Tomatoes that you can buy - any time of year - instead of just when they are 'in season' is a material thing, not a fantasy improvement.
Cars that drive better, get 3x better mileage, are significantly more safe, and have tons more features - are better - it's not some crap fantasy.
The proposition I make is that wage growth halted for the average (median average) American in the 70s. The same phenomenon spreads to other Westernized countries too later on, most dramatically evident in the island of Japan which has spent 30 years keeping up maintenance.
Alongside this I proposed (here or elsewhere on HN) that we were and are yet presently living in a stagnant period. The thesis is well laid out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4
Stagnation is not a plateau or a halt to growth, but a slowdown in the rate of change. So there is some change, just not much relative to former periods. The economist Robert Gordon has written a life's work on the subject. He may be wrong, but it is not a stupid idea.
The items you mention are examples of incremental improvements in existing technology. This is not unimportant, it is at least half the battle since what is the point of high technology if nobody can access its utility.
However my worry, and that of Levchin, Page, Gordon, Musk and Thiel is that we are not seeing breakthrough technologies able to scale up and this is a very troubling sign for the future.
Energy production and storage, space travel (Musks's entire rationale is reasoned on the Stagnation Hypothesis), biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials technology, central coordination, many important areas in our society are in some form of decay, diminishing returns are evident. Lots of PR and press releases but no impacts. Investors have gone bust in many of these areas, esp. in biotech, nanotech and cleantech. If everything is improving that shouldn't be happening.
Again, the benchmark is not no change. The benchmark is the past history of those areas. You can pick bright spots in each industry and high achievements but we do not see things like technologies to make heart attacks impossible or cheap aerogel insulation, the kinds of leaps we made in the past that really lifted all boats.
This can be difficult to believe if you live in a modern western city, but if you go to the peripheral of our world you can visibly see it rotting away. This is because it is not the center of the system that fails first, it is the peripheral.
In a period of rapid true growth you see whole new fields of development opening up from what used to be small niche fields (like computation used to be).
It is not about having faith in the future or technology, it is that we have to come up with business plans and ideas that make things happen or it is entirely plausible they never will happen. Believe me, I want a better future as well, I'm not trying to drag you down because I have a cynical personality or something like that.
Musk and Thiel are just old enough to remember and era when technology was making seemingly huge advances: 'men on the moon', 'breaking the sound barrier' etc.. They want to see 'that level' of innovation. I think it's narrow minded and arrogant: Airplanes don't 'seem' like they have changed a lot, but there has been an enormous degree of incremental innovation - just not in the direction they want, i.e. 'faster, higher' etc.. The 'innovation' has been in safety, reliability, fuel efficiency, price, sophistication etc. - all of which has benefited 'the people' far more than someone making a new Concorde that can do Mach 5 but costs $20K/hour per seat.
Over the 'long haul' - the standard of living has improved as much since the 1970's as it has been on average for the last 200 years - roughly. The 1940s-1970s was a little bit of a bubble due to the war and the resulting economic effects.
This idea of 'wage stagnation' is an unfair economic characterization of what is going on, and it's used by the populist left to fight their ideological battle.
Though it's true that a disproportionate amount of returns is going to the 1% - it's not really at the cost of the 99%. The 99% are living a very high standard of living - so long as they have jobs. Employment issues I think are more important than the false canary of 'stagnant wages'
I think there is something semantic in our way.
Are you familiar with Thiel's concept of representing progress using a Cartesian plane? Technology goes on the Y axis, Globalization on the X axis.
Then it becomes possible to represent 4 possible states of play.
This is a model of course. There could be different aspects in different states.
However it illuminates an important possibility, which is that you could have broad progress in globalization without necessarily having much in technology.
Globalization is of course, the spreading of Technology, so it is a kind of derivative.
I hope it is clear then what I mean by 'Technological Stagnation'. I am deselecting Globalization and looking at what is left.
> Over the 'long haul' - the standard of living has improved as much since the 1970's as it has been on average for the last 200 years - roughly. The 1940s-1970s was a little bit of a bubble due to the war and the resulting economic effects.
Sure but we agree with all of that. With the caveat some of that growth was not real (in the finance sector). That is of course true of other eras too, I just mention it because it plays an outsize role when the bubbles come up.
We are talking about different things. The standard of living improving is globalization. The improvements in airplanes you mentioned, are improvements, but again, they are a form of globalization.
We see that, it is good. But it is not enough if we are to keep going.
> This idea of 'wage stagnation' is an unfair economic characterization of what is going on, and it's used by the populist left to fight their ideological battle.
I am on the right. The furthest to the right imaginable. The same is true of many if not most people who talk about technological stagnation.
The populist left is not wrong about something being not right, just the solutions they tend to throw up.
> Though it's true that a disproportionate amount of returns is going to the 1% - it's not really at the cost of the 99%. The 99% are living a very high standard of living - so long as they have jobs. Employment issues I think are more important than the false canary of 'stagnant wages'
I would say to you that those 'returns' are almost all fake.
The top 1% of 1% is not making real money because their stock portfolios and property valuations are increasing, it is the mother of all bubbles caused by monetary manipulation.
I live myself in a house that is worth at most 1/8 of the valuation the market gives it.