Technology
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I‘m a little surprised by the sheer size of your comment. Thank you for your effort.
I agree that there are many good ideas and nuances to use in this situation. I really like how much thought you‘ve put into it.
Where I don’t agree is the 100 yrs ago theme. You‘re taking what I said and interpret it in a way I didn’t intend. I meant we as people should become less productive and neither we as a population nor living like 100 yrs ago.
Example: being less productive as in not being on the phone with a customer while driving to work alone in your own car so as to be there early, able to pick something up your boss demands and making sales for the company but instead waiting for the bus, not being on the phone and not slaving for your boss while on unpaid time.
Does this example make more sense?
And being less productive does not mean we have no modern medicine, cutting edge computers but less luxury. The vast majority of our surplus productivity goes into the 1% and luxury items. Yachts, Jewelry, etc. part of this surplus happens because both people in a 2 person household work and still get along the same or less than 1 earner households did back in the 70s.
Yeah, I can be a bit wordy. If it's too much, you can skip everything up to the last quotation where I talk about income in the 70s vs now.
My point is, the thing that got us from subsistence farming 200 years ago to almost nobody being farmers today is productivity. With a tractor and combine harvester, a single farmer can do the work of dozens, if not more. That farmer's life is more complicated because equipment failing has a lot more impact, but they also get to benefit from the labor of others.
Stress is very different between then and now. In the past, stressing about how to feed yourself was just part of life. Today, stress is largely due to artificial deadlines with generally lower stakes (e.g. you won't starve, you'll just lose possessions or a position of influence).
I believe stress is an internal motivator to be more productive. If we reduce the requirement to be productive, we'll just stress about other things, like how much more productive we could be. If you want proof of that, visit an elder care facility or something where literally all needs and many wants are taken care of, and you'll find the residents still experiencing stress (e.g. if the nurse is later than usual, or they don't have appealing items on the menu).
So stress is a relative thing, not some kind of absolute we can "fix" (generally) by changing workload or something. So I don't think "we" collectively need to slow down (that just reduces progress we make), but there's certainly a level of relative stress that's too much for an individual, so individuals may need to slow down.
And who makes those yachts, jewelry, etc? Those are specialized jobs, so that luxury spending creates high quality jobs that would otherwise not exist.
100 years ago cars were a thing only the rich could afford. If you compare then to now:
If you don't believe me, here's an inflation calculator that largely matches the article's numbers.
That's just not true. Here's a graph of real personal income since the mid 70s (real means after taking inflation into account). In 1974, the average worker made ~$27k in 2021 dollars, and in 2021, the average person made $40.6k. That means the average person makes ~50% more than they did 47 years ago.
People work more not because they have to (things are cheaper and we earn more), but because they want to spend more. There are just more things to spend money on today than in the 70s, and finding those things is easier than ever with the Internet. We compare ourselves to influencers, not to what we actually need.
The problem imo isn't with productivity, but with lifestyle expectations. For example, these days everyone needs a smart phone, yet my sister's family has never had one. They're not poor (my BIL is a professor, and they have a newly 4k+ sq ft home), and they have teenagers at home, they just never felt the need to own one (though their 16yo is getting pretty adamant about needing one). They also have one car (BIL bikes several miles to work, and they live on a steep hill). The money they save goes to other lifestyle choices, like spending the entire summer living abroad with the whole family (they have a large family, so airfare alone is super expensive). That's obviously an extreme example, but I think it illustrates my point well that many of our "needs" are just justifications given the expectations of others.
I have to disagree here.
You‘re making a lot of assumptions here that are not easily connected imo.
Stress being a good motivator is correct but on relative terms. Too much stress destroys you and people have been a lot more productive back then comparing labor that they are today. Most people move away from grueling manual labor which you can see in the ongoing shortages in labor intensive jobs such as carpentry (which I have worked in in the past btw). There is no evidence that reducing stress would be a bad thing.
Also, it feels to me as if you‘re trying to apply the things I‘ve said to your model of thinking instead of trying to understand my way of thinking, experience and therefore why I come to the conclusions I do. A typical problem of our stressed times.
What I‘m trying to say is that the stress level has been a lot lower in all past times and you can see psychiatric medication and stress diseases skyrocketing for a couple years if not decades.
We are playing a dangerous shell game of distracting each other and ourselves from the facts that we can’t become more productive without sacrificing our freedom and our sanity.
And stuff has not become cheaper and we are not earning more. That is complete and utter bs. Buying a cell phone (which you now need for work whatsapp groups) is becoming more and more expensive, tvs tripled in price. There even are lists you can look at. The average inflation has been nearly 2 digits for the past couple of years.
There are interesting charts showing the comparison of wages to inflation and they‘re shocking.
So frankly, I find it a little upsetting that you would say the extreme opposite. I would call this disinformation.
Source for european real wages falling: https://www.ft.com/content/ed477fe9-46fa-43d0-b315-4170763261c2
Source for us real wages stagnating for 50 yrs: https://www.aei.org/articles/have-wages-stagnated-for-decades-in-the-us/
No, buying a top end cell phone is becoming more and more expensive. There are plenty of options at the lower end that are more than capable.
For example, the phone I've had for the past 3 years retailed at $250 (Moto G Power, 8 core and 4GB RAM IIRC), and I got it for $50 through a cell plan deal ($200 off if I used Google Fi for 3 months). My phone plan (Tello) is $10/month for 1GB data and unlimited talk and text. When I got my first phone ~15 years ago, the phone itself cost $50-100 after discount, and the plan was $50/month with no data and limits on minutes.
Just because you can pay >$1k on a phone and >$50/month on a plan doesn't mean that's necessary but any stretch of the imagination.
And TVs have actually gotten cheaper pretty much every year since they were introduced. I can get a bigger, nicer TV today for the same money as I did a few years ago, and that has been true for decades. I bought a 55" 4k LG TV almost 7 years ago for ~$400 (Black Friday deal), and the price o see today for similar specs (55" 4k LG TV) is ~$360. There are also options for 40" TVs under $200, and 20 years ago I bought a 20" CRT TV for $200-250 (not inflation adjusted).
In the US, it was 7% and 6.5% respectively for the past couple of years, and if you'll look, it has been <2% almost every year since 2010, and under 1% for some of those years. So the recent runup in inflation is absolutely an anomaly, and over a longer term it averages out to the normal 2-3%. At least in the US, we're pretty much back to normal now (between 3-4%, normal is 2-3%).
The causes for recent inflation figures are:
Basically, more people had money (partially from labor shortage, partially from stimulus packages), and since most people needed to stay home, they tended to want similar things that they didn't before. If you can't go out to shows and restaurants, you turn to things you can do at home (TVs, game consoles, etc), and that increased demand happened just as supply dropped.
People also seemed to want to buy houses at that time more than ever because:
And supply for new construction was limited due to COVID-19 supply chain issues (lumber and steel became much less available), and thus nrw construction became much more expensive. The result was a rapid runup in housing costs (my house nearly doubled over those two years).
If you'll note, prices on things have generally stabilized or gone down since. New cars just didn't exist in 2020 and 2021 due to semiconductor shortages, and now you can find more new cars at original MSRP (used market still sucks, but that'll improve). Gaming consoles were hard to find, and now they're quite plentiful. Housing is still expensive, but that's because it has a much slower replacement cycle (i.e. now that materials are more plentiful, we're having trouble catching up in supply).
From your second article about wage stagnation:
That was the period of stagflation in the 80s, and it isn't particularly relevant to today's situation. This Wikipedia article on stagflation is interesting, and the issues seem to have started with a supply constraint much like COVID (in the case, the Six Day War and later Yom Kippur War ended in oil supply reduction to the West), and when paired with inflationary monetary policy, we ended up with reduced economic capacity and devaluation of currency.
So I don't think it's fair to compare the height of the 70s to today, just as the author in that second post argues. But even if we do, that article shows we are a little higher than the peak in the 70s, despite a huge reduction in the 80s. That's pretty incredible, especially since most of the increase starts just 30-ish years ago.
I can't say much about the rest of the world though, and I'm sure inflation is worse in Europe due to the war in Ukraine, but at least in the US, the average person is better off today than 50 years ago.
The main issue I think is perception. Median wages seem to have increased, but people seem to focus on income inequality, which has also increased. So people are better of today, but they're further away from the wealthy. I don't think that's a particularly useful metric, we should be focusing on the welfare of the average person and the poor, not the relative welfare vs the wealthy.
I‘m really sorry but I don’t have the time to sift through walls of text all the time. I appreciate your effort though.
Have a good one.
That's fair. Have a good one too. :)