12 ms·

I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down wit

by cedws 11mo ago

I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. Social media is driving society apart, making people selfish, jealous, and angry. Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. It will just be used to stomp on ordinary people and create even more inequality.

Avicebron 11mo ago
What's crazy is that people will jump all over themselves to say "well you could totally live like that at a 1960s level" like that's even a viable possibility today (in the US). What's that about the falcon and the falconer? The center cannot hold..
- Retric 11mo ago
  People do make it work in the US with tiny incomes and a better standard of living than you’d see in a typical 1960’s household. I know people raising a family of 4 on 1 income well below the median wage without a collage degree. They do get significant help from government assistance programs for healthcare, but their lifestyle is way better off than what was typical in the 1960’s. Granted they aren’t doing this in a ultra expensive US city, but on the flip side they’re living in a huge for 1960’s 3 bedroom house with a massive backyard.
  - crossbody 11mo ago
    Finally a rational comment and not blind hating-complaining. Thank you
FloorEgg 11mo ago
To me this all just looks like a big frothy chemical reaction playing out far beyond any one person's control. With that view, many things oscillate over time, including game theory patterns (average interaction intentions of win-win, win-lose, lose-lose), and integration / mitosis (unions, international treaties, civil wars),etc. So my optimistic view is that inevitably we will get more tech whether we want it or not, and it will probably make things worse many for a while, but then it will simultaneously enable and force a restructuring at some level that starts a new cycle of prosperity. On the other side it will be clear that all this tech directly enables a better (more free, more diverse, more rewarding, more sustainable) way of life. I believe this because from studying history it seems this pattern plays out over and over and over again to varying degrees.
- Eisenstein 11mo ago
  When you say that this pattern plays out, can you be specific?
  - FloorEgg 11mo ago
    I don't have time to be precise, but I'll do my best to be more specific. New system better at organizing human behavior -> increases prosperity -> more capacity for invention -> new technologies disrupt power dynamics -> greed and power-law dynamics tilt system away from broad prosperity (most powerful switch from win-win to win-lose) -> majority become unsatisfied with system -> economics break down (too much debt, not enough education, technology increasingly and disproportionately benefits wealthy) -> trust break down -> average pattern of behavior tilts towards lose-lose dynamics -> technology keeps advancing -,> new technologies disrupt old power structures -> restructuring of world-powr order at highest levels (often through conflict) -> new system established, incorporating lessons learned from the old (more fair, more inclusive) -> trust reestablished, shift back to win-win dynamics (cycle repeats) In reality it's more messy than this. Also the geographical location of this cycle and the central power can move around. Some places may sit out one or more cycles and get stuck.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
Demiurge 11mo ago
> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. Every kind of a man, or woman? > Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. Well, this probably why statistics exist.
- Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
  Yeah if you bar over 50% of your workforce from working at market clearing wages then naturally the other 50% are going to get paid at their expense. When you underpay minorities and often outright ban women from working formal employment, it's not hard to see how wages for the others remain high.
  - jimbokun 11mo ago
    Well congratulations! We have succeeded in having stagnating wages and stagnating standard of living for everyone now!
    - doctorpangloss 11mo ago
      Lemme guess, we should bring back Bretton Woods?
    - Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
      Do you want to take a 20% pay cut so I can take the marginal benefit? Who wants to volunteer to be barred from working so I can negotiate better salary?
      - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
        I have no full time job, so I already took the cut. You're welcome.
    - satvikpendem 11mo ago
      Will you volunteer to not work so that I can instead?
astura 11mo ago
According to the census bureau median family income in 1960 was $5,600, which is $58,946.59 in Jan 2024 dollars. It's $83,730 in 2024. For individual males, in 1960 it was $4,100 ($43,157.33 Jan 2024 dollars) and $71,090 in 2024. Sources: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-037.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-286.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28... https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl The thing is, a 1960s standard of living would be totally unacceptable by almost everyone today. Single car max, no air conditioning, small house or apartment, multiple children sharing bedrooms, no cellphones, no Internet, no cable, no streaming. Local calls only. Children allowed outside by themselves.
- ethanwillis 11mo ago
  now tell us how they calculate those inflation adjusted dollars-- what basket of goods? prices in which markets?
  - tharne 11mo ago
    They've cited and linked their sources. What's the issue?
    - ethanwillis 11mo ago
      The "issue" is the comparison is much more complex than people may be led to believe. It's not a simple "adjust the dollars to be the same" calculation. There are a lot of assumptions that go into making that calculation. If I tell you that the value of a dollar you hold has gone down or up this year versus last year because of the price fluctuation of an item you never have or never will purchase, such as hermit crabs in New Zealand. Would you believe your dollar is worth more or less? What if the price of a good you do spend your dollars on has an inverse relationship with the price of hermit crabs in New Zealand? Or what if the prices of the items you do buy haven't moved at all?
    - bpt3 11mo ago
Terr_ 11mo ago
> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. It will just be used to stomp on ordinary people and create even more inequality. The problem isn't "more technology" (nor is the solution "less) but rather a change in who controls it and benefits. We shouldn't surrender-in-advance to the idea that the stompers will definitely own it.
SrslyJosh 11mo ago
> The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. More like the last 50 years. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-... "For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades" The TL;DR is that in 1964 the average hourly wage was $20.27. As of 2018, average hourly wage was $22.65.
- zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
  1974 median individual income was $28k 2024 median individual income was $45k Over 50 years that’s a decent amount of growth. Obviously it could be better but it’s not nothing. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
  - amypetrik8 11mo ago
    Sure but pretty sure with your 1974 28k you could buy a nice house, whereas with your 2024 (equivalent) 45k you can buy an OK car, not a house
    - raincole 11mo ago
      In theory this graph is already inflation-adjusted. In practice, I think this shows why economic statistics are borderline lies.
      - marcosdumay 11mo ago
        The problem is inflation. We have no way to reliably measure it over any long time-frame. Make the time long enough, and it even stops making sense as a concept.
ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
> "In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children." In the 1930s, it wasn't possible so what's your point? (History time: What happened on October 24, 1929?) Choosing the 1960s as a baseline is artificially cherry-picking an era of economic growth (at the expense of the rest of post-WW2 Europe and Asia who were rebuilding) instead of an era of decline or normalcy.
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  > cherry-picking an era of economic growth But we already did the growth. We didn't shrink back. So we should still be able to get those results.
  - oersted 11mo ago
    I will not attempt to make a judgement as to the effects of this, but just so you get an idea of the enormity of the change: World population: 1960: ~3B 2025: ~8.3B It was a VERY different world. That growth might not have gone anywhere but it’s not a very significant amount of wealth in today’s terms. People are very worried about birth rates because for a while it will mean that there will be too few people of working age, which will be a disaster. But big picture, perhaps a correction is overdue, we cannot make people’s lives better if we keep adding people faster than we are growing the world economy. You always need to put history in the context that the world was pretty empty. Less value was created but there was less competition for resources and it was easier for certain groups to stand out or dominate. 1900: ~1.6B 1750: ~750M 1500: ~450M 1000: ~350M 1: ~250M
    - Dylan16807 11mo ago
      Competition for what resources? Food we still have plenty of, green revolution and all, and almost everything else is limited by labor so it should scale fine with population. Land is the main thing that's limited, but getting a smaller yard doesn't fix much.
xnx 11mo ago
> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? It has been for the last few thousand years.
- bluescrn 11mo ago
  That ended in around 2010, IMHO. Now technology mostly divides and manipulates us, enshittifies things, and works to turn billionaires into trillionaires.
  - marcosdumay 11mo ago
    It's not technology that is doing that.
bananaflag 11mo ago
> I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. AI healthcare, for example. Have an entity that can diagnose you in a week at most, instead of being sent from specialist to specialist for months, each one being utterly uninterested in your problem.
- LtWorf 11mo ago
  The AI only works kinda decently for ONE specific field, where you still need to take the xray anyway and need the machine and the operator to do it.
jaredklewis 11mo ago
> That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hungary, where the government gives massive tax breaks (IIRC they spend around ~6% of their GDP on child incentives), has low birthrates. Europe, East Asia, India, the Middle East, the Americas, basically the whole world except for central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (which are catching up) has low birth rates. Obviously the economic conditions between basically all the countries in the world varies wildly, but there isn't a consistent relationship between those conditions and fertility. Also within countries, the number of children people have is not always correlated with wealth (and at times in the past 60 years it has been negatively correlated). Anyway, I find your argument intuitive, but it doesn't seem to align with the data we have.
- uniq7 11mo ago
  In which of those countries is it possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children?
  - amy_petrik 11mo ago
    It's a simple catch-22 - women don't want to leave the workforce because one salary cannot support a family - yet women remaining in the workforce, since single-salary is infeasible, thusly doubling supply of workers, lowering salaries, which itself makes it infeasible to single-income a family Not to pick on women, as a feminist if you ask me, all modern men should have to be houseboys to serve their feminine masters. It does suck but it is necessary to benefit the modern women who did not suffer, in so by causing modern men to suffer -- to make amends for the suffering of all women in the perpetuity of history at the hands of all historical men, neither of which are alive today.
    - kamaal 11mo ago
georgeecollins 11mo ago
A lot of this stuff about baby boomers vs now is based on how remember things. The data is more complicated. Example: The average home in 1960 was like 1600 sq ft, now its like 2800 sq ft. Sometimes we are comparing apples to oranges. I am not trying to blunt social criticism. The redistribution of wealth is a real thing that started in the tax policies of the 1980s that we just can't seem to back away from. But a lot of people are pushing gambling, crypto, options that are telling people that they have no hope of getting ahead just by working and saving. That's not helpful.
- p1necone 11mo ago
  > The average home in 1960 was like 1600 sq ft, now its like 2800 sq ft. Statements like this are not particularly meaningful unless there is actually a supply of 1600 sqft houses that are proportionally cheaper, otherwise you're just implying a causal relationship with no evidence.
  - crossbody 11mo ago
    Supply is driven by demand unless there is a monopoly in house building (there isn't). If this wasn't the case, one could quickly become a billionaire by starting first company that build small houses that are supposedly in demand but not provided by the market
    - p1necone 11mo ago
      You're still presupposing that there's a linear (or at least linear enough to be significant amongst the myriad other factors involved) relationship between square footage of house and cost. And that that relationship extends arbitrarily downwards as you reduce the square footage.
      - crossbody 11mo ago
        It's one of the main factors. And it can be reduced to almost nothing if a small single family housing zone is turned into a skyscraper providing accommodation for thousands
rr808 11mo ago
> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. Most of the people I see working in tech can easily afford this. Maybe not private schools or McMansions but the basics are pretty easy. Sure if you're a humanities major with health problems its tough.
- ocdtrekkie 11mo ago
  This is far from true. Aside from Valley pay, which also has Valley housing costs, a "tech job" will barely pay for healthcare and housing for one, much less healthcare and housing for four.
  - rr808 11mo ago
    Median dev salary in USA is $133k, most likely with healthcare already. You can easily afford a mortgage on a median home which is about $24k/yr. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm#tab-5 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/ https://www.calculator.net/mortgage-calculator.html?chouseprice=360%2C000&cdownpayment=10&cdownpaymentunit=p&cloanterm=30&cinterestrate=6.374&cstartmonth=11&cstartyear=2025&caddoptional=1&cpropertytaxes=1.2&cpropertytaxesunit=p&chomeins=1%2C500&chomeinsunit=d&cpmi=0&cpmiunit=d&choa=0&choaunit=d&cothercost=4%2C000&cothercostunit=d&cmop=0&cptinc=0&chiinc=0&choainc=0&cocinc=0&cexma=0&cexmsm=11&cexmsy=2025&cexya=0&cexysm=11&cexysy=2025&cexoa=0&cexosm=11&cexosy=2025&caot=0&xa1=0&xm1=11&xy1=2025&xa2=0&xm2=11&xy2=2025&xa3=0&xm3=11&xy3=2025&xa4=0&xm4=11&xy4=2025&xa5=0&xm5=11&xy5=2025&xa6=0&xm6=11&xy6=2025&xa7=0&xm7=11&xy7=2025&xa8=0&xm8=11&xy8=2025&xa9=0&xm9=11&xy9=2025&xa10=0&xm10=11&xy10=2025&csbw=1&printit=0&x=Calculate https://www.calculator.net/mortgage-calculator.html?chousepr...
    - epicureanideal 11mo ago
      The median dev doesn’t work in a city with a median cost of living. The jobs are concentrated where there’s a high cost of living.
SchemaLoad 11mo ago
We will be able to build even bigger super yachts for billionaires now though. Bezos can have his own personal cruise ship.
rockemsockem 11mo ago
I'd say the most mundane thing I use chat GPT for is to tell me which deeply nested menu some option is in for software I don't use very often. I feel like most people would get value out of that. Most recent example from a few days ago 'How do I change settings around spacing for "heading 2" in a document?'
mittensc 11mo ago
> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That wasn't true in the rest of the world. The US had a unique position due to ww2 that was bound to errode. I find it funny to compare horror stories from my parents/grandparents to this...
schnitzelstoat 11mo ago
The main problem there is soaring housing costs which have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with extremely restrictive planning regulations that make it impossible for the housing supply to keep up with population growth.
isoprophlex 11mo ago
We're disappearing up our own assholes made of misery, loneliness and consumerism. If you want a picture of the future: imagine a robotic boot, stamping on a human face that's begging for more techno-stamping, forever.
- jcgrillo 11mo ago
  This is an excellent metaphor, so don't take this as criticism merely an observation, but it skews heavily towards the techno-utopian narrative that scam artists like Altman and Pichai keep harping on. Your techno-dystopia makes the same fatal assumption that tech matters much at all. The internet has become television. That's it. It's not nothing but it damn sure ain't everything, and it's just not all that important to most folks.
Blamklmo 11mo ago
[dead]
andrepd 11mo ago
> The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. Make it 50 years https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages-and-worker-productivity-the-price-measure-matters/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...
LtWorf 11mo ago
> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. And that was all because they needed to show to the communist countries how much better capitalism was. Now communism is gone so there's no need to show off.
ahoka 11mo ago
"work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children" Have you considered that there's more to human existence than to pay a mortgage and women are not something you keep in your house to watch after your offspring so they can do the very same when growing up?
- spicyusername 11mo ago
  I'm not sure what you're responding to, or why you're responding in such a hostile way. The wife can be the breadwinner, too. Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life. Who wants a society in which couples don't have time to parent their children or manage their household? It's a fact that seeing to your children's education and social life, cleaning, cooking, and all of the other non-sexy activities of running a household are a full-time job. It doesn't need to be the wife that does that, but it's best when somebody in the family can.
  - moduspol 11mo ago
    > Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life. I'm with you but I think we're in the minority nowadays. "Progress" seems to mean paying someone else (who cares a lot less about your children than you do to) to raise your children starting from the moment that maternity leave ends. But at least you get to live close to a big city, and I guess our GDP is a little higher.
- williamdclt 11mo ago
  That's not the point being made. Whether you're into the traditional marriage/family social schema or not (and personally I'm very much not), it's still something that most of the population wants, that society expects and relies on. The fact that it's not something achievable anymore is clearly a big problem.
lynx97 11mo ago
> In the 60s it was possible for a man ... with a wife and support two or three children. This is borderline sexist. > and the plummeting birth rates show it Those or, IMO, mostly due to the invention of the pill.
kiba 11mo ago
The benefits of economic growth flows largely to people who owns land and non-reproducible privilege. This the real reason why billionaire exists, not because they have a lot of money, though that help, but because they were able to build modern monopolies. The solution is to tax, dismantle, or regulate them, and that includes land. Georgism and LVT proposals are starting to see a slow resurgence in the political landscape.
gorgoiler 11mo ago
Why was it possible for a man in the 1960s to have an ordinary job, a family, and a house? Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? Is there some sector of society now that prospers proportionally more at the expense of others? The answer that immediately springs to mind is that women, ethnic minorities, and the urban poor all did relatively badly in the 1960s. With the latter two categories, for every apple pie home with a sedan and two kids there were umpteen other drafty tenement flats with malnourished families sharing a bedroom: British tenements https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/feb/02/a-failure-of-society-britains-slum-housing-crisis-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/feb/02... NYC tenements https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/06/07/tenement-homes-new-york-history-cramped-apartments https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/06/07/tenement-homes-new-york... It’s not one thing or another — many factors have contributed to what feels like change this way or that over the years — but I try to never forget just how abominably crap life used to be for quite a lot of people, and just how much better it is these days.
- zaphod12 11mo ago
  your point isn't necessarily wrong, but using an NYPL overview of tenements which all pre-date WWII to exemplify anything about the 1960s in NYC is disingenuous.
- moduspol 11mo ago
  > Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? The common theory I've heard is that the rest of the developed world was still recovering from WW2.
  - solace_silence 11mo ago
    That is a common explanation, but it kinda implies the world just sat on its hands for 20 years after WWII. I suspect it's just a distraction from the high tax rates and relatively progressive policy at the time, to instead say "it can't happen again".
- duped 11mo ago
tim333 11mo ago
The work an ordinary job and support a house, wife and two kids thing is down to economic policy rather than tech. Houses have been treated as financial assets where you have to restrict supply to keep the prices up. You could build a manufatured house for ~$60000 or a couple or years salary like https://siphouse.co.uk/product/insulated-summer-house-with-veranda-hadrian-80-m%c2%b2/ https://siphouse.co.uk/product/insulated-summer-house-with-v... if it wasn't for planning laws preventing it. or https://www.claytonhomes.com/homes/36TRU28684RH/ https://www.claytonhomes.com/homes/36TRU28684RH/ Maybe 2x that for govt sponsored high rises like they have in Asia That may look basic but is similar to what you could get in the 1960s. I mean what do you actually need? I think we may need a return to slightly more lefty policies - still free enterprise but everyone has a right to a reasonable home and ok income (healthcare etc)
marcosdumay 11mo ago
> Because to me it looks like the opposite. It's neither. None of that is about technology, and it's not the first time in history that it happened either. And if AI somehow replace a third of the workforce, it's still not enough of an structural change to make technology a cause. If it goes way above that, it can be different, but it's not right now.
satvikpendem 11mo ago
> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. The book Capital in the 21st Century comes to the conclusion that this is a historical anomaly due to World War II (and really only in the US, and really only for white families in the US). Don't take the anomaly of the past and treat it as the normality of what people in history experienced.
red-iron-pine 11mo ago
> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. Wasn't like that in 1800s, or the 1910s, or the Great Depression, etc. World Wars happened and all of the industrial nations got bombed to hell and lost a generation or two. The US didn't have that happen and was able to provide unprecedented prosperity for the Greatest Generation and Boomers because it would take 30+ years to truly rebuild and grow their population. Sure enough the wheels started falling off in the 70's and 80s, and only technological growth kept the US on top. And that's slipping.

by cedws 11mo ago

Avicebron 11mo ago

What's crazy is that people will jump all over themselves to say "well you could totally live like that at a 1960s level" like that's even a viable possibility today (in the US). What's that about the falcon and the falconer? The center cannot hold..

Retric 11mo ago
People do make it work in the US with tiny incomes and a better standard of living than you’d see in a typical 1960’s household. I know people raising a family of 4 on 1 income well below the median wage without a collage degree. They do get significant help from government assistance programs for healthcare, but their lifestyle is way better off than what was typical in the 1960’s. Granted they aren’t doing this in a ultra expensive US city, but on the flip side they’re living in a huge for 1960’s 3 bedroom house with a massive backyard.
- crossbody 11mo ago
  Finally a rational comment and not blind hating-complaining. Thank you

FloorEgg 11mo ago

To me this all just looks like a big frothy chemical reaction playing out far beyond any one person's control. With that view, many things oscillate over time, including game theory patterns (average interaction intentions of win-win, win-lose, lose-lose), and integration / mitosis (unions, international treaties, civil wars),etc. So my optimistic view is that inevitably we will get more tech whether we want it or not, and it will probably make things worse many for a while, but then it will simultaneously enable and force a restructuring at some level that starts a new cycle of prosperity. On the other side it will be clear that all this tech directly enables a better (more free, more diverse, more rewarding, more sustainable) way of life. I believe this because from studying history it seems this pattern plays out over and over and over again to varying degrees.

Eisenstein 11mo ago
When you say that this pattern plays out, can you be specific?
- FloorEgg 11mo ago
  I don't have time to be precise, but I'll do my best to be more specific. New system better at organizing human behavior -> increases prosperity -> more capacity for invention -> new technologies disrupt power dynamics -> greed and power-law dynamics tilt system away from broad prosperity (most powerful switch from win-win to win-lose) -> majority become unsatisfied with system -> economics break down (too much debt, not enough education, technology increasingly and disproportionately benefits wealthy) -> trust break down -> average pattern of behavior tilts towards lose-lose dynamics -> technology keeps advancing -,> new technologies disrupt old power structures -> restructuring of world-powr order at highest levels (often through conflict) -> new system established, incorporating lessons learned from the old (more fair, more inclusive) -> trust reestablished, shift back to win-win dynamics (cycle repeats) In reality it's more messy than this. Also the geographical location of this cycle and the central power can move around. Some places may sit out one or more cycles and get stuck.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]

Demiurge 11mo ago

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. Every kind of a man, or woman? > Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. Well, this probably why statistics exist.

Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
Yeah if you bar over 50% of your workforce from working at market clearing wages then naturally the other 50% are going to get paid at their expense. When you underpay minorities and often outright ban women from working formal employment, it's not hard to see how wages for the others remain high.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  Well congratulations! We have succeeded in having stagnating wages and stagnating standard of living for everyone now!
  - doctorpangloss 11mo ago
    Lemme guess, we should bring back Bretton Woods?
  - Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
    Do you want to take a 20% pay cut so I can take the marginal benefit? Who wants to volunteer to be barred from working so I can negotiate better salary?
    - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      I have no full time job, so I already took the cut. You're welcome.
  - satvikpendem 11mo ago
    Will you volunteer to not work so that I can instead?

astura 11mo ago

According to the census bureau median family income in 1960 was $5,600, which is $58,946.59 in Jan 2024 dollars. It's $83,730 in 2024. For individual males, in 1960 it was $4,100 ($43,157.33 Jan 2024 dollars) and $71,090 in 2024. Sources: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-037.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-286.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28... https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl The thing is, a 1960s standard of living would be totally unacceptable by almost everyone today. Single car max, no air conditioning, small house or apartment, multiple children sharing bedrooms, no cellphones, no Internet, no cable, no streaming. Local calls only. Children allowed outside by themselves.

ethanwillis 11mo ago
now tell us how they calculate those inflation adjusted dollars-- what basket of goods? prices in which markets?
- tharne 11mo ago
  They've cited and linked their sources. What's the issue?
  - ethanwillis 11mo ago
    The "issue" is the comparison is much more complex than people may be led to believe. It's not a simple "adjust the dollars to be the same" calculation. There are a lot of assumptions that go into making that calculation. If I tell you that the value of a dollar you hold has gone down or up this year versus last year because of the price fluctuation of an item you never have or never will purchase, such as hermit crabs in New Zealand. Would you believe your dollar is worth more or less? What if the price of a good you do spend your dollars on has an inverse relationship with the price of hermit crabs in New Zealand? Or what if the prices of the items you do buy haven't moved at all?
  - bpt3 11mo ago

Terr_ 11mo ago

> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. It will just be used to stomp on ordinary people and create even more inequality. The problem isn't "more technology" (nor is the solution "less) but rather a change in who controls it and benefits. We shouldn't surrender-in-advance to the idea that the stompers will definitely own it.

SrslyJosh 11mo ago

> The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. More like the last 50 years. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-... "For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades" The TL;DR is that in 1964 the average hourly wage was $20.27. As of 2018, average hourly wage was $22.65.

zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
1974 median individual income was $28k 2024 median individual income was $45k Over 50 years that’s a decent amount of growth. Obviously it could be better but it’s not nothing. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
- amypetrik8 11mo ago
  Sure but pretty sure with your 1974 28k you could buy a nice house, whereas with your 2024 (equivalent) 45k you can buy an OK car, not a house
  - raincole 11mo ago
    In theory this graph is already inflation-adjusted. In practice, I think this shows why economic statistics are borderline lies.
    - marcosdumay 11mo ago
      The problem is inflation. We have no way to reliably measure it over any long time-frame. Make the time long enough, and it even stops making sense as a concept.

ThrowawayR2 11mo ago

> "In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children." In the 1930s, it wasn't possible so what's your point? (History time: What happened on October 24, 1929?) Choosing the 1960s as a baseline is artificially cherry-picking an era of economic growth (at the expense of the rest of post-WW2 Europe and Asia who were rebuilding) instead of an era of decline or normalcy.

Dylan16807 11mo ago
> cherry-picking an era of economic growth But we already did the growth. We didn't shrink back. So we should still be able to get those results.
- oersted 11mo ago
  I will not attempt to make a judgement as to the effects of this, but just so you get an idea of the enormity of the change: World population: 1960: ~3B 2025: ~8.3B It was a VERY different world. That growth might not have gone anywhere but it’s not a very significant amount of wealth in today’s terms. People are very worried about birth rates because for a while it will mean that there will be too few people of working age, which will be a disaster. But big picture, perhaps a correction is overdue, we cannot make people’s lives better if we keep adding people faster than we are growing the world economy. You always need to put history in the context that the world was pretty empty. Less value was created but there was less competition for resources and it was easier for certain groups to stand out or dominate. 1900: ~1.6B 1750: ~750M 1500: ~450M 1000: ~350M 1: ~250M
  - Dylan16807 11mo ago
    Competition for what resources? Food we still have plenty of, green revolution and all, and almost everything else is limited by labor so it should scale fine with population. Land is the main thing that's limited, but getting a smaller yard doesn't fix much.

xnx 11mo ago

> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? It has been for the last few thousand years.

bluescrn 11mo ago
That ended in around 2010, IMHO. Now technology mostly divides and manipulates us, enshittifies things, and works to turn billionaires into trillionaires.
- marcosdumay 11mo ago
  It's not technology that is doing that.

bananaflag 11mo ago

> I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. AI healthcare, for example. Have an entity that can diagnose you in a week at most, instead of being sent from specialist to specialist for months, each one being utterly uninterested in your problem.

LtWorf 11mo ago
The AI only works kinda decently for ONE specific field, where you still need to take the xray anyway and need the machine and the operator to do it.

jaredklewis 11mo ago

> That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hungary, where the government gives massive tax breaks (IIRC they spend around ~6% of their GDP on child incentives), has low birthrates. Europe, East Asia, India, the Middle East, the Americas, basically the whole world except for central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (which are catching up) has low birth rates. Obviously the economic conditions between basically all the countries in the world varies wildly, but there isn't a consistent relationship between those conditions and fertility. Also within countries, the number of children people have is not always correlated with wealth (and at times in the past 60 years it has been negatively correlated). Anyway, I find your argument intuitive, but it doesn't seem to align with the data we have.

uniq7 11mo ago
In which of those countries is it possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children?
- amy_petrik 11mo ago
  It's a simple catch-22 - women don't want to leave the workforce because one salary cannot support a family - yet women remaining in the workforce, since single-salary is infeasible, thusly doubling supply of workers, lowering salaries, which itself makes it infeasible to single-income a family Not to pick on women, as a feminist if you ask me, all modern men should have to be houseboys to serve their feminine masters. It does suck but it is necessary to benefit the modern women who did not suffer, in so by causing modern men to suffer -- to make amends for the suffering of all women in the perpetuity of history at the hands of all historical men, neither of which are alive today.
  - kamaal 11mo ago

georgeecollins 11mo ago

A lot of this stuff about baby boomers vs now is based on how remember things. The data is more complicated. Example: The average home in 1960 was like 1600 sq ft, now its like 2800 sq ft. Sometimes we are comparing apples to oranges. I am not trying to blunt social criticism. The redistribution of wealth is a real thing that started in the tax policies of the 1980s that we just can't seem to back away from. But a lot of people are pushing gambling, crypto, options that are telling people that they have no hope of getting ahead just by working and saving. That's not helpful.

p1necone 11mo ago
> The average home in 1960 was like 1600 sq ft, now its like 2800 sq ft. Statements like this are not particularly meaningful unless there is actually a supply of 1600 sqft houses that are proportionally cheaper, otherwise you're just implying a causal relationship with no evidence.
- crossbody 11mo ago
  Supply is driven by demand unless there is a monopoly in house building (there isn't). If this wasn't the case, one could quickly become a billionaire by starting first company that build small houses that are supposedly in demand but not provided by the market
  - p1necone 11mo ago
    You're still presupposing that there's a linear (or at least linear enough to be significant amongst the myriad other factors involved) relationship between square footage of house and cost. And that that relationship extends arbitrarily downwards as you reduce the square footage.
    - crossbody 11mo ago
      It's one of the main factors. And it can be reduced to almost nothing if a small single family housing zone is turned into a skyscraper providing accommodation for thousands

rr808 11mo ago

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. Most of the people I see working in tech can easily afford this. Maybe not private schools or McMansions but the basics are pretty easy. Sure if you're a humanities major with health problems its tough.

ocdtrekkie 11mo ago
This is far from true. Aside from Valley pay, which also has Valley housing costs, a "tech job" will barely pay for healthcare and housing for one, much less healthcare and housing for four.
- rr808 11mo ago
  Median dev salary in USA is $133k, most likely with healthcare already. You can easily afford a mortgage on a median home which is about $24k/yr. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm#tab-5 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/ https://www.calculator.net/mortgage-calculator.html?chouseprice=360%2C000&cdownpayment=10&cdownpaymentunit=p&cloanterm=30&cinterestrate=6.374&cstartmonth=11&cstartyear=2025&caddoptional=1&cpropertytaxes=1.2&cpropertytaxesunit=p&chomeins=1%2C500&chomeinsunit=d&cpmi=0&cpmiunit=d&choa=0&choaunit=d&cothercost=4%2C000&cothercostunit=d&cmop=0&cptinc=0&chiinc=0&choainc=0&cocinc=0&cexma=0&cexmsm=11&cexmsy=2025&cexya=0&cexysm=11&cexysy=2025&cexoa=0&cexosm=11&cexosy=2025&caot=0&xa1=0&xm1=11&xy1=2025&xa2=0&xm2=11&xy2=2025&xa3=0&xm3=11&xy3=2025&xa4=0&xm4=11&xy4=2025&xa5=0&xm5=11&xy5=2025&xa6=0&xm6=11&xy6=2025&xa7=0&xm7=11&xy7=2025&xa8=0&xm8=11&xy8=2025&xa9=0&xm9=11&xy9=2025&xa10=0&xm10=11&xy10=2025&csbw=1&printit=0&x=Calculate https://www.calculator.net/mortgage-calculator.html?chousepr...
  - epicureanideal 11mo ago
    The median dev doesn’t work in a city with a median cost of living. The jobs are concentrated where there’s a high cost of living.

SchemaLoad 11mo ago

We will be able to build even bigger super yachts for billionaires now though. Bezos can have his own personal cruise ship.

rockemsockem 11mo ago

I'd say the most mundane thing I use chat GPT for is to tell me which deeply nested menu some option is in for software I don't use very often. I feel like most people would get value out of that. Most recent example from a few days ago 'How do I change settings around spacing for "heading 2" in a document?'

mittensc 11mo ago

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That wasn't true in the rest of the world. The US had a unique position due to ww2 that was bound to errode. I find it funny to compare horror stories from my parents/grandparents to this...

schnitzelstoat 11mo ago

The main problem there is soaring housing costs which have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with extremely restrictive planning regulations that make it impossible for the housing supply to keep up with population growth.

isoprophlex 11mo ago

We're disappearing up our own assholes made of misery, loneliness and consumerism. If you want a picture of the future: imagine a robotic boot, stamping on a human face that's begging for more techno-stamping, forever.

jcgrillo 11mo ago
This is an excellent metaphor, so don't take this as criticism merely an observation, but it skews heavily towards the techno-utopian narrative that scam artists like Altman and Pichai keep harping on. Your techno-dystopia makes the same fatal assumption that tech matters much at all. The internet has become television. That's it. It's not nothing but it damn sure ain't everything, and it's just not all that important to most folks.

Blamklmo 11mo ago

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andrepd 11mo ago

> The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. Make it 50 years https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages-and-worker-productivity-the-price-measure-matters/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...

LtWorf 11mo ago

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. And that was all because they needed to show to the communist countries how much better capitalism was. Now communism is gone so there's no need to show off.

ahoka 11mo ago

"work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children" Have you considered that there's more to human existence than to pay a mortgage and women are not something you keep in your house to watch after your offspring so they can do the very same when growing up?

spicyusername 11mo ago
I'm not sure what you're responding to, or why you're responding in such a hostile way. The wife can be the breadwinner, too. Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life. Who wants a society in which couples don't have time to parent their children or manage their household? It's a fact that seeing to your children's education and social life, cleaning, cooking, and all of the other non-sexy activities of running a household are a full-time job. It doesn't need to be the wife that does that, but it's best when somebody in the family can.
- moduspol 11mo ago
  > Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life. I'm with you but I think we're in the minority nowadays. "Progress" seems to mean paying someone else (who cares a lot less about your children than you do to) to raise your children starting from the moment that maternity leave ends. But at least you get to live close to a big city, and I guess our GDP is a little higher.
williamdclt 11mo ago
That's not the point being made. Whether you're into the traditional marriage/family social schema or not (and personally I'm very much not), it's still something that most of the population wants, that society expects and relies on. The fact that it's not something achievable anymore is clearly a big problem.

lynx97 11mo ago

> In the 60s it was possible for a man ... with a wife and support two or three children. This is borderline sexist. > and the plummeting birth rates show it Those or, IMO, mostly due to the invention of the pill.

kiba 11mo ago

The benefits of economic growth flows largely to people who owns land and non-reproducible privilege. This the real reason why billionaire exists, not because they have a lot of money, though that help, but because they were able to build modern monopolies. The solution is to tax, dismantle, or regulate them, and that includes land. Georgism and LVT proposals are starting to see a slow resurgence in the political landscape.

gorgoiler 11mo ago

Why was it possible for a man in the 1960s to have an ordinary job, a family, and a house? Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? Is there some sector of society now that prospers proportionally more at the expense of others? The answer that immediately springs to mind is that women, ethnic minorities, and the urban poor all did relatively badly in the 1960s. With the latter two categories, for every apple pie home with a sedan and two kids there were umpteen other drafty tenement flats with malnourished families sharing a bedroom: British tenements https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/feb/02/a-failure-of-society-britains-slum-housing-crisis-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/feb/02... NYC tenements https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/06/07/tenement-homes-new-york-history-cramped-apartments https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/06/07/tenement-homes-new-york... It’s not one thing or another — many factors have contributed to what feels like change this way or that over the years — but I try to never forget just how abominably crap life used to be for quite a lot of people, and just how much better it is these days.

zaphod12 11mo ago
your point isn't necessarily wrong, but using an NYPL overview of tenements which all pre-date WWII to exemplify anything about the 1960s in NYC is disingenuous.
moduspol 11mo ago
> Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? The common theory I've heard is that the rest of the developed world was still recovering from WW2.
- solace_silence 11mo ago
  That is a common explanation, but it kinda implies the world just sat on its hands for 20 years after WWII. I suspect it's just a distraction from the high tax rates and relatively progressive policy at the time, to instead say "it can't happen again".
duped 11mo ago

tim333 11mo ago

The work an ordinary job and support a house, wife and two kids thing is down to economic policy rather than tech. Houses have been treated as financial assets where you have to restrict supply to keep the prices up. You could build a manufatured house for ~$60000 or a couple or years salary like https://siphouse.co.uk/product/insulated-summer-house-with-veranda-hadrian-80-m%c2%b2/ https://siphouse.co.uk/product/insulated-summer-house-with-v... if it wasn't for planning laws preventing it. or https://www.claytonhomes.com/homes/36TRU28684RH/ https://www.claytonhomes.com/homes/36TRU28684RH/ Maybe 2x that for govt sponsored high rises like they have in Asia That may look basic but is similar to what you could get in the 1960s. I mean what do you actually need? I think we may need a return to slightly more lefty policies - still free enterprise but everyone has a right to a reasonable home and ok income (healthcare etc)

marcosdumay 11mo ago

> Because to me it looks like the opposite. It's neither. None of that is about technology, and it's not the first time in history that it happened either. And if AI somehow replace a third of the workforce, it's still not enough of an structural change to make technology a cause. If it goes way above that, it can be different, but it's not right now.

satvikpendem 11mo ago

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. The book Capital in the 21st Century comes to the conclusion that this is a historical anomaly due to World War II (and really only in the US, and really only for white families in the US). Don't take the anomaly of the past and treat it as the normality of what people in history experienced.

red-iron-pine 11mo ago

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. Wasn't like that in 1800s, or the 1910s, or the Great Depression, etc. World Wars happened and all of the industrial nations got bombed to hell and lost a generation or two. The US didn't have that happen and was able to provide unprecedented prosperity for the Greatest Generation and Boomers because it would take 30+ years to truly rebuild and grow their population. Sure enough the wheels started falling off in the 70's and 80s, and only technological growth kept the US on top. And that's slipping.