Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work.
I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because international calls were so expensive. We flew every few years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs, and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that till death.
I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare and college having become drastically more expensive. (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity allowing new measures of wealth for many.
If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets. Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity increases in lower/middle income countries, too.
>Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work.
So, not much then.
For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades.
Likewise, cheap clothes mean diminishing quality (regardless of price bracket, from $5 items to $200 brand-name ones, they are all most often than not made in sweatshops in the developing world, often with the same materials and processes). Plus tons of clothes thrown, which is an environmental attrocity.
(As for cheap music and movies, that's a byproduct of one basic delevopment: high speed internet, which enabled a new delivery method. Not the best example of an increase in productivity, not to mention those are passtimes).
As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century, so 100+ years ago, and it was due to running water, bathrooms, hand washing, and a few such things. Low hanging fruit. Certainly not due to the last 70+ years of "increased productivity".
Meanwhile we pay more for healthcare, housing, and education (the 3 things that matter more), wages have stagnated since the 70s, and work-life balance has gotten infinitely worse, depression ever more prevalent, the middle and working classes have collapsed, and so on. No savings and no chance of retirement at any reasonable age for the majority as well.
>I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off.
Probably it's from people who are not impressed by more and cheaper trinkets.
It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.
Much of the rest of what you say is also inconsistent with actual data.
I think your graph is a good illustration of the loss of productivity. Compare the gains between 1900 and 1920 and 2000 and 2020. The earlier period saw an 11% gain in life expectancy, compared to a 2% gain in the latter period. Just looking at the line in your graph you can tell progress is slowing down.
Why did we make more progress before and less later? We have better tools, computers, and software. We have more people, both in the US and coming in from worldwide along with a greater portion of the population being college educated and free to work on scientific and engineering problems. We have better developed theories of biological, chemical, and physical systems. And yet, when we knew very little, had little resources, and few people working on the problem - we made huge strides. Now, not so much.
Maybe this issue is that we've already plucked the low hanging fruit. That doesn't seem quite right to me though. Even if we have, we should be equipped, via the advantages I referenced earlier, to pick higher fruits.
I wouldn't be at all surprised that there's going to be slowdowns of growth in various areas, some things are by definition going to be constrained in terms of space/resources. (e.g. growth of # home units in New York City) I don't think infinite liniear or infinite exponential growth is the expectation.
That having been said, for this particular example (life expectancy) it's typically a bit better to look at life expectancy at age x, often 5, 10 or 15 are chosen.
It's because infant mortality used to be sky-high, as 25% (one in four) in 1900 and 16% (one in 6) in 1950 worldwide, to < 2.9% today, with the best countries now around 0.2%.
If say one in four humans becomes virtually zero years old, that skews the average down a lot, e.g. from 65 to 40. But it doesn't mean that the average person who makes it through the first few years would've died at age 40.
I think you’re reading too much into “life expectancy at birth”. Life expectancy at age 20 hasn’t moved nearly as much. The big wins were reductions in deaths during childhood.
Not to sound harsh, but the main economic benefit is that now people need to have fewer children to maintain a stable population.
Frankly, as a parent, I think "fewer dead children" is a pretty big deal. Perhaps one of the biggest improvements in human welfare that one would hope to see in society.
In the late 80s life expectancy in Italy was around 70, now it's well above 80, and a large part of the difference is due to how many died 55-65 to cardiovascular problems or cancer.
A lot more of my relatives died of heart attack or cancer in the 80s than those from the next generation did in the last ten years. In fact in the last few years I witnessed many people getting surgery for those same heart issues or cancer that would have killed you a couple decades back.
> It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.
Which appear to be uniquely dangerous and ineffective, so it's odd to use them as an example of progress. Besides that, mRNA is not a new thing. What's new is the EUA.
>In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.
This has nothing to do with productivity rise and where do we see its results (what is discussed here), but about the merits of technology.
Even so, the raise in life expectancy at birth is about those low hanging hygiene practices (nothing to do with post 1950 techology) and a few vaccines (most of which available before 1950s).
Not any big technological breakthroughs, like artificial hearts and so on (which hardly make a dent), and with extremely little to do with any post 1950s tech.
So the question of the article in the domain still remains, where's all this benefit from the productivity rise.
>We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time
But can you show me the exact breakthrough that came by this pouring of resources into the research, and that enabled such vaccines, by removing blockers that blocked such vaccines for decades?
The main vaccine “innovation” was that the FDA decided to finally approve an mRNA therapy. Moderna’s been trying to get such things approved for about a decade.
So, the “breakthrough” was a brief suspension of questionable bureaucratic barriers. (Temporary suspension of “Dissipation” from the article.)
>So, the “breakthrough” was a brief suspension of questionable bureaucratic barriers. (Temporary suspension of “Dissipation” from the article.)
So as I doubted.
Naturally, the next question would be "What was the questionable bureaucratic barriers" that was temporary suspended. It really blows my mind that the answers to this is not widely known. It is kind of disturbing..
>Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.
What about the quality of life? We know that people are getting sicker at a younger age, and if we consider that in addition to the ever increasing cost of the treatments, it does not appear to be a net positive.
I would guess that those who are getting sicker at younger would just have died.
Let's say hypertension is now diagnosed at 50 instead of 70. How many people used to die of a stroke between 50 and 70 due to undiagnosed hypertension?
How many people used to NOT have hypertension, and other cardiovascular issues, for want of exercises and other physical activities? Thanks to increase tech addiction in form of 24x7 chitchat using smartphones and video games..
So it technology take away some and then give back some (not without a huge cost, mind you), how can you evaluate its impact on human existence?
You are selectively picking one example from the parent post and making a rather personal attack. There’s no need for that. Stick to your argument and don’t make it personal.
You couldn’t be more wrong, or more dismissive. Ask a working single mother whether inexpensive, effective appliances are a significant productivity and quality of life enhancer.
This reminds me of Simpson's Paradox in the sense that it may be true that life is better for a single mother because modern appliances make life easier but it is also true that society has greatly increased the number of single mothers. In 1980 18% of births were to single mothers compared to 40% in 2020[1].
It's possible that the amount of single mother suffering has increased even though the suffering per single mother may have decreased. (No change, I expect, in the children's suffering)
That statistic sounds totally wrong and after looking at your source it is highly misleading. It’s just if the parents were married at birth.
Of the people I know with kids like 50% of them were not married when they started having kids. They either got married latter or never married because there was no advantage to do so and they didn’t care.
Yet none of them are what you would call “single mothers”. They are all still together with the fathers of their children.
So basically it says more about marriage than it does about parenting.
If you have better data I'm happy to look at that. I agree that cohabiting are likely more common now and it is possibly more common to get married just after birth than it used to be.
Table CH-1 from this census website shows that children living with a single parent goes from 10% in 1960 to 36% in 2020. (=E13/C13) I'm not certain but I think they are accounting for cohabiting parents here because they don't use any language related to marriage and the census could tell if the parents were cohabiting or not.
>>>No change, I expect, in the children's suffering
Drug use, gang activity, and other criminality are all positively correlated with single-parent households, and some data shows even MORE positively correlated with single-mother, as opposed to single-father, households.
Again, we can go deeper. How many single mothers would be forced to remain in otherwise abusive situations but for the fact that she is able to both work and care for her family due to “progress”?
My cursory look for some evidence suggests single mothers see dramatically elevated rates of violence and abuse. This source surveys children who live with both parents and just one. Children living with just one are seven times as likely to have witnessed someone hitting their mother in the past year than children living with both parents. I take that to mean that the increase in single motherhood means there is more domestic abuse happening than if no such increase had taken place.
Or maybe those women are now single mothers because they were able to escape their abusers. You would have to compare data across decades, and adjust for people being more/less willing to disclose abuse.
I very much agree with you. I grew up without microwave oven or dishwasher. Neither of those are essential in any way, but claiming that those don’t provide great time savers for parents (single or not) with small children would be ridiculous.
I don’t remember where I saw the numbers, but in 1980 a microwave cost more than a months (average) salary. Today I can buy a good one for less than half a day’s earnings.
Ask a working single mother is she would trade "inexpensive, effective appliances" to 1960s era healthcare, housing/rent, and education costs, and working/middle class job availability.
There’s nothing forcing you to use any electric appliances, with the possible exception the stove if you to make warm food and don’t have access to a wood stove. Try a week washing the dishes by hand, doing your laundry in the sink or in the bathtub. I’m sure you’ll be a bit embarrassed about your above comment after that.
You probably should ask someone who was born in the 1920s. If you asked a middle class woman in the 50s to choose between a car and a washing machine, I would bet she would pick the washing machine.
> For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades.
How nicely should a consumer device be made? I feel like technological improvements make the device obsolete and disposable, so making the build quality higher just artificially slows down iteration time. (Why will 5G be widely adopted? Because eventually everyone will drop their 4G phone down the stairs or the battery will be uneconomical to replace.)
If you go back and look at old appliances, they basically have no value despite being well built. They don't solve the problem they were designed to solve anymore. A shitty laptop from Amazon is a whole different piece of technology compared to a hand-crafted Apple 1 from 1976, enabling you to do things that people wouldn't have even dreamed of when the Apple 1 came out. So making it "survive the test of time" is futile -- that computer isn't garbage because it was put together sloppily, it's garbage because technology advanced past it. (Probably a bad example, I think the Apple 1 was just a circuit board cobbled together in a garage.)
I feel like even consumer appliances have changed. Clothes washers use significantly less water. Stoves use precise electronic control instead of burning flammable gas that gets piped into your home. TVs display content on-demand, with 8.3 million individually-colored pixels and 6 channels of sound. Computers connect to a library where you can read pretty much any book ever written, right in your home. Technology changes so people discard their old devices and replace them with new ones. It's not just some scam to make companies that can't innovate some cheap money. Everything has a lifetime, and sometimes it's shorter than the lifetime of the physical materials that the device is built from.
Maybe you don't need any of that, and just want to read novels from the 1950s with your dog in a log cabin. That's totally legit, but where you think people excited about 4k TVs are weird, they probably think you're weird.
Honestly, I think phones are something people hate the most for being a little too breakable, but thinking about it more deeply, I think the right tradeoffs were made. They last as long as they need to on average. 10 years ago, the technology (hardware, software, connectivity, design, everything) was immature. So they broke more and cost less, because you were going to need to upgrade. Now we have $1200 phones, and they are a little nicer, and the technology isn't changing enough to make them obsolete every 6 months. This all sounds about right to me. I have a $1000 phone and thoughts about upgrading it haven't crossed my mind in the ~3 years I've had it. That is very different from the phones I had before that, where I felt like they were compromises on the day they came out. (And hey, I only paid $300 for them.)
Not because any danger of radiation. But I think people should be able to say "This is enough", and stop ourselves to be forced to think "We need moar!", thus put some block to this progress for the sake of progress..
You make a poor argument, because resources are limited, and "progress" will have to wait at some point. Human race can either opt into slower progress to match the available resources, or be selected out.
Indiscriminate growth is a hallmark of cancerous things. You can detect it, cut it out and attempt to survive, or surely die with it.
Progress doesn't have to imply more consumption, there's been a ton of progress in the field of recycling for instance. Also in renewable power sources.
It's literally exactly what we're talking about. You seem to be unaware that one of the major benefits of 5g (aside from the significantly increased density per tower requiring fewer towers) is all the energy savings baked into 5g-nr. Try not to believe the hype.
It is the first time I hear this: the usual narrative is that it would require more towers. (And the idea of the emitters being more pervasive in the territory is one of the main concerns of some).
> You seem to be unaware that one of the major benefits of 5g
True.
> Up to 15 percent energy savings with software features
'Upto 15 percent' sounds alike it is a very optimistic estimate, (you know when they advertise 'upto 50% discount' most of the products are discounted at much lower rate). And it does not seem that this power saving is also dependent on network traffic. So I am not really convinced.
No doubt. We are so spoiled we just take all our advances as a given.
On top of all this so many people are doing more interesting work. My father didn't just work 7 days a week, sometimes 16 hour days but he did that doing something so boring to me I would rather be homeless or dead.
Healthcare is more expensive because it saves people's lives.
Healthcare is really the best example that we are just spoiled children who can not be satisfied no matter what Santa brings for Christmas. Even getting extra years of life isn't good enough because it "cost too much".
Isn't this always true? If you were born three hundred years ago you could have just listed off some recent technological development and concluded everyone was spoiled babies.
You know what? I paid double what my parents paid for the house I really think of as my childhood house that they bought in 1989, and I paid more than quadruple what they paid for our actual first house in 1979. But my house is also double the size, it's downtown in a major metro, I'm not going to have to rebuild it from the inside out because it's not falling apart and everything already works. There is no asbestos in my walls, no lead in my paint.
I guess I'm paying more for healthcare, but I also get better healthcare. I suffered severe spine damage in the Army, but I'm basically fine now thanks to procedures and techniques that didn't exist 20 years ago. I had severe pneumonia when I was 5. If I'd been born prior to 1928 when antibiotics were invented, I would have just died as a child and wouldn't even be here to be paying for anything.
My grandparents, man. One of my grandfathers effectively worked, grueling manual labor, until the day he died. The other one died with nothing, left in a nursing home rotting with Alzheimer's for the last decade while con-artists tricked him out of what little he could have left to his children. And he experienced unimaginable horrors as a young adult. His ship in the South Pacific in 1945 was destroyed and he survived for six weeks on a raft drinking fish blood. I served 8 years in the Army on a tank crew and I can't even imagine what these people from earlier generations went through. My grandmother literally murdered someone when she was a teenager. I guess it's a minor miracle she never went to prison, but I suppose the police just didn't bother policing the segregated Mexican neighborhoods back then, which is probably why she was killing people.
I have no idea where this idea comes from that we're worse off than our parents. I guess it's because the people believing this kind of thing are mostly writers in a collapsing industry who came from upper middle class highly educated backgrounds? Well, guess what? A lot of us didn't and we're way better off than our parents and grandparents.
College got more expensive. Great, but I was the first person on either side of my family in any generation to even go to college. The idea of getting educated at all and not working your entire life doing manual labor would have been an unimaginable luxury to my great-grandfather who grew up picking cotton and taught himself stonemasonry.
These people who think it's been so downhill since the 70s. Do you seriously not remember the 80s and 90s? I was with my dad and got trapped doing side jobs during the LA riots. Over 60 people were murdered. The National Guard enforcing curfews and perimeters in the nation's second largest city. Nowadays we flip out that a single woman died trying to break into the capitol. My school got shot at in drive-bys more times than I can remember. We weren't allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys because the school district was so afraid gangs would kill us for it. My sister's best friend was murdered.
I guess life was great in the 70s for the 0.0001% of the world population employed on the factory floors of major US auto manufacturers, and it sucks those opportunities dried up, but man is it myopic to act like that's the only thing that has happened in the last 50 years.
The average American is something like 39 years old atm. That means the average birth date is 1982 so most people probably do not remember the 80s and only barely remember the 90s. If you were alive when your parents bought a house in the 70s then you have lived a life that most Americans don’t have a connection to. You were in the golden years and wonder why people don’t have the same view you do?
>These people who think it's been so downhill since the 70s.
Hmmm. Old enough to remember the 70s (and 60s and a bit of the 50s).
It's easy enough to cast about for a few real advantages of modern times.
. The ability to type to this forum. Essentially a Usenet group with a different interface.
. Replacement of Sears with Amazon
. Video on demand
. LED lightbulbs
. Greatly improved medical care in some areas, particularly surgery.
. Faster closing on stock trades.
A time traveler from 1965 would notice nothing unusual about my house aside from the flat panel TV.
I think that aside from some healthcare tech, I'd willingly trade cheaper beachfront property and skinnier / more athletic kids for 99% of modern advances.
My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to.
I've come around to the idea that we should put excise taxes on the sale of new cars that use fossil fuels and use the revenue to help working class people replace their existing gasoline cars with electric[1]. The idea is help people do what you want them to do instead of apply the rubber hose.
[1] One way to think about that is you force people buying new cars to be carbon neutral by paying to retire existing cars.
The goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In order to do that, it has to be done in a way that the masses will not revolt and eliminate the political leaders who want to prevent climate change.
I think that your suggestion, while I guess it's mainstream and basically what's already being done in most places, is guaranteed to fail in both respects.
If we tax one thing and subsidize another, without any linkage to CO2 emissions, then we will not get the reductions we need.
We cannot reconcile the idea that CO2 is the problem, while maintaining that some CO2 is more equal than others.
Can you explain further why you do not like the idea of pursuing the goal that matters, and prefer substituting one that doesn't?
Do you personally, at work, observe how metrics and KPIs that aren't chosen well, lead to bad behavior?
I see the fundamental problem is dependence on existing capital assets that emit CO2. Like gasoline and diesel cars and trucks. Focusing that seems reasonable that you a) don't want people to buy new ones. 2) want to expedite the retirement of current ones.
Putting an excise tax on new fossil fueled cars would discourage manufacture and sales. Using the revenue to help working class people retire and replace their older fossil fueled vehicles with zero emissions ones reduces the number currently in service. The key word with that is 'help' as in help that do what's needed. Instead of carbon taxes which punish working class people for not doing something unspecified to fix the problem.
That said I also support banning production of fossil fuel powered cars with enough forewarning that industry and the economy can adjust.
>I see the fundamental problem is dependence on existing capital assets that emit CO2
I don't think you're wrong, but an opinion like you're expressing doesn't say what, who, how it should be done. It doesn't set a goal that can be achieved, and it doesn't imply that success would solve the problem of reducing global CO2 levels.
Have you ever had a project manager tell you how to write code?
>carbon taxes which punish working class people
That's why the revenue needs to be sent right back to the people in equal amounts.
If that isn't good enough, it doesn't mean carbon taxes are less necessary. You haven't stated why it won't work or is not necessary in a way that I can understand yet.
Doing other things seems to me like the ultimate example of "looking for your keys under the streetlight even though you dropped them in the dark".
Or, it's like the joke "we must do something; this is something, therefore we must do it".
Building things produces CO2. People will argue endlessly about how much. It's impossible for everyone to agree on the facts, but the quantity matters.
We don't want any particular activity or product to be generated, we want less CO2. If we reward specific things that are associated currently with less CO2 but don't logically entail it, it will be a very short time until people optimize those goals by producing more CO2.
And if you're poor and have to live far from your job (because you're poor) screw you? There are a lot of people who will be locked out of driving by this because they don't have the float to overpay for gasoline and wait for the refund.
If the US had better public transit options, then maybe. But you have to do that first.
>My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to.
Interesting. Have you described it in detail somewhere?
But people seem negative on it recently, and I'm not sure why.
I don't see any feasible alternative and I'm getting cognitive dissonance from people who are getting more vocal about climate change being an emergency and aren't pushing this.
I'm unclear on the gap between the "notion" and the protests in France.
The Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend) is kind of inconsistent - it says that a revenue neutral tax is a "conservative" idea, then it has more about a "universal climate income" under "social justice".
Widespread is not the same thing as generally accepted. I think I've been reading vaguely hostile stuff recently about carbon taxes from vaguely progressive sources, but I'm not sure why.
I'm wondering if progressives are against it because it's considered conservative.
I think one of the reasons is that it is a market-based solution that allows companies to pollute as long as they are willing to pay for it. Many progressives prefer an approach of behaviour and lifestyle modifications.
>I think one of the reasons is that it is a market-based solution that allows companies to pollute as long as they are willing to pay for it. Many progressives prefer an approach of behaviour and lifestyle modifications.
I don't see how that hypothesis is compatible with regarding climate change as an existential threat.
I mean, maybe it is potentially the end of the world for practical purposes, and maybe it isn't.
But if it is, then concentrating on behavior modifications that are appealing to impose independently of CO2 levels seems like an expression of either a desire for human extinction or of a disbelief in the problem.
It seems to be a right wing proposal that's been around for some time. That must be why I either didn't run across it or forgot; I mostly ignore conservative media.
I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because international calls were so expensive. We flew every few years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs, and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that till death.
I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare and college having become drastically more expensive. (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity allowing new measures of wealth for many.
If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets. Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity increases in lower/middle income countries, too.