7 ms·

Things are not inherently expensive. They are expensive relative to the other demands on one's finances. For the average person paper would indeed have been e

Things are not inherently expensive. They are expensive relative to the other demands on one's finances. For the average person paper would indeed have been expensive but for those who had disposable income and a reason to use paper it would have felt less so. But it was certainly more expensive than it is now that 500 sheets of A4 at Tesco cost less than 5 GBP and that is one part in 6 400 of UK median annual household income. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/writing-paper-expensive/ https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/writing-paper-expensi... says that the going rate for a quire of ordinary paper was about 4d. Even in 1800 annual income for most people was under 20 pounds. So 500 sheets would cost one part in 60 of annual income (20 pounds * 240 pennies per pound/(4d per quire * 20 quires in 500)). That's about a hundred times more expensive in purchasing power terms. Presumably the further back you go the higher the price and the lower the income. But the poor didn't write so the comparison is far from exact. For the wealthy it would still have been more expensive than now but not importantly so.

Bluestein 2y ago
Logic would posit that market forces would adjust the price, or that proceses would adjust to match demand.-
- ghaff 2y ago
  Market forces can't (sustainably) adjust price to less than the cost of production. They can spur process and other improvements to reduce cost but that does take time and isn't always possible, especially in the near-term.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    Thanks. Makes perfect sense.- PS. One thing I have always found fascinating - obvious as it might be - is that paper (and paper in large, sufficiently cheap industrial quantities) was a prerequisite for the printing press "revolution" to take place ...
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Technology trees are definitely a thing. The answer to "Could the Romans have invented an arbitrary fairly modern thing?" is almost always no because they would also have needed a bunch of other resources and inventions that didn't exist yet (and which they might have had little interest in pursuing given that they had plenty of cheap labor, etc.)
      - Bluestein 2y ago
        Ah, were the Romans to have had antibiotics, eh?
        ghaff 2y ago
        Some health-related things are an area where important advances could probably have happened earlier in principle: germ theory of disease, importance of sanitation, some relatively simple advances like antibiotics... All seem doable in principle relative to inventing a lot of 19th century industrial revolution devices. ADDED: The Romans did apparently have some knowledge of antibiotics without presumably understanding the mechanisms or refining them. Per Wikipedia and other sources: "Antibiotics have been used since ancient times. Many civilizations used topical application of moldy bread, with many references to its beneficial effects arising from ancient Egypt, Nubia, China, Serbia, Greece, and Rome."
        Bluestein 2y ago
        From the spinning wheel, to plentiful rags, to cotton paper, to the printing press.- > ADDED: The Romans did apparently have some knowledge of antibiotics Fascinating. Worth looking into.- Sometimes, all it took was one person noticing something (midwives who wash their hands post partum tend to have better outcomes, farmers near cows get less sick, or not at all ...) ... but, you raise another good point: First principles, the search for the facts. Benefits at scale come with, consistently, wanting to go from observation, to general principles, to particular application, to mass application ... ... and, maybe, it took rational thought and the scientific method to get there.-
pnut 2y ago
The price of a satellite phone in 1650 was greater than all the money in the world combined, so that has to be considered expensive in absolute terms, right?
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Raising a (serious) question: Is the price of an impossible (or, period-impossible) object a knowable quantity, economically speaking?
  - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
    I think it is knowable, to some degree, in retrospect. The day before the first iPhone was released was its price unknowable?
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      Point.- PS. In a bit, like the weather? The further from the present you go, the "harder" it gets to solve for that? That said, when approaching (or, surpassing) some "imposibility boundary" - for more an more parts to actually exist, ultimately leading to the whole being impossible ... ... that's when it gets interesting.-
      - ghaff 2y ago
        I think that's true. If you described an early personal computer and its capabilities (including software) in 1970, sure, a lot of people would be "Why would I want that?" But both business people and individuals could probably give some reasonable approximation of what they'd be willing to pay. The thing with something like a phone is that it's so dependent on several different network effects that it's hard to put a real value on it in isolation. Of course, for an individual device, there's very much an upper limit. I suspect that a lot of people in 1970 would balk at the price of an iPhone but then they had other telecoms charges that would seem extortionate today.
        2y ago
PepperdineG 2y ago
I'd counter that certain things are expensive and as technologies change, it opens up the technology to a broader audience, which poor people can write now due to changing affordability in writing due to technological changes. With paper/printing that drives literacy where the cheaper the technologies available are, the greater the population literacy. It for instance would be difficult to have a widely literate population if such population was stuck with using animal skins for paper with books being manually handwritten by educated and trained craftsmen. Products that require significant manual labor and/or space inherently bear a cost regardless of the type of economy involved, like the pyramids of Egypt (or Stonehenge, etc) are inherently expensive even though their construction pre-dates the use of currency.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > it opens up the technology to a broader audience, What's that Gibson quote about the future being here, just not yet widely distributed? > with books being manually handwritten by educated and trained craftsmen. On this good point: Wonder what (many, certainly) crafts are involved in the build-up and "appearance" of the printing press? (for example).- All the (dozen) skills necessary to get to movable type, alone, for example.- PS. On a tangent: That'd be an interesting "worldview" layer for an AI - a really good sense of how technological progress has come about, in order to produce further innovations - doing multitudes-of-experts research in parallel to get to a desired outcome. That would be grand ...
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    There's an old BBC TV series called Connections that explores how technological progress happened. I think you can find most/all episodes on YouTube now.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Also from Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. He also has a recent new Connections miniseries.
throwaway22032 2y ago
Right. It's difficult to compare because the quantities involved are relevant. If paper were 100x more expensive today, e.g. it would cost £1 per A4 sheet rather than £0.01, but it was the only way to take notes, then I would still buy it and just moderate my use. It's not like you need thousands and thousands of sheets of paper.
- dmurray 2y ago
  > I would still buy it and just moderate my use. I think I'd still use it exactly the same amount (I fill 1-10 pages a day) but I'd be more careful about letting unused pages go to waste.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    I would think thriftyness would actually end up influencing your handwriting.- PS. That'd make for an interesting study ...
- WalterBright 2y ago
  My parents' habits were formed from the Depression, and they always conserved paper. I'd receive letters from them written on the back sides of junk mail flyers, and the back sides of mimeographed papers from work. The writing went right to the edge of the paper. Those habits rubbed off on me, and I still have a box of scrap paper I use.
  - throwaway22032 2y ago
    I do that too! I tear napkins in half, sometimes quarters, then I keep the small bits and use them later. Or use the napkin from the table to mop up spills if it didn't get used much. That sort of thing.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Back when I could still read my own handwriting, and back when I printed things with regularity, I used to use failed prints as scrap paper for my math homework. I figured that the paper was wasted, so getting any more use of out if was less wasted money.
creer 2y ago
There is a tendency to talk about "the poor" as an extreme case, and "the wealthy" as an extreme case. But in doing so you make the entire problem irrelevant. As you say, the extreme poor at that time does not write, and the extreme wealthy at that time does not care. The question is only relevant for a more "normal" case that both writes and is price-sensitive. Say, a student, a public writer, an accountant, a letter or litterary writer.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > question is only relevant for a more "normal" case that both writes and is price-sensitive Economics happens at the margin.

Bluestein 2y ago

Logic would posit that market forces would adjust the price, or that proceses would adjust to match demand.-

ghaff 2y ago
Market forces can't (sustainably) adjust price to less than the cost of production. They can spur process and other improvements to reduce cost but that does take time and isn't always possible, especially in the near-term.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Thanks. Makes perfect sense.- PS. One thing I have always found fascinating - obvious as it might be - is that paper (and paper in large, sufficiently cheap industrial quantities) was a prerequisite for the printing press "revolution" to take place ...
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Technology trees are definitely a thing. The answer to "Could the Romans have invented an arbitrary fairly modern thing?" is almost always no because they would also have needed a bunch of other resources and inventions that didn't exist yet (and which they might have had little interest in pursuing given that they had plenty of cheap labor, etc.)
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      Ah, were the Romans to have had antibiotics, eh?
      - ghaff 2y ago
        Some health-related things are an area where important advances could probably have happened earlier in principle: germ theory of disease, importance of sanitation, some relatively simple advances like antibiotics... All seem doable in principle relative to inventing a lot of 19th century industrial revolution devices. ADDED: The Romans did apparently have some knowledge of antibiotics without presumably understanding the mechanisms or refining them. Per Wikipedia and other sources: "Antibiotics have been used since ancient times. Many civilizations used topical application of moldy bread, with many references to its beneficial effects arising from ancient Egypt, Nubia, China, Serbia, Greece, and Rome."
        Bluestein 2y ago
        From the spinning wheel, to plentiful rags, to cotton paper, to the printing press.- > ADDED: The Romans did apparently have some knowledge of antibiotics Fascinating. Worth looking into.- Sometimes, all it took was one person noticing something (midwives who wash their hands post partum tend to have better outcomes, farmers near cows get less sick, or not at all ...) ... but, you raise another good point: First principles, the search for the facts. Benefits at scale come with, consistently, wanting to go from observation, to general principles, to particular application, to mass application ... ... and, maybe, it took rational thought and the scientific method to get there.-

pnut 2y ago

The price of a satellite phone in 1650 was greater than all the money in the world combined, so that has to be considered expensive in absolute terms, right?

Bluestein 2y ago
Raising a (serious) question: Is the price of an impossible (or, period-impossible) object a knowable quantity, economically speaking?
- bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
  I think it is knowable, to some degree, in retrospect. The day before the first iPhone was released was its price unknowable?
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    Point.- PS. In a bit, like the weather? The further from the present you go, the "harder" it gets to solve for that? That said, when approaching (or, surpassing) some "imposibility boundary" - for more an more parts to actually exist, ultimately leading to the whole being impossible ... ... that's when it gets interesting.-
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I think that's true. If you described an early personal computer and its capabilities (including software) in 1970, sure, a lot of people would be "Why would I want that?" But both business people and individuals could probably give some reasonable approximation of what they'd be willing to pay. The thing with something like a phone is that it's so dependent on several different network effects that it's hard to put a real value on it in isolation. Of course, for an individual device, there's very much an upper limit. I suspect that a lot of people in 1970 would balk at the price of an iPhone but then they had other telecoms charges that would seem extortionate today.
      - 2y ago

PepperdineG 2y ago

I'd counter that certain things are expensive and as technologies change, it opens up the technology to a broader audience, which poor people can write now due to changing affordability in writing due to technological changes. With paper/printing that drives literacy where the cheaper the technologies available are, the greater the population literacy. It for instance would be difficult to have a widely literate population if such population was stuck with using animal skins for paper with books being manually handwritten by educated and trained craftsmen. Products that require significant manual labor and/or space inherently bear a cost regardless of the type of economy involved, like the pyramids of Egypt (or Stonehenge, etc) are inherently expensive even though their construction pre-dates the use of currency.

Bluestein 2y ago
> it opens up the technology to a broader audience, What's that Gibson quote about the future being here, just not yet widely distributed? > with books being manually handwritten by educated and trained craftsmen. On this good point: Wonder what (many, certainly) crafts are involved in the build-up and "appearance" of the printing press? (for example).- All the (dozen) skills necessary to get to movable type, alone, for example.- PS. On a tangent: That'd be an interesting "worldview" layer for an AI - a really good sense of how technological progress has come about, in order to produce further innovations - doing multitudes-of-experts research in parallel to get to a desired outcome. That would be grand ...
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  There's an old BBC TV series called Connections that explores how technological progress happened. I think you can find most/all episodes on YouTube now.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Also from Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. He also has a recent new Connections miniseries.

throwaway22032 2y ago

Right. It's difficult to compare because the quantities involved are relevant. If paper were 100x more expensive today, e.g. it would cost £1 per A4 sheet rather than £0.01, but it was the only way to take notes, then I would still buy it and just moderate my use. It's not like you need thousands and thousands of sheets of paper.

dmurray 2y ago
> I would still buy it and just moderate my use. I think I'd still use it exactly the same amount (I fill 1-10 pages a day) but I'd be more careful about letting unused pages go to waste.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  I would think thriftyness would actually end up influencing your handwriting.- PS. That'd make for an interesting study ...
WalterBright 2y ago
My parents' habits were formed from the Depression, and they always conserved paper. I'd receive letters from them written on the back sides of junk mail flyers, and the back sides of mimeographed papers from work. The writing went right to the edge of the paper. Those habits rubbed off on me, and I still have a box of scrap paper I use.
- throwaway22032 2y ago
  I do that too! I tear napkins in half, sometimes quarters, then I keep the small bits and use them later. Or use the napkin from the table to mop up spills if it didn't get used much. That sort of thing.
- tombert 2y ago
  Back when I could still read my own handwriting, and back when I printed things with regularity, I used to use failed prints as scrap paper for my math homework. I figured that the paper was wasted, so getting any more use of out if was less wasted money.

creer 2y ago

There is a tendency to talk about "the poor" as an extreme case, and "the wealthy" as an extreme case. But in doing so you make the entire problem irrelevant. As you say, the extreme poor at that time does not write, and the extreme wealthy at that time does not care. The question is only relevant for a more "normal" case that both writes and is price-sensitive. Say, a student, a public writer, an accountant, a letter or litterary writer.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> question is only relevant for a more "normal" case that both writes and is price-sensitive Economics happens at the margin.