9 ms·

Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and var

Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because international calls were so expensive. We flew every few years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs, and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that till death. I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare and college having become drastically more expensive. (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity allowing new measures of wealth for many. If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets. Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity increases in lower/middle income countries, too.

coldtea 5y ago
>Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. So, not much then. For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades. Likewise, cheap clothes mean diminishing quality (regardless of price bracket, from $5 items to $200 brand-name ones, they are all most often than not made in sweatshops in the developing world, often with the same materials and processes). Plus tons of clothes thrown, which is an environmental attrocity. (As for cheap music and movies, that's a byproduct of one basic delevopment: high speed internet, which enabled a new delivery method. Not the best example of an increase in productivity, not to mention those are passtimes). As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century, so 100+ years ago, and it was due to running water, bathrooms, hand washing, and a few such things. Low hanging fruit. Certainly not due to the last 70+ years of "increased productivity". Meanwhile we pay more for healthcare, housing, and education (the 3 things that matter more), wages have stagnated since the 70s, and work-life balance has gotten infinitely worse, depression ever more prevalent, the middle and working classes have collapsed, and so on. No savings and no chance of retirement at any reasonable age for the majority as well. >I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. Probably it's from people who are not impressed by more and cheaper trinkets.
- harryh 5y ago
  As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-... It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago. Much of the rest of what you say is also inconsistent with actual data.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I think your graph is a good illustration of the loss of productivity. Compare the gains between 1900 and 1920 and 2000 and 2020. The earlier period saw an 11% gain in life expectancy, compared to a 2% gain in the latter period. Just looking at the line in your graph you can tell progress is slowing down. Why did we make more progress before and less later? We have better tools, computers, and software. We have more people, both in the US and coming in from worldwide along with a greater portion of the population being college educated and free to work on scientific and engineering problems. We have better developed theories of biological, chemical, and physical systems. And yet, when we knew very little, had little resources, and few people working on the problem - we made huge strides. Now, not so much. Maybe this issue is that we've already plucked the low hanging fruit. That doesn't seem quite right to me though. Even if we have, we should be equipped, via the advantages I referenced earlier, to pick higher fruits.
    - IkmoIkmo 5y ago
      I wouldn't be at all surprised that there's going to be slowdowns of growth in various areas, some things are by definition going to be constrained in terms of space/resources. (e.g. growth of # home units in New York City) I don't think infinite liniear or infinite exponential growth is the expectation. That having been said, for this particular example (life expectancy) it's typically a bit better to look at life expectancy at age x, often 5, 10 or 15 are chosen. It's because infant mortality used to be sky-high, as 25% (one in four) in 1900 and 16% (one in 6) in 1950 worldwide, to < 2.9% today, with the best countries now around 0.2%. If say one in four humans becomes virtually zero years old, that skews the average down a lot, e.g. from 65 to 40. But it doesn't mean that the average person who makes it through the first few years would've died at age 40. If we look at improvements of life expectancy for those who already raeached age 10, it looks like this and is a pretty straight line with fewer indications of slowing down. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10...
nonameiguess 5y ago
Amen. You know what? I paid double what my parents paid for the house I really think of as my childhood house that they bought in 1989, and I paid more than quadruple what they paid for our actual first house in 1979. But my house is also double the size, it's downtown in a major metro, I'm not going to have to rebuild it from the inside out because it's not falling apart and everything already works. There is no asbestos in my walls, no lead in my paint. I guess I'm paying more for healthcare, but I also get better healthcare. I suffered severe spine damage in the Army, but I'm basically fine now thanks to procedures and techniques that didn't exist 20 years ago. I had severe pneumonia when I was 5. If I'd been born prior to 1928 when antibiotics were invented, I would have just died as a child and wouldn't even be here to be paying for anything. My grandparents, man. One of my grandfathers effectively worked, grueling manual labor, until the day he died. The other one died with nothing, left in a nursing home rotting with Alzheimer's for the last decade while con-artists tricked him out of what little he could have left to his children. And he experienced unimaginable horrors as a young adult. His ship in the South Pacific in 1945 was destroyed and he survived for six weeks on a raft drinking fish blood. I served 8 years in the Army on a tank crew and I can't even imagine what these people from earlier generations went through. My grandmother literally murdered someone when she was a teenager. I guess it's a minor miracle she never went to prison, but I suppose the police just didn't bother policing the segregated Mexican neighborhoods back then, which is probably why she was killing people. I have no idea where this idea comes from that we're worse off than our parents. I guess it's because the people believing this kind of thing are mostly writers in a collapsing industry who came from upper middle class highly educated backgrounds? Well, guess what? A lot of us didn't and we're way better off than our parents and grandparents. College got more expensive. Great, but I was the first person on either side of my family in any generation to even go to college. The idea of getting educated at all and not working your entire life doing manual labor would have been an unimaginable luxury to my great-grandfather who grew up picking cotton and taught himself stonemasonry. These people who think it's been so downhill since the 70s. Do you seriously not remember the 80s and 90s? I was with my dad and got trapped doing side jobs during the LA riots. Over 60 people were murdered. The National Guard enforcing curfews and perimeters in the nation's second largest city. Nowadays we flip out that a single woman died trying to break into the capitol. My school got shot at in drive-bys more times than I can remember. We weren't allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys because the school district was so afraid gangs would kill us for it. My sister's best friend was murdered. I guess life was great in the 70s for the 0.0001% of the world population employed on the factory floors of major US auto manufacturers, and it sucks those opportunities dried up, but man is it myopic to act like that's the only thing that has happened in the last 50 years.
Fricken 5y ago
Itt: people being willfully ignorant about climate change. If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I make about 20% of what people claim the SV crowd earns. I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3. I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough. But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to.
  - forcry 5y ago
    >My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to. Interesting. Have you described it in detail somewhere?
    - 2arrs2ells 5y ago
      This general idea is called a revenue neutral carbon tax: ex https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/revenue-neutral-carbon-tax-climate-policy/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/revenue-neutral-c...
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        But people seem negative on it recently, and I'm not sure why. I don't see any feasible alternative and I'm getting cognitive dissonance from people who are getting more vocal about climate change being an emergency and aren't pushing this.
telxos 5y ago
No doubt. We are so spoiled we just take all our advances as a given. On top of all this so many people are doing more interesting work. My father didn't just work 7 days a week, sometimes 16 hour days but he did that doing something so boring to me I would rather be homeless or dead. Healthcare is more expensive because it saves people's lives. Healthcare is really the best example that we are just spoiled children who can not be satisfied no matter what Santa brings for Christmas. Even getting extra years of life isn't good enough because it "cost too much".
- RedXIII 5y ago
  Isn't this always true? If you were born three hundred years ago you could have just listed off some recent technological development and concluded everyone was spoiled babies.
  - _sillymarketing 5y ago
    True in recent history, but not always. For 200k years, humans lived the same exact life as their parents.

coldtea 5y ago

>Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. So, not much then. For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades. Likewise, cheap clothes mean diminishing quality (regardless of price bracket, from $5 items to $200 brand-name ones, they are all most often than not made in sweatshops in the developing world, often with the same materials and processes). Plus tons of clothes thrown, which is an environmental attrocity. (As for cheap music and movies, that's a byproduct of one basic delevopment: high speed internet, which enabled a new delivery method. Not the best example of an increase in productivity, not to mention those are passtimes). As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century, so 100+ years ago, and it was due to running water, bathrooms, hand washing, and a few such things. Low hanging fruit. Certainly not due to the last 70+ years of "increased productivity". Meanwhile we pay more for healthcare, housing, and education (the 3 things that matter more), wages have stagnated since the 70s, and work-life balance has gotten infinitely worse, depression ever more prevalent, the middle and working classes have collapsed, and so on. No savings and no chance of retirement at any reasonable age for the majority as well. >I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. Probably it's from people who are not impressed by more and cheaper trinkets.

harryh 5y ago
As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-... It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago. Much of the rest of what you say is also inconsistent with actual data.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I think your graph is a good illustration of the loss of productivity. Compare the gains between 1900 and 1920 and 2000 and 2020. The earlier period saw an 11% gain in life expectancy, compared to a 2% gain in the latter period. Just looking at the line in your graph you can tell progress is slowing down. Why did we make more progress before and less later? We have better tools, computers, and software. We have more people, both in the US and coming in from worldwide along with a greater portion of the population being college educated and free to work on scientific and engineering problems. We have better developed theories of biological, chemical, and physical systems. And yet, when we knew very little, had little resources, and few people working on the problem - we made huge strides. Now, not so much. Maybe this issue is that we've already plucked the low hanging fruit. That doesn't seem quite right to me though. Even if we have, we should be equipped, via the advantages I referenced earlier, to pick higher fruits.
  - IkmoIkmo 5y ago
    I wouldn't be at all surprised that there's going to be slowdowns of growth in various areas, some things are by definition going to be constrained in terms of space/resources. (e.g. growth of # home units in New York City) I don't think infinite liniear or infinite exponential growth is the expectation. That having been said, for this particular example (life expectancy) it's typically a bit better to look at life expectancy at age x, often 5, 10 or 15 are chosen. It's because infant mortality used to be sky-high, as 25% (one in four) in 1900 and 16% (one in 6) in 1950 worldwide, to < 2.9% today, with the best countries now around 0.2%. If say one in four humans becomes virtually zero years old, that skews the average down a lot, e.g. from 65 to 40. But it doesn't mean that the average person who makes it through the first few years would've died at age 40. If we look at improvements of life expectancy for those who already raeached age 10, it looks like this and is a pretty straight line with fewer indications of slowing down. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10...

nonameiguess 5y ago

Amen. You know what? I paid double what my parents paid for the house I really think of as my childhood house that they bought in 1989, and I paid more than quadruple what they paid for our actual first house in 1979. But my house is also double the size, it's downtown in a major metro, I'm not going to have to rebuild it from the inside out because it's not falling apart and everything already works. There is no asbestos in my walls, no lead in my paint. I guess I'm paying more for healthcare, but I also get better healthcare. I suffered severe spine damage in the Army, but I'm basically fine now thanks to procedures and techniques that didn't exist 20 years ago. I had severe pneumonia when I was 5. If I'd been born prior to 1928 when antibiotics were invented, I would have just died as a child and wouldn't even be here to be paying for anything. My grandparents, man. One of my grandfathers effectively worked, grueling manual labor, until the day he died. The other one died with nothing, left in a nursing home rotting with Alzheimer's for the last decade while con-artists tricked him out of what little he could have left to his children. And he experienced unimaginable horrors as a young adult. His ship in the South Pacific in 1945 was destroyed and he survived for six weeks on a raft drinking fish blood. I served 8 years in the Army on a tank crew and I can't even imagine what these people from earlier generations went through. My grandmother literally murdered someone when she was a teenager. I guess it's a minor miracle she never went to prison, but I suppose the police just didn't bother policing the segregated Mexican neighborhoods back then, which is probably why she was killing people. I have no idea where this idea comes from that we're worse off than our parents. I guess it's because the people believing this kind of thing are mostly writers in a collapsing industry who came from upper middle class highly educated backgrounds? Well, guess what? A lot of us didn't and we're way better off than our parents and grandparents. College got more expensive. Great, but I was the first person on either side of my family in any generation to even go to college. The idea of getting educated at all and not working your entire life doing manual labor would have been an unimaginable luxury to my great-grandfather who grew up picking cotton and taught himself stonemasonry. These people who think it's been so downhill since the 70s. Do you seriously not remember the 80s and 90s? I was with my dad and got trapped doing side jobs during the LA riots. Over 60 people were murdered. The National Guard enforcing curfews and perimeters in the nation's second largest city. Nowadays we flip out that a single woman died trying to break into the capitol. My school got shot at in drive-bys more times than I can remember. We weren't allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys because the school district was so afraid gangs would kill us for it. My sister's best friend was murdered. I guess life was great in the 70s for the 0.0001% of the world population employed on the factory floors of major US auto manufacturers, and it sucks those opportunities dried up, but man is it myopic to act like that's the only thing that has happened in the last 50 years.

Fricken 5y ago

Itt: people being willfully ignorant about climate change. If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.

perl4ever 5y ago
I make about 20% of what people claim the SV crowd earns. I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3. I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough. But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to.
- forcry 5y ago
  >My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to. Interesting. Have you described it in detail somewhere?
  - 2arrs2ells 5y ago
    This general idea is called a revenue neutral carbon tax: ex https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/revenue-neutral-carbon-tax-climate-policy/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/revenue-neutral-c...
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      But people seem negative on it recently, and I'm not sure why. I don't see any feasible alternative and I'm getting cognitive dissonance from people who are getting more vocal about climate change being an emergency and aren't pushing this.

telxos 5y ago

No doubt. We are so spoiled we just take all our advances as a given. On top of all this so many people are doing more interesting work. My father didn't just work 7 days a week, sometimes 16 hour days but he did that doing something so boring to me I would rather be homeless or dead. Healthcare is more expensive because it saves people's lives. Healthcare is really the best example that we are just spoiled children who can not be satisfied no matter what Santa brings for Christmas. Even getting extra years of life isn't good enough because it "cost too much".

RedXIII 5y ago
Isn't this always true? If you were born three hundred years ago you could have just listed off some recent technological development and concluded everyone was spoiled babies.
- _sillymarketing 5y ago
  True in recent history, but not always. For 200k years, humans lived the same exact life as their parents.