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I honestly don't care about how egalitarian a society is. I care about a society's aggregate quality of life. If one person has a quality of life 100,000 times

I honestly don't care about how egalitarian a society is. I care about a society's aggregate quality of life. If one person has a quality of life 100,000 times greater than everyone else, yet everyone else has a quality of life 100 times greater than today, I would choose that society. You can argue that the overall quality of life for our society now is lower than in 1950, but I strongly disagree with you. It doesn't matter if real wages have increased since 1970 if material goods have gotten cheaper. I would still argue that the overall quality of life has increased since 1970. And you're painting an incomplete picture about 1950: >1950 was "better" in that it was both more egalitarian (for whom) and also more secure (which, I should note, made it inherently more egalitarian). If you were white. >Things like the GI Bill and post-war reconstruction made Major Life Purchases like housing, infrastructure, and education very affordable for large masses of the population. If you were white. >Employer-sponsored pension plans made retirement a real possibility and Social Security a fall-back. 65 was around the median age of death in 1950. "Retirement" was a hell of a lot shorter if you work almost until your death age. I can't call that better than now. >One spouse was expected to work, and the other spouse's labor was held in reserve for emergencies. If you were white. And both spouses working was an emergency situation because maintaining a household took a lot more effort in 1950 than it does today. I just can't imagine things being better for people in 1950 than now. >someone who has bare-minimum health insurance, and has to pay health premiums, taxes, ever-rising housing rent, and student-debt service on a salary in the range of $20k-$30k per year (assuming you live in the USA) simply cannot afford to consume that many Playstation 3 games. I don't think I could afford to consume that many Playstation 3 games in 1950, either. In fact, I don't think anyone could afford to consume any. In fact, there would be a good chance that I wouldn't even own a television in 1950.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
I do certainly take your point on the "if you were white" front, but I want to use that to lead into something Tony Judt wrote in "Ill Fares the Land": the post-war period was prosperous enough that political movements, in many instances, shifted from striving to overthrow and replace the system towards striving to be included in the existing prosperity. MLK Jr was indeed a black-rights activist and a socialist, but he didn't see his form of democratic socialism as something that required a violent revolution of genocidal proportions the way that, say, Lenin had, or even the way that German anti-fascist partisans had. >I don't think I could afford to consume that many Playstation 3 games in 1950, either. In fact, I don't think anyone could afford to consume any. Thank you for making part of my point for me. If someone couldn't consume PS3 games in 1953-1963 because they didn't exist, and someone can't consume PS3 games now because they're unaffordable on today's low salaries (well, low salaries for most people outside Hacker News), then what good is the existence of PS3 games to this person? Where's the worth in increased production and variety of consumer goods only an elite minority can afford to enjoy?
- rthomas6 14y ago
  I agree that increased production and variety of consumer goods is mostly useless if only an elite minority gains benefits from them. But I still disagree that only an elite minority has seen a benefit, i.e. an increase in the quality of life over the past 40 years, and certainly over the past 60 years. And yes, income and wealth inequality may have increased since 1950, and I agree with you that this is objectively bad. I also agree that our country has a serious and growing problem with personal debt. But these things do not mean that the average and median standard of living has not risen for everyone in the United States since 1950, which I believe it has. I don't even see how this can be argued. Almost every quality of life metric I can think of has improved: education, life expectancy, and infant mortality have all improved, in addition to harder to measure increases in everyday comfort due to technology. In 2013, even most of the poor have a mobile phone. Almost anyone can walk into a library and talk to you or I on Hacker News. There are some metrics that have not improved, such as crime, incarceration rates, or income equality, and these are serious issues. But overall, I believe that the standard of living for the average US citizen has risen. Anecdotal examples don't really prove much, but I'd like to give one anyway. My sister hasn't made the best decisions, and dropped out of college to move in with her boyfriend. They lived with his mother for a while, and lived on food stamps and in poverty. During this time, they had access to an Xbox 360, a car, cell phones, and a television. Their living situation was terrible by normal standards, and yet their standard of living would have been seen as good or even great by 1950 standards.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    I don't even see how this can be argued. Simple: median real wages HAVE NOT RISEN AT ALL since 1970, while the cost of living (particularly prices for housing, health-care, education and energy) has... a lot. So you can say that consumer technology has increased the quality of life in a non-tangible, non-quantified way. But in all the quantified ways, things are getting worse: people are losing the incomes that enabled them to access consumer goods (like consumer technologies) in the first place. There are also many complaints about "kids these days", that a current-day education is "inflated" and less worthwhile or indicative of anything than a past one. The poor don't have mobile phones because they can afford luxuries, they have them because mobile phones have become very, very cheap and, in some cases, government-subsidized. As to life-expectancy, it's actually started to tick slightly downward for young people today since the Recession started. Infant mortality, too. So, indicators that have gotten better over the past four decades: educational levels, life expectancy, infant mortality, crime rates (they're down quite a bit). Indicators that got worse in the past four decades: housing, health-care, education and energy costs, real wages, working hours (they increased noticeably). Indicators that started getting worse since 5 years ago: all of the above.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

I do certainly take your point on the "if you were white" front, but I want to use that to lead into something Tony Judt wrote in "Ill Fares the Land": the post-war period was prosperous enough that political movements, in many instances, shifted from striving to overthrow and replace the system towards striving to be included in the existing prosperity. MLK Jr was indeed a black-rights activist and a socialist, but he didn't see his form of democratic socialism as something that required a violent revolution of genocidal proportions the way that, say, Lenin had, or even the way that German anti-fascist partisans had. >I don't think I could afford to consume that many Playstation 3 games in 1950, either. In fact, I don't think anyone could afford to consume any. Thank you for making part of my point for me. If someone couldn't consume PS3 games in 1953-1963 because they didn't exist, and someone can't consume PS3 games now because they're unaffordable on today's low salaries (well, low salaries for most people outside Hacker News), then what good is the existence of PS3 games to this person? Where's the worth in increased production and variety of consumer goods only an elite minority can afford to enjoy?

rthomas6 14y ago
I agree that increased production and variety of consumer goods is mostly useless if only an elite minority gains benefits from them. But I still disagree that only an elite minority has seen a benefit, i.e. an increase in the quality of life over the past 40 years, and certainly over the past 60 years. And yes, income and wealth inequality may have increased since 1950, and I agree with you that this is objectively bad. I also agree that our country has a serious and growing problem with personal debt. But these things do not mean that the average and median standard of living has not risen for everyone in the United States since 1950, which I believe it has. I don't even see how this can be argued. Almost every quality of life metric I can think of has improved: education, life expectancy, and infant mortality have all improved, in addition to harder to measure increases in everyday comfort due to technology. In 2013, even most of the poor have a mobile phone. Almost anyone can walk into a library and talk to you or I on Hacker News. There are some metrics that have not improved, such as crime, incarceration rates, or income equality, and these are serious issues. But overall, I believe that the standard of living for the average US citizen has risen. Anecdotal examples don't really prove much, but I'd like to give one anyway. My sister hasn't made the best decisions, and dropped out of college to move in with her boyfriend. They lived with his mother for a while, and lived on food stamps and in poverty. During this time, they had access to an Xbox 360, a car, cell phones, and a television. Their living situation was terrible by normal standards, and yet their standard of living would have been seen as good or even great by 1950 standards.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  I don't even see how this can be argued. Simple: median real wages HAVE NOT RISEN AT ALL since 1970, while the cost of living (particularly prices for housing, health-care, education and energy) has... a lot. So you can say that consumer technology has increased the quality of life in a non-tangible, non-quantified way. But in all the quantified ways, things are getting worse: people are losing the incomes that enabled them to access consumer goods (like consumer technologies) in the first place. There are also many complaints about "kids these days", that a current-day education is "inflated" and less worthwhile or indicative of anything than a past one. The poor don't have mobile phones because they can afford luxuries, they have them because mobile phones have become very, very cheap and, in some cases, government-subsidized. As to life-expectancy, it's actually started to tick slightly downward for young people today since the Recession started. Infant mortality, too. So, indicators that have gotten better over the past four decades: educational levels, life expectancy, infant mortality, crime rates (they're down quite a bit). Indicators that got worse in the past four decades: housing, health-care, education and energy costs, real wages, working hours (they increased noticeably). Indicators that started getting worse since 5 years ago: all of the above.