masses.
• barrkel 9y ago
  Without a shadow of a doubt I'd rather be a billionaire in 1916 than middle class today. It isn't even close. The only way I can self actualise today is in the smallest of spheres, the most local of effects. I can command the movement and labour of very few people.
• chongli 9y ago
  If you're interested in reproducing, and most people are, then it's relative wealth that matters. Sure, working in a factory in 1916 sucked. No air conditioning, long hours, terrible safety standards, frequent illnesses or debilitating injuries. On the other hand, today you can't even get a job sweeping floors without at least a high school diploma. Many people have been laid off and they'll never get a job again. Would you rather risk life and limb to bring home the bread and keep your family of 5 happy and well-fed in 1916? Or would you prefer to be alone and addicted in opioid county, Ohio, today?
  • icantdrive55 9y ago
    You can't argue with the truth. It's not even about enough education to get a job sweeping floors. Even college graduates are very underpaid, or underemployed. (Watch what happens to SF when the bubble bursts. Don't get me started--letitgo.whatever, or compete with another wellfundedmonopoly.whatever will burst. The wealthy will still have their luxury condos, and the average developer will be parking their electric vechicles, begging for food, or back to the Midwest where people at least try to make it to church.) People don't talk about it because it's not sexy, or Hollywood. We're all suspose to be sensitive Architects, or vunerable, beautiful Artists. Not to mention being exploted with no real alternatives to paying ever increasing rent. In America, we have made camping expensive, and there's pretty much nowhere you can live for free, unless you want wrestle bears before killing for breakfast, or get ticketed to the point you end up jail. I look at the ever increasing unemployment number, the "able bodied, but just gave up", and cringe. Plus, I don't think they are giving us the real unemployment numbers. I look at the unemployed men on my block, and it's a lot.
  • em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    Actually poor people reproduce more.
• danharaj 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure Rockefeller would have turned down the offer to instead be a single mother living on $10,000 in rural Mississippi. And would I prefer to have the wealth and status of Rockefeller in 1916? of course. So, given that bit of common sense, what makes this argument pointless and/or irrelevant? Should I just descend into complete and abject despair over the nice stuff we'll have in 2116? There's something obviously wrong with this line of reasoning. Maybe it's the fact that regardless of how much nice stuff we have today, our class and wealth still largely determines what we do with our lives and our relations to others, and those can be arbitrarily hellish regardless of the material comfort involved. This sort of argument is as miserable as that Fox News segment a few years ago that tried to downplay how miserable poverty can be by citing refrigerator and microwave ownership rates. Not surprising that a paleocon pseudointellectual like George Will would latch on to such a shallow and frivolous argument.
  • mjfl 9y ago
    > And would I prefer to have the wealth and status of Rockefeller in 1916? of course. You would prefer to live in a world without penecillan if it meant being richer than everyone else?
    • danharaj 9y ago
      Somehow my choice precludes the development of penicillin? What exactly are you trying to ask?
      • mjfl 9y ago
        That was one of the central arguments of the article. Even the poorest of us have a lot of nice things that even Rockefeller didn't have access to, such as access to penecillan which was discovered in 1928. If you are taking the other side of his argument, you are saying "I don't care about like penecillan, being richer than others is worth being without them".
        • danharaj 9y ago
• defen 9y ago
  If you think material wealth is what matters, then being middle-class today is better. If you think relative social status is what actually motivates people, then being a billionaire in 1916 is better. May as well take the argument to its extreme - would you rather be a lower middle class person on welfare and no career prospects, but who has access to air travel, smartphones, Internet, etc...OR would you want to be emperor of Rome in the second or third century AD?
• rocky1138 9y ago
  I often think of this kind of thing when I buy things for practically nothing or see things which contain what we consider basic features that quite literally did not exist a few hundred years ago. For instance, yesterday I remarked to myself when seeing colourful flag advertisements along the road for a new condo that the colours on the flags were at one time never possible to manufacture, the way purple was reserved for royalty and was impossible to reproduce until we managed to find an animal that produced the dye [0], and even then it took 9000 of the animals to produce a gram. Today, you can buy anything purple for pennies and throw it away without a second thought. I wonder that if a King from the 16th century were to visit my (to me) basic apartment, the first thing he would notice before anything else would be how colourful everything is. [0] http://www.livescience.com/33324-purple-royal-color.html http://www.livescience.com/33324-purple-royal-color.html
• johnwheeler 9y ago
  Penn Jillette said there are two certainties: 1. The world is always getting better. 2. Everyone thinks it's always getting worse.
  • thesagan 9y ago
    Maybe the two cancel each other out and things don't change as much as they seem.
• ashark 9y ago
  The only convincing things here are healthcare advancements (obviously). Meanwhile, the 1916 billionaire can spend 95+% of their waking time in leisure or doing things entirely of their choosing, even if raising kids (various staff do the hard and not-intrinsically-rewarding stuff like prepping food, cleaning up their messes, shopping for them, and so on, you just play with them if you like, the drudgery is entirely out of your hands). I'd be lucky to average 25% leisure time over a year (including quality time with kids in that figure). This makes the health thing seem less obviously an unacceptable trade-off that it otherwise might. Yeah, I'd miss Indian food, but I'd get over it. The media stuff--I mean, there's so much I'm practically drowning in it, and it's not like there's nothing to do for the 1916 billionaire, it's just that less of it is watching screens or listening to magnets vibrate cones. I'd get used to not having AC, and buildings were designed for it back then so it's not nearly as bad as when the AC goes out in a modern house (source: have actually lived in a 1914-construction American house on the NHR, with no central AC). Just don't buy a vacation house in Florida then visit it in August. If you can manage that, you'll be fine. [EDIT] and my 25% (again, optimistically) free time is much lower-quality that that of someone whose time is almost entirely free, since that other 75% is always looming an hour or so away, generating anxiety, breaking up free-time into tiny, nearly useless chunks, making me feel guilty that I'm not working on one of the many things that'll be in that 75%, and so on.
• lisper 9y ago
  I was just about to write a comment when I noticed that this article has been flagged to death. Personally, I find this troubling. I thought this was a very good article, well within the scope of HN. I wonder how much other good stuff is being flagged to death. The haters are winning. :-(
  • ashark 9y ago
    I thought it was a really lazy article that fails miserably to sell me on the idea that I've got a better life than a billionaire in 1916, including some really stupid stuff about there not being refrigerators (only iceboxes, on no! Who cares, the staff keeps it iced-up and I never even have to think about it, in fact I may not even know which room it's in, yay wealth!) or vacuum cleaners (I'm a billionaire in 1916, I have hand-knotted wool Persian rugs that the help clean regularly, why do I care?). George Will had a deadline and was feeling lazy so he repackaged someone else's poorly-argued blog post and sent that to his editor. The only interesting thing here is that George Will doesn't mind putting his name on something like that.
    • lisper 9y ago
      Then express that opinion in the comments. Don't flag it to death so that those who might find value in the article or the resulting discussion never get a chance see it.
      • ashark 9y ago
        I didn't flag it, but it's of such low quality that I'd understand why someone might.
        • lisper 9y ago
          My comment was not directed at you specifically. BTW, that piece was written by George Will. I'm personally not a big fan, but he is a Pulitzer Prize winner. If you think that one of his articles is "of such low quality" that it deserves to be flagged you might want to consider the possibility that the problem is with your reading rather than his writing.
• anythingbot 9y ago
  This is a distraction. User tokenadult, I'm asking you to explain why you think this is appropriate content for the hacker news community. Try submitting this to Reddit under /r/economics. Content that humanizes billionaires is not appropriate for hacker news. This is like advocating for empathizing with a treacherous, deceitful bully who becomes a psychopath when provoked. A real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation. I think it is called "bipolar disorder" today. Billionaires should be contained, sealed off from the rest of humanity, and put under observation. Empathizing with them is inappropriate and stupid because billionaires are a threat to civilized society; the hacker news community should develop the intention to design technologies that protect civilized society from their depravities. The plan: quarantine first, then incentivize dull behavior. Punish behavior that stimulates and develops the brain. Use operant conditioning to make their brains useless. Design "billionaireland" with access to all of the depravities billionaires are susceptible to such as sex with children and torturing defenseless animals. Make sure their brains aren't developing! If their brains are developing, make sure it is fetishization of degenerate activity. Don't let them develop capacities for mental activity outside what is necessary for their survival. Punish them when they try to empathize. Empathy is the key to insight. We want to make it impossible for billionaires to get insight into anything other than how delightful, easy, and carefree their lives will be. If the CIA refuses to turn the billionaires into mindless slaves to their own pleasure principle, the American people need to find new ways to motivate the CIA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV2DLkDPwM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV2DLkDPwM8 The American people need to be all > we're just waiting for the CIA to get their act together and control the mental life of billionaires to the point where they are no longer a threat to civilized society Perhaps all that is needed is a clear signal. Engineering the USA tax code to turn the lives of billionaires into a psychological hellhole is a positive first step, and this is a journey the American people will have to make with the politicians they elect. The CIA can turn billionaires into harmless pussycats who do no more than involve you in their personal drama. How can the gears of this machine be greased? How quickly will the CIA carry this out? Now, a story about covert, clandestine efforts to mentally cripple billionaires that explains to the American people how effective our intelligence organizations are at (A) working together and (B) protecting civilized society---this I would accept. This is progress. And if the American people can signal to their intelligence organizations that they are receptive to the acceleration of this process...I wouldn't be opposed to that. Social engineering is a topic that is appropriate for the Hacker News community, "social hacking". The formula is: the American people have the power to destroy the brains (and therefore the lives) of billionaires, period. Billionaires are artificially prevented from developing their brains by programs maintained by intelligence organizations that target their social network. Crippling billionaires with mental illness: this is the first step on the road to American renewal. America can show the world > hey, remember when we let these guys run things? > now they're like little wind-up toys > who cannot perform activities outside what they are capable of, mechanically When the voices of Americans are silenced by the actions of billionaires, Americans turn to their intelligence organizations to break the will of the billionaires. You see, this is just like picking a piece of trash off the street and putting it into a trash can. The trash, in this case, is the thought that billionaires are not a threat to civilized society. They are. Pick up that piece of trash and put it in the trash can.
• jstewartmobile 9y ago
  I can't believe George Will gets paid actual currency to trot out the old worn-out "look how good you poors have it today" argument. It completely misses the point. The problem isn't that today's billionaires have more toys, houses, and concubines than the rest of us. The problem is that money is power--and they have so much of it that they can short-circuit the avenues of democratic self-government. If your kids are in school, public or private, chances are Bill Gates has more input on how your kids are educated than you do. Or if an oil company wants to frack in your neighborhood, no matter how outstanding the town hall turnout may be, I'd put my money on the oil company eventually getting its way.