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Life wasn't exactly luxury for a farmer 200 years ago.

• closeparen 7y ago
  According to the "inequality" framing, that is irrelevant, the important thing is that the lack of luxury was uniform across society.
• tw1010 7y ago
  Sometimes I get a bit conspiratorial about the fact that whenever people want to give an example of how terrible life was in the past, they always mention primitive or agrarian times. It's almost never comparing life today with 100 years ago. (It's like they're finding a straw-man period.) But as Eric Weinstein has mentioned in plenty of interviews (e.g. in his latest one with Peter Thiel), life for the boomers were actually arguably better on average than it is for millennials today (and we're not talking about engineering millennials here).
  • Kiro 7y ago
    > life for the boomers were actually arguably better What is he referring to exactly though when he says it's better?
    • filoleg 7y ago
      Probably that everyone was worse off, but more equal on average, thus making it look like everyone was better off. Because you couldn't easily see back then that you are worse off than John Smith across the street.
  • malvosenior 7y ago
    100 years ago we didn't even have penicillin. I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of technological progress made in the last century. For most of humanity, life has never been better. Infant mortality is at an all time low (among nearly every other quality of life metric): https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality