> productivity A hand-waving argument because there's no way to create a baseline. Technology today is too different from the past. It isn't easy to even look

> productivity A hand-waving argument because there's no way to create a baseline. Technology today is too different from the past. It isn't easy to even look at just energy, housing or food. I can't think of an unbiased way to model housing costs. Looking at food prices (let's ignore nutrition and environmental costs): Historically, incomes have risen faster than food prices as countries have industrialized, enabling a simultaneous increase in the supply and affordability of many nutritious foods. As a personal example in New Zealand, virtually nobody is eating mutton, tripe or liver any more. Milk prices against median wage over time might be a good estimate for food affordability? I prefer to try and find good analytical examples that I can understand. Clever people make arguments about everything, but their assumptions are well hidden. Demographics is an understandable force, because you can find reliable figures from which you can calculate working hours, and you can calculate the number of people not working (retirees being the most significant). HOURS are a great measure for many things, because we are all given the same number equally (to a gross approximation). Nursing and education are good to model as hours in any decade. Health costs get contentious. Everyone wants more and more money spent, and technology provides more and more expensive medical solutions. But resources are not infinite so an economy needs to have a way to limit healthcare costs. There's no easy way to model healthcare costs versus income. People want free cancer treatment but they won't exercise and don't have healthy food habits. We could drastically improve quality of life by daily exercise - not sure how capitalism could get blamed here. Healthy eating is accessible but many people don't eat good foods. Who's responsible? > neoliberalism An almost meaningless word. Politics is about tribalism. I believe that we can individually understand some economics by simplifying down to concepts that are unarguably basic like hours. You need the same skill when working with large software systems. There's metaskills to understanding radically different systems.