
Think you’re living in a ‘hellhole’ today? Try being a billionaire in 1916 - tokenadult
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/thinking-youre-living-in-a-hellhole-today-try-being-a-billionaire-in-1916/2017/05/05/475d7370-30f9-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html
======
dgllghr
This argument is disturbing in a number of ways. The first and foremost of
which is that it finds acceptable the fact that the middle class may only be
better off from the ultra-rich from 100 years ago. In other words, the author
thinks it's fine that the middle class is slightly under 100 years behind the
ultra-rich in terms of quality of life.

The article makes no attempt at resolving the underlying and more important
question: why is it okay that the ultra-rich of today have the ability to buy
so much political power, have access to healthcare that is far more advanced
than that which is available to even the middle class (let alone the poor),
can live in such a way that causes so much harm to the environment or
generally does damage to shared resources, and can have so much influence over
information whether via the internet or through articles such as this one? In
other words, why is okay that there inequality is so great and progress is
applied so unequally?

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." \-
William Gibson

~~~
marcoperaza
> _In other words, why is okay that there inequality is so great and progress
> is applied so unequally?_

Because inequality is the result of competitive capitalism, which allows some
people to become extremely wealthy by providing value to others. Almost all of
the advances in quality of life have come around because enterprising people
were able to profit from providing them.

~~~
dbingham
This one idea is a massively pervasive, invasive meme. It is not remotely true
and it is used to justify so much of the harm caused by current neoliberal
policy and the growing inequality in wealth and power it creates.

Most major advances we now take for granted were the results either of
government research funding or passion projects of lone researchers and
inventors. Often they were a combination of the two. Many of the lifestyle
changing inventions we now take for granted were invented long before they
became broadly marketable and often their creators never profited from them.

Markets are handy distribution tools and individual freedoms are important.
But _profit_ is not the primary driver of innovation. Passion, curiosity, and
desire to make the world a better place -- these are the drivers of
innovation.

Of late, the drive toward profit has become a stifler of innovation as
"competitive" capitalism, when unregulated under neoliberal policy, moves
inexorably towards uncompetitive monopoly in the pursuit of profit.

~~~
marcoperaza
I think you're placing too much emphasis on the act of invention itself.
Figuring out how to build a microwave oven, i.e. inventing it, is but a small
part of the enterprise of putting one in every home. Supply chains, marketing,
servicing, cost cutting, etc. are all important and tricky parts of it.

~~~
kthejoker
Shenanigans. The same infrastructure serves basically all home delivery,
marketing, service, etc. There's not a special new highway or chain store or
advertising network for every kitchen gadget.

~~~
prostoalex
HD-DVD, Betamax and Flooz electronic currency had access to the same
infrastructure.

------
nathan_f77
I like to think about things like this. I also like to think about how Bill
Gates and Mark Zuckerberg don't really have a quality of life that is much
higher than mine, at least when it comes to technology and media. You can't
buy a smartphone that is better than an iPhone 7 or a Samsung Galaxy S8. We
all have access to the same shows on Netflix, and a practically infinite
amount of music on Spotify. I think it would be exhausting to get dressed up
and eat at Michelin starred restaurants every day - most of the time I just
want something from a restaurant down the road.

~~~
eru
Yes, from a material point of view, Bill Gates can buy exactly the same Coca
Cola as a poor fishermen.

What more money buys you, now and in 1916, is social status. And that's always
good for your subjective quality of life.

It wasn't always so---economies around the globe really only took off once the
bourgeoisie could buy their way into status.

~~~
paxunix
> What more money buys you, now and in 1916, is social status.

It goes well beyond that. With more money, I can pay someone to keep my house
clean and maintain my yard, own a more reliable car, buy and eat better
quality/healthier food. I don't have to care about how much it costs me to go
to the dentist, nor how much I have to pay to vacation for two weeks in South
America.

You can exercise money to buy social status, but at the heart of it, money
buys ease of life. I bet Bill Gates very rarely thinks about how much money he
has or how much something will cost him; your housekeeper thinks about that
much, much more often.

~~~
nathan_f77
My main point is that a $700 smartphone is literally the best smartphone that
money can buy, and there has never been a better smartphone in all of human
history. I like knowing that the device in my pocket is the absolute pinnacle
of mobile devices, and that no-one in the entire world has (or has ever had) a
better smartphone.

Another point is about the utility of money. Once you reach a certain level of
financial independence, your life is only marginally improved by private jets
and private chefs. For instance, if you had $4 million in index funds, you
could quit your job and live on an annual salary of $120k. You could hire
cleaners, drive a very nice car, eat very good food, have great health and
dental insurance, and go on vacation... permanently.

I think more software engineers should be thinking about financial
independence, because it's so achievable in this industry.

------
chongli
If you're interested in reproducing, and most people are, then it's relative
wealth that matters. Sure, working in a factory in 1916 sucked. No air
conditioning, long hours, terrible safety standards, frequent illnesses or
debilitating injuries. On the other hand, today you can't even get a job
sweeping floors without at least a high school diploma. Many people have been
laid off and they'll never get a job again.

Would you rather risk life and limb to bring home the bread and keep your
family of 5 happy and well-fed in 1916? Or would you prefer to be alone and
addicted in opioid county, Ohio, today?

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Actually poor people reproduce more.

------
elipsey
I think complaints about wealth distribition are substantially about
enfranchisement and regulatory capture. Material well being is important, but
so is autonomy. If being disenfranchised and not able to control our labor or
our fate is an inadequate cause for compliant as long as we have access to the
material necessities of life, then we ought to be perfectly happy in prison.

------
ashark
The only convincing things here are healthcare advancements (obviously).

Meanwhile, the 1916 billionaire can spend 95+% of their waking time in leisure
or doing things entirely of their choosing, even if raising kids (various
staff do the hard and not-intrinsically-rewarding stuff like prepping food,
cleaning up their messes, shopping for them, and so on, you just play with
them if you like, the drudgery is entirely out of your hands). I'd be lucky to
average 25% leisure time over a year (including quality time with kids in that
figure). This makes the health thing seem less obviously an unacceptable
trade-off that it otherwise might.

Yeah, I'd miss Indian food, but I'd get over it. The media stuff--I mean,
there's so much I'm practically drowning in it, and it's not like there's
_nothing_ to do for the 1916 billionaire, it's just that less of it is
watching screens or listening to magnets vibrate cones. I'd get used to not
having AC, and buildings were designed for it back then so it's not nearly as
bad as when the AC goes out in a modern house (source: have actually lived in
a 1914-construction American house on the NHR, with no central AC). Just don't
buy a vacation house in Florida then visit it in August. If you can manage
that, you'll be fine.

[EDIT] and my 25% (again, optimistically) free time is much lower-quality that
that of someone whose time is almost entirely free, since that other 75% is
always looming an hour or so away, generating anxiety, breaking up free-time
into tiny, nearly useless chunks, making me feel guilty that I'm not working
on one of the many things that'll be in that 75%, and so on.

------
tokai
I think the article is working way to hard to make the 1916 worse than now. I
find some of the arguments in favour of the 1916s, less precise watches sound
stress reducing, as punctuality can be taken with a grain of salt. Take this:
"If in 1916 you suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, a sexually
transmitted disease or innumerable other ailments treatable in 2017"

Depression, bipolar, and std's were treatable in the 1916. Maybe not
effectively, but it is not like we are handling depression or bipolar
satisfactorily now.

Looking at number of suicides then and now, would probably have made for a
better argument. Or dwelling on just exactly how our treatments of illnesses
have become better.

------
rocky1138
I often think of this kind of thing when I buy things for practically nothing
or see things which contain what we consider basic features that quite
literally did not exist a few hundred years ago.

For instance, yesterday I remarked to myself when seeing colourful flag
advertisements along the road for a new condo that the colours on the flags
were at one time never possible to manufacture, the way purple was reserved
for royalty and was impossible to reproduce until we managed to find an animal
that produced the dye [0], and even then it took 9000 of the animals to
produce a gram. Today, you can buy anything purple for pennies and throw it
away without a second thought.

I wonder that if a King from the 16th century were to visit my (to me) basic
apartment, the first thing he would notice before anything else would be how
colourful everything is.

[0] [http://www.livescience.com/33324-purple-royal-
color.html](http://www.livescience.com/33324-purple-royal-color.html)

------
DINKDINK
Maybe in 1916, the ultrarich were writing articles that said, "Try being a
millionaire in 1816" to mollify the masses.

------
defen
If you think material wealth is what matters, then being middle-class today is
better. If you think relative social status is what actually motivates people,
then being a billionaire in 1916 is better.

May as well take the argument to its extreme - would you rather be a lower
middle class person on welfare and no career prospects, but who has access to
air travel, smartphones, Internet, etc...OR would you want to be emperor of
Rome in the second or third century AD?

------
lisper
I was just about to write a comment when I noticed that this article has been
flagged to death. Personally, I find this troubling. I thought this was a very
good article, well within the scope of HN. I wonder how much other good stuff
is being flagged to death. The haters are winning. :-(

~~~
ashark
I thought it was a really lazy article that fails miserably to sell me on the
idea that I've got a better life than a billionaire in 1916, including some
really stupid stuff about there not being refrigerators (only iceboxes, on no!
Who cares, the staff keeps it iced-up and I never even have to think about it,
in fact I may not even know which room it's in, yay wealth!) or vacuum
cleaners (I'm a billionaire in 1916, I have hand-knotted wool Persian rugs
that the help clean regularly, why do I care?).

George Will had a deadline and was feeling lazy so he repackaged someone
else's poorly-argued blog post and sent that to his editor. The only
interesting thing here is that George Will doesn't mind putting his name on
something like that.

~~~
lisper
Then express that opinion in the comments. Don't flag it to death so that
those who might find value in the article or the resulting discussion never
get a chance see it.

~~~
ashark
I didn't flag it, but it's of such low quality that I'd understand why someone
might.

~~~
lisper
My comment was not directed at you specifically.

BTW, that piece was written by George Will. I'm personally not a big fan, but
he is a Pulitzer Prize winner. If you think that one of his articles is "of
such low quality" that it deserves to be flagged you might want to consider
the possibility that the problem is with your reading rather than his writing.

~~~
ashark
This piece is definitely awful and lazy. I know who he is, that's why I wrote
that the most interesting thing about this was that he'd put his name on it.

~~~
lisper
Ah, sorry, I missed that bit.

> he repackaged someone else's poorly-argued blog post

So you just accused a Pulitzer Prize winner of plagiarism. Do you have any
evidence for this? Where is the original that you claim he "repackaged"?

~~~
defen
The claim wasn't that he committed plagiarism, it was that he lazily
"repackaged" a blog post:
[http://cafehayek.com/2016/02/40405.html](http://cafehayek.com/2016/02/40405.html)

It's not plagiarism, but it's also not something a moderately talented high-
schooler couldn't have done. I mean he even used the same food examples, the
same real-estate examples, the same travel examples, the same home appliance
examples...all he did is add some BLS stats.

~~~
lisper
Fair enough. I concede the point.

------
jstewartmobile
I can't believe George Will gets paid actual currency to trot out the old
worn-out "look how good you poors have it today" argument. It completely
misses the point.

The problem isn't that today's billionaires have more toys, houses, and
concubines than the rest of us. The problem is that money is power--and they
have so much of it that they can short-circuit the avenues of democratic self-
government.

If your kids are in school, public or private, chances are Bill Gates has more
input on how your kids are educated than you do. Or if an oil company wants to
frack in your neighborhood, no matter how outstanding the town hall turnout
may be, I'd put my money on the oil company eventually getting its way.

------
barrkel
Without a shadow of a doubt I'd rather be a billionaire in 1916 than middle
class today. It isn't even close. The only way I can self actualise today is
in the smallest of spheres, the most local of effects. I can command the
movement and labour of very few people.

------
Top19
This is a terrific article that puts all of the benefits of living today in
perspective.

The frustrating thing about many economic statistics, and this is talked about
at length in "The Second Machine Age", is that they include very little of
things we would deem very important. So things get "mathematically worse" but
in reality are quite a bit better.

I don't want to go at length on this and beyond what my memory can recall, but
an example they used in the book is Wikipedia. It's incredible obviously. But
it does not factor in any quality of life or GDP statistic.

~~~
revelation
Those aren't economic achievements, they are science progress.

Meanwhile inequality is only rising. But we shouldn't care because look at all
the cool things we now have?!

~~~
anbende
If by cool things you mean "improved cancer treatment" and "inexpensive access
to entertainment" then yes, inequality IS less important because people have
these "cool things". The idea that there is a gap is much less important than
ensuring that those at the bottom have enough. Unfortunately they don't
always, and that's a problem. Wealth disparity isn't always the right metric,
though sometimes it is.

~~~
Boothroid
People had entertainment way back when - and made their own if they had to.
Also most diseases these days seem to be caused or exacerbated by unhealthy
modern lifestyles. I don't think people are objectively happier than they used
to be. Netflix cannot replace a sense of community.

------
danharaj
I'm pretty sure Rockefeller would have turned down the offer to instead be a
single mother living on $10,000 in rural Mississippi. And would I prefer to
have the wealth and status of Rockefeller in 1916? _of course_.

So, given that bit of common sense, what makes this argument pointless and/or
irrelevant? Should I just descend into complete and abject despair over the
nice stuff we'll have in 2116? There's something obviously wrong with this
line of reasoning.

Maybe it's the fact that regardless of how much nice stuff we have today, our
class and wealth still largely determines what we do with our lives and our
relations to others, and those can be arbitrarily hellish regardless of the
material comfort involved.

This sort of argument is as miserable as that Fox News segment a few years ago
that tried to downplay how miserable poverty can be by citing refrigerator and
microwave ownership rates. Not surprising that a paleocon pseudointellectual
like George Will would latch on to such a shallow and frivolous argument.

~~~
mjfl
> And would I prefer to have the wealth and status of Rockefeller in 1916? of
> course.

You would prefer to live in a world without penecillan if it meant being
richer than everyone else?

~~~
danharaj
Somehow my choice precludes the development of penicillin? What exactly are
you trying to ask?

~~~
mjfl
That was one of the central arguments of the article. Even the poorest of us
have a lot of nice things that even Rockefeller didn't have access to, such as
access to penecillan which was discovered in 1928. If you are taking the other
side of his argument, you are saying "I don't care about like penecillan,
being richer than others is worth being without them".

~~~
danharaj
Yes I'd take those odds because of the mind boggling social power and freedom
that comes with being a billionaire. Although yes, penicillin and vaccines are
the best argument for living now than then.

------
johnwheeler
Penn Jillette said there are two certainties:

1\. The world is always getting better.

2\. Everyone thinks it's always getting worse.

~~~
thesagan
Maybe the two cancel each other out and things don't change as much as they
seem.

------
reasonattlm
What is wealth? Let me try a slightly non-standard answer to that question.
Wealth is a measure of your ability to do what you would like to do, when you
would like to do it - a measure of your breadth of immediately available
choice. Therefore your wealth is determined by the resources you presently
own, as everything requires resources.

For the sake of argument, let us say that your resources presently amount to a
leather bag containing a hundred unmarked silver coins. Interestingly enough,
by the "what would you like to do" measure, you are fantastically more wealthy
than any given ancestor put in the same position of ownership. You have
immensely greater choice. Clearly there is more to wealth-as-choice than
present property. We must also consider the historical investment made into
increasing choice, and into lowering the cost of specific - usually popular -
choices. The engines of technology and open, free markets are turned by people
to create new, better, cheaper choices. The choice to fly, the choice to
remain alive with heart disease, the choice to avoid that heart disease.

Where do silver coins - or indeed, any other resources you might own - come
from? Where does investment come from? After all, we don't come into this
world with the proverbial silver implement between the teeth. No, we worked
for those coins. We spent time and negotiated payment for that time. Why?
Because time is valuable.

But time spent alive, measured in the ticking of heartbeats, is more than
valuable - it is wealth itself, the source of all other measures of wealth.
All property was created by someone, somewhere, taking their time. The
creation and exchange of property is a way to make time fungible,
transferrable, a more valuable resource. Time spent alive is the root of all
property, all human action, and thus all wealth - both the silver in your
pocket that provides for present choice, and the wealth of possible choices
created by past investment.

Time is everything. How much have time you spent reading this far? Could you
have been doing something more useful, more optimal from your perspective? We
make these small evaluations constantly, because time is the most valuable
thing we have.

We all go through engineering our cycles of property and time; how can we best
optimize time to generate property that can be used to make our time more
effective? We do this in small ways and large, but everyone does it. Some
people do it so effectively they launch themselves into property escape
velocity, exponentially increasing the effectiveness of their time and
exploring the outer limits of what it means to maintain ownership of a great
deal of property.

Interestingly, despite the grand importance of time as the absolute foundation
of wealth, very little progress has been made in the most obvious optimization
of all: creating property that can create more time. More heartbeats, more
health, more time spent alive and active. Rejuvenation medicine, capable of
repairing the damage of aging. Tissue engineering to generate replacements for
worn organs. The cure for cancer. If you could do all that, then the much more
productive form of escape velocity becomes possible - longevity escape
velocity. Why strive to maintain an empire of property that will crumble to
dust when the degenerations of age catch up with you when you could be that
fit-looking guy having a blast swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for
as long as you like?

Wealth is exactly time, and here we are, bordering the era of biotechnology
for the repair of aging. Planning ahead for the best possible personal future
starts with investment now. Think about it.

~~~
ue_
>Wealth is a measure of your ability to do what you would like to do, when you
would like to do it - a measure of your breadth of immediately available
choice.

This ties in well with what Oscar Wilde wrote:

"Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like
Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a
supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep
himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the
shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of
what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and
lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority
of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are
forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous
poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that
they should be strongly moved by all this."

------
tobyhinloopen
Kind of silly article, but was a fun read. While the article does trigger a
"wow we actually have it quite good now" feeling, don't forget being a
billionaire means more than having a lot of money.

It means you had major success and you are one of the greatest. It means you
have status and respect. It means you are capable of financially supporting
other people, helping them and help fixing their problems.

Not only can you provide for yourself up to highest of standards of living of
1916, you can provide for 1000s of other peoples up to the higher standards of
1916. Helping people is fun :)

