This is stupid, there is one thing I value which hasn't changed much between now and then - my time. If I owned my time I could spend it reading, talking to friends, thinking. These things haven't changed much between now and then.
From a UK perspective, a reasonable house in London costs 1 million. So broadly, until I have that level of assets, I don't own my time because I must work and don't have a choice about it. I work somewhere between 10 and 12 hours a day, 6 days a week on average, on a much higher than average salary and it will take me almost a lifetime to have the assets to own my time.
This comparison is only relevant for those people who already own most of their time, so say $500,000 and above assets. Which is a lot of people but not most.
Ironically, reading the comments it seems that this is written from some right wing perspective of "everyone should be happy with their lot". But counting wealth in terms of nice things you can eat and cosmetic surgery itself betrays a massively out of touch perspective. Almost everyone in the world spends almost all of their time working a job that they hate, because they have no choice about it.
The people who view work less like this are mostly the upper classes, because for them work is much more likely to be vocational, fun or semi-optional. If you meet someone working in tech or trading in finance, there's a skew but they might have a rich or poor background. If you meet a journalist, or anyone with a "cool" or "fun" job, they're almost certainly very wealthy by background.
So you would sacrifice antibiotics, advanced cancer treatment, air travel, the internet, telephones, etc. to have more free time to talk to your friends, read, and think?
I would totally sacrifice air travel, the Internet, telephones (I would gladly give up telephones with zero compensation) to have more free time and an infinite number of people to attend to my every need.
If you have all the time in the world why would you need air travel? You can charter your own boat and travel in style with interesting friends with whom to have interesting conversations, while staring at the sea. That beats sitting in a cramped seat next to a big man and a crying baby, anytime.
Pain relief, anesthesia and modern dentistry, may be more difficult to renounce.
Not to be overly reductionist, but from an evolutionary perspective isn't one of the most important things the survival of your own genes?
Seems especially in modern societies the actual cost, effort required, and difficulty of finding a mate and raising children responsibly (e.g. so that they might also be in a position to have children if they desire) is much higher than it was in the past (hence the sharply declining birthrates in all modern nations).
You have outwardly modern, prosperous nations like Japan going through slow demographic implosions. If things are so great, why doesn't society want to, or manage to reproduce itself in the aggregate?
Are modern conveniences, travel, time to read, travel, etc., the ends in and of themselves, or are they just supposed to be the means to the only goal that nature cares about in the long term, which the survival and propagation of parts of our ourselves?
Not of the individual, since that will always perish, but our genes, our thoughts, our values and cultures?
> Seems especially in modern societies the actual cost, effort required, and difficulty of finding a mate and raising children responsibly (e.g. so that they might also be in a position to have children if they desire) is much higher than it was in the past (hence the sharply declining birthrates in all modern nations).
No, not at all. Sociologists do not at all believe that declining birth rates are because its harder to raise kids. It’s never been easier! Healthcare in most of the developed world is taken care of for the majority of people, basic education is free, and food is so cheap and abundant you’d have to actively try to raise a malnourished child today.
The idea that delivering and raising a child was easier or cheaper 100,200, or 500 years ago is ludicrous.
Is it possible that human psychology and culture evolved in a world with difficult conscious control over reproduction, and while we have moved to a world where conscious control is relatively cheap and easy, our instincts and practices haven't adjusted yet to optimize reproductive fitness?
Yet if that is the case, why do fewer and fewer people choose to raise families?
Could it be that people perceive that status goods, like living in a good neighborhood, being able to send children to good schools, are just as important as supplying material needs, and no amount of economic growth will directly deliver relative social status, which is inherently zero sum?
Those were just examples, in reality it's more free time to do absolutely anything.
If you take the health side, I think Rockefeller would have had a higher life expectancy than me. I could be wrong but if you account for the higher life expectancy of the rich and the detrimental effects of stress, I think it would be close. But say he had a five year shorter expectancy, well if you say that time working a job is worth 50% of normal time (and also consider that most people would value 20-40 more than 60-80. Then he has an effective life expectancy decades longer.
Screw the internet, phones and flights I'll trade for a grand tour, a private theatre, my own university, a private harem.
If I'm lucky I'll get ten years to be completely free, in the other case I get 70 (?).
40 hours a week plus a commute leaves you weekends and late evenings, which you won't enjoy because you're tired. And a lot of these people are trapped by a mortgage, and spent a lot of their energy and health worrying about bills.
Maybe you or I wouldn't swap but the idea that most people in the town I grew up in wouldn't swap is actually absurd. Fear of insecurity is absolutely brutal.
40h/week doesn’t feel like it’s leaving me with a lot of time at all - I would much rather work 4 days a week for 80% of my salary or even 3 days for 60%.
Yep, this is a classic thought experiment that is designed to show you how fantastic markets are at delivering human happiness. The problem is that the same could be said about Russians in 1988 after 70 years of communism.
It also ignores the prestige that accrues to those at the top of the pile. Boudreaux says he wouldn't swap with a 1916 Rockerfeller - but would 1916 Rockerfeller want to swap with him? I suspect 1916 Rockerfeller would not want to give up his position in society even for cars with electric windows and wifi.
It also relies on this idea of an "average American" and just completely ignores the question of the working class. I think many blue collar workers would actually trade places with Rockerfeller to escape their debts, a life of hard labor, imprisonment, discrimination.
> I suspect 1916 Rockerfeller would not want to give up his position in society even for cars with electric windows and wifi.
That is a massive assumption and given Rockefeller's personality I think it is very inaccurate to say that he cared about his social rank at all. What makes you think this way?
Because in this conversation Rockefeller is the placeholder/poster child for « stereotypical rich person », not the real Rockfeller personnality. Parent's thesis is: status > wealth.
Certain political factions seem to do nothing but write articles, tell poor people that they should not fight for their self interests.
Besides the though experiment is stupid. If I was richer than John D. Rockafeller I would be using my influence to effectively fight climate change. But I'm not, because a stupid shiny gadget with a tiny screen, doesn't make you richer than John D. Rockefeller.
I could see the point around dental and healthcare (if you can afford it now), but otherwise the stuff they mentioned as supposedly making us richer - wifi, movies, Skype (wtf?) - is the shit barely anyone needs, other than for entertainment and escapism from otherwise not particularly different reality.
So what's the point here? That income inequality doesn't exist because the average person in the US today is better off in most ways than the average person in the US of 100 years ago? Or that income inequality does exist, but it's okay, it doesn't really matter, because the last hundred years have given us more toys and comfort?
This is brought up often as some kind of contrarian rebuttal to the politics around modern inequality. It used to be one of Paul Graham's favorite counter-arguments. It's still as boring now as it was then.
Conjuring up a convoluted thought experiment just to try to take the wind out of people arguing about income inequality isn't insightful. It doesn't add anything to the argument. Literally the best point you're making is that as long as human progress doesn't stall completely for a hundred years, we should all be happy.
Oh, and choosing Rockefeller is hilarious, given his status as an oft-criticized robber baron in the political discourse at the time. (I wish modern political cartoons were as sharp and well-drawn.)
sounds like you are needlessly wound-up about this. it is merely a thought-experiment detailing some amusing anecdotes regarding the progress of society. your idea that this is some rebuttal to undermine the issue of inequality seems to be your strawman...if you look at it from another perspective, much of the progress addressed in the article has resulted from the democratization of economic growth
We don't have to, and shouldn't, read this article in isolation. The author is a pretty hardcore libertarian economist. If you search this blog for "inequality" you'll come up with a bunch of articles revealing that he thinks inequality is at worst irrelevant and at best a good thing:
Example quote: "Second, in a market economy rising monetary inequality is evidence of the expansion of choice and diversity made possible by economic growth. As society becomes materially richer – that is, as consumption goods become less costly and more abundant even for poor people – individuals enjoy a greater range of options of how to spend their time and lives."
Given this context, it would be bizarre if this article was not an argument against addressing inequality.
I get that we all have nice things, but that doesn't make Americans wealthy. If most Americans get seriously sick at the same time they've lost a job, then they're on a one-way road to poverty. Our standard of living is higher, but that doesn't make us rich.
That's barely one month's worth of basic expenses (rent, food, utilities) in the Bay Area. It's perhaps 3-6 months' worth in a less absurdly expensive area, depending on housing situation and how austere one can pare down the life to. Throw in even a non-serious, but serious-enough sickness and that's cut in half (or worse).
So, yeah, "most" might even be a bit optimistic. I'd have used "vast majority", "almost everyone", "just about anyone outside the top 5%-10% of income earners", etc.
If a person loses their job they'll get COBRA and see their premiums double or triple. And a family on government aid in this scenario is already impoverished.
I read about a study where Harvard grad students were offered $50k/year as a stipdend but they’d get half of their peers, or $25k/year but they’d get double their peers. People tended to choose the later. Happiness at least above some poverty threshold is relative to where you stand in relation to others. I would bet that JD wouldn’t have traded his life for mine no more than Bill agates would trade his to be an average joe in the year 2120.
I have noticed a strange effect where as new technologies arrive to replace old ones, the old technologies become obsolete and we assume that the old technologies never existed in the first place.
For example, we now have the internet and can search for information online, so we imagine that pre-internet people had no access to information. But this is simply not true. There were libraries, bookshops, letters, conferences and workshops, and a whole infrastructure around knowledge-sharing which has now become obsolete.
In the topic of trading places, you would lose substantial buying power, but you would gain a crazy opportunity to establish a legacy through generational wealth. People would sacrifice internet and dentistry and all other modern amenities for such an incredible shot. Better to reign in hell, as the saying goes.
I wish articles like these would also discuss what would be superior about being the rich guy in 1916. I tend to agree with the overall point, but it's so one-sided it makes me suspicious.
It's absolutely true that my medical care, personal entertainment, and climate control options are way better than his were. But it's not quite as one-sided as this article makes it sound. For example, I have to spend a decent chunk of my time working for other people, otherwise I'll lose all those fancy modern things I so enjoy. What is it worth to be able to do what you want, when you want, all the time?
For example, I own (one third share of) an airplane that's far better, in the aspects I care about, than anything that existed in 1916. I also flew it less than half a dozen times in the past year because it's hard to find the time among all the other stuff I have going on. Is it better to have a vastly superior airplane I get to fly a few times a year, or to have a state-of-the-art 1916 airplane I can fly whenever I feel like it? I don't think the answer is obvious.
What's better, the ability to call people on the other side of the planet for essentially free, or the ability to hang out on the beach for weeks or months at a time? Again, this is not obvious.
Or just to get down to the very basics, what's better: lots of technological toys, and medical care that will probably keep you in good health for decades if it doesn't bankrupt you first, or the near certainty that no matter what you do, your financial future and that of your immediate descendants is certain?
The comparison makes me think of slaveowners handing out little baubles and telling their slaves, "see how good you have it?" while growing fat off the fruit of their labor. Some lower-middle-class American has a nicer car than existed in 1916 and a smartphone and good heat and air conditioning at home, woohoo! Never mind that he needs the phone so his manager can call him in at a moment's notice, needs the car to get there quickly because he'll be fired if he's late, and is one paycheck away from losing that nicely heated and cooled home, while the company he works for makes more in profit from his work than he does.
What is financial security worth? How much is it worth to have control over your own life? Maybe it really is better to have modern technology instead, but it should be addressed.
Aside from these concerns, the article also suffers from terrible temporal provincialism. It spends several paragraphs talking about how much richer we are today because we have rock and roll and modern movies. I'm pretty sure that 1916 had great music, and even if it didn't have the technology to reproduce that music with high quality, who cares when you can afford to just pay top-quality musicians to come play it live? And I'm pretty sure that 1916 had great stage plays too, and like music, the technological weaknesses in reproduction are easily erased with money.
> even if it didn't have the technology to reproduce that music with high quality, who cares when you can afford to just pay top-quality musicians to come play it live?
Agreed! One of the most ridiculous part of the article. You don't need a stereo or Airplay or Sonos if you have an orchestra... or several.
Why not buy a cheap 1960s plane? A cheap 2000s car? A cheap piece of land in the middle of nowhere with 1910s era medical assistance. Freedom, in the sense of not needing to work (FU money) is easy to come by for anyone browsing HN. Just requires dropping expectations somewhat — still well above 1916 Rockefeller levels.
What I got out of this article was be thankful where we all are today, and let's all work towards a better future solving hard problems. and fight for things which are good, and against things which are bad.
From a UK perspective, a reasonable house in London costs 1 million. So broadly, until I have that level of assets, I don't own my time because I must work and don't have a choice about it. I work somewhere between 10 and 12 hours a day, 6 days a week on average, on a much higher than average salary and it will take me almost a lifetime to have the assets to own my time.
This comparison is only relevant for those people who already own most of their time, so say $500,000 and above assets. Which is a lot of people but not most.