Think you’re living in a ‘hellhole’ today? Try being a billionaire in 1916 | Hacker News Reader

Think you’re living in a ‘hellhole’ today? Try being a billionaire in 1916

washingtonpost.com

43 pointstokenadult78 comments

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

The laws of the capitalist mode of production heavily favour accumulation of capital and inheritance of it, Oscar Wilde noted the hideous disparity even in the 19th century, Kropotkin did the same.

"In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen." (From The Conquest of Bread)

You say that like accumulation of capital is a bad thing. It's good: capital competes with capital to lowers its rates of return. We need more capital.

The real culprit is land: we don't accumulate any more of that, so it's rates of return don't vanish.

>The real culprit is land: we don't accumulate any more of that, so it's rates of return don't vanish.

An interesting point to this is the land value tax, advocated by Georgists (whom Einstein was sympathetic to).

> It's good: capital competes with capital to lowers its rates of return. We need more capital.

Can you expand on what you mean by this, please? Why does there need to be competition?

Yes, I was hinting at Georgism myself.

> Can you expand on what you mean by this, please? Why does there need to be competition?

All of GDP basically gets split between land, labour and capital. As sort-of Georgist libertarian/socialists, we want as much of that to go to labour as possible, but without shrinking the pie. We redirect land's share via an LVT. But we don't want to tax capital: but fortunately, the competition between capital goods will lead to lower rates of return.

The owner of the first factory might make lots of profit. The owner of the second factory less so, and the third might barely break even. The surplus can go to consumers and workers.

(Not sure if that was better explained?)

Land? You'd think it's machinery that is the means of production and ownership of that becomes more concentrated.

Back then you would give a manuscript to your secretary who would type it, hand it to the typesetter, and it would go to the printer, both skilled tradesman and unionized. Now you yourself submit camera-ready copy to the publisher and pay a subscription for Office 365 year after year. You ask yourself why the price of scientific journals hasn't dropped, but the missing land tax isn't the reason.

Machinery deprecates pretty quickly, and we can produce more of it, eroding any excess returns.

I'm also not quite sure what this American obsession with unions is about.

Actually, the price for reading science has dropped to almost zero. But, of course, not if you restrict yourself to paying for scientific journals.

(The monopolies there that drive high costs are the result of a really weird system---and yes, that one's not got to do much with land rents nor equipment. It's closer to regulatory capture, and entrenched interests.)

> capital competes with capital to lowers its rates of return. We need more capital.

Wouldn't lowering rates of return on capital disincentivise investment in new capital? If that was the most important dynamic then presumably the greatest amount of aggregate capital would be obtained through capital redistribution?

Yes, lowering rates of return on capital disincentivise capital investment. But that's alright: on the scale of the whole economy the only reason to invest in capital is to consume more.

A scarcity of capital leads to higher rates of return. A glut of capital leads to lower rates of return. There's an equilibrium in the middle. My "We need more capital." was spoken from the point of view of someone selling their labour for a living: for me as a worker, there can't be enough capital.

Wilde is interesting because he was a socialist before anyone had tried communism. Years ago, I read an essay is his, "The Heart of Man After Socialism" where he argued that people are inherently benevolent, but the capitalist system made them greedy. Unfortunately, communism showed that greed is a much better motivator which is probably the primary reason capitalism has flourished. (I say unfortunately, because it would be wonderful if there were a better society than capitalism, though one could argue that a most European nations are some sort of hybrid which is better.) In short, Wilde may have understood the problem, but history has disproved his solution.

That said, he also advocated that menial tasks such as sweeping the floor should be done by machines instead of people, and in this respect I wholeheartedly agree. Washing machines, vacuums and dishwashers have improved everyone's lives in the past century...at least everyone in the richer parts of the world.

> Unfortunately, communism showed that greed is a much better motivator which is probably the primary reason capitalism has flourished.

I don't think we've given Communism a good go, especially as those societies in the modern world (i.e after the advent of capitalism) have been capitalist states, either internally or externally to other nations. The fact is that in the absence of a motivator for money, people will do things for a variety of reasons, including wanting to make the world a better place, out of a desire for mastery, desire for recognition, out of wanting to improve the lives of those who will come after you, to live in a society you want to live in (everyone wants to live in a society with clean toilets) etc.

It is also a fact that these motivators only appear in two cases, (i) when people have enough money to not have to worry about survival and being satisfied (ii) when people have no need for money, as they are already satisfied.

Neither of these cases has happened yet.

> why is it okay that the ultra-rich of today [...] have access to healthcare that is far more advanced than that which is available to even the middle class [...]

Citation needed. Last I checked, healthcare is still pretty much either (reasonably) cheap to provide at middle class levels of affluence or next to useless, statistically speaking.

(Not talking about America here---the US seems seriously screwed. But about what healthcare costs to someone who's willing to be eg a medical tourist.)

People reasonably described as "middle class" in the US have decent access to healthcare.

Perhaps even because it is tautological, that someone lacking decent access to healthcare isn't reasonably described as middle class. But probably because while healthcare does cost a lot, people with decent jobs tend to be able to afford the cost.

Healthcare is partially what it is elsewhere because the US subsidizes it by having such expensive care here (e.g. R&D for new drugs and treatments, the entire FDA process that others leverag, etc).

Yes, partially---and as an unAmerican I am grateful; but lots of the US spending is just waste, too.

>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.

But almost none of the inventors of said advancements profited from their inventions. It seems to me there should be an upper and lower limit that all people regardless of circumstance live within.

Except not all "value" is created or appreciated equally.

Hedge funders, for example, do not create any clear value to society despite massive windfalls (especially those automated algorithms that look for arbitrage in pennies, but as massive volume and frequency). Those who provide power by coal compare to solar or wind significantly shortchange those who buy the same electricity because the "value" does not price this in (humans are terrible at choosing for long term gains compared to short term anyway). Those who save money (it's all value!) by dumping their toxic waste products in oceans and rivers do terrible harm to the world yet stay rewarded. All that value allows them to buy off politicians (more value!), which gives a cyclical effect.

I wish capitalists wouldn't speak in such abstract terms -- reality must be confronted.

> Hedge funders, for example, do not create any clear value to society

Which is why their compensation is contractual. It obviously provides some value to the high net worth clients who agree to their fees.

It's not like hedge fund managers rely on MacArthur fellowships or some taxpayer assistance program for their compensation needs.

In some societies the employment in hedge fund industry is at, or near, zero. Hedge fund managers rise to the occasion, that occasion being demand for their services.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

So why is it that major advances in pharmaceutical research or technology come from places driven primarily by profit motive, i.e. US? Seems that there would be a more random distribution of such businesses around the world. Are people in areas that focus on quality of life (Denmark, Costa Rica, New Zealand) less inventive, passionate or curious?

I think the biggest problem is the speed differential. That's ok, the rich can afford 140in 16K TV a few years before middle class which get it a few years before poor people. It is not ideal, but you know that eventually everybody is going to have it.

The problem of recent years is that the balance is slightly off. Housing, Education and in the US healthcare seems to have set an upper bound on the non-rich. Everybody else is getting net gain, the poor worldwide improve, the rich improve, the first world middle class progress seems to taper.

The rich progress should have tapered before the middle class, signalling that we are a few generation away from utopian post-scarcity world. The rich sailing away and all the rest squeezing under a glass ceiling is instead signalling that we are a few generation away from dystopian world with a superclass and underclass. Worse, if being in the underclass meant living like a middle class 20th century first world citizen, that would not be ideal but that would be quite good, however there is no guarantee it is such. Especially not when the current political wisdom is that if you are not middle class, that's because you are not worth it and social service is only there to scratch the charity itch of your better, no as a human right.

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.

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.

True, but I don't really want any of that. I'd rather spend time with a few good friends instead of going to events and cocktail parties or whatever these "social status" people get up to.

> 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.

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.

The grandfather comment's argument was exactly that those differences in quality face vastly diminishing returns very quickly after you go beyond the reaches of the middle class.

And even before that: bourgeois attitudes can make a few dollars stretch a lot more. (But on the other hand, having more money lets you get away with less discipline in spending.)

Sounds like you should do them a favour and offer to switch places with them

Haha, I don't think I would want to! I would have to suddenly deal with a lot more stress and responsibility. I also love being able to walk around a new city and go to restaurants without a team of bodyguards. I definitely don't want to be a billionaire, but I wouldn't complain if I had $4 million.

To be honest, I'm not big on having my name in history books, or having statues made in my image. I'd like to help a lot of people if I can, but I don't want to start a foundation in my name. Everything is fleeting and ultimately meaningless, so why put your name on it.

People who invest in networks or production companies can get early screeners of movies/shows. They can also just hang out with the creators of those movies and shows, or hire the writers or actors to perform for them.

Mark Zuckerberg's phone has the same camera your phone has, but the photographer he pays to follow him around has a better one, so he never uses it. Bill Gates has access to the same Thai restaurants as you, but his private chef knows how to make his family's favorite dishes and he never has to wait in line.

I've also been thinking about those early screeners. There's a company that gives you early access to movies in your home theater: http://www.primacinema.com. I have a couple of reasons why I'm not really interested in that.

* Hollywood doesn't make a lot of good movies anymore. I haven't seen a great comedy in many years. There's been a few decent dramas and science fiction movies, but they're not grabbing my attention like they used to.

* I really enjoy going to the cinema. I like the ritual of going out, buying tickets, and just being around other people. If I'm interested in a movie, I'll watch it at IMAX, and I don't want to have an IMAX theater in my house. I want to have a small, comfortable house.

* I decided I don't even really want a home theater. At least, not the kind of home theater you see in these huge mansions. I can't imagine inviting 20 people to my house to watch a movie, because that's just too many people. I'm far more comfortable with maybe 4 or 5 friends in a living room, with a big TV and a nice stereo.

> They can also just hang out with the creators of those movies and shows

That would be fun, but also kind of lame. I don't want to be that guy. I'd much rather be directly involved with the production of a movie or show, and maybe meet some of those people naturally. Not because of money, but because I had some creative input.

> Mark Zuckerberg's phone has the same camera your phone has, but the photographer he pays to follow him around has a better one

Haha, I don't want to pay a photographer to follow me around. That's a very strange idea.

> Bill Gates has access to the same Thai restaurants as you, but his private chef knows how to make his family's favorite dishes and he never has to wait in line

That's the thing though, I don't want a private chef. I can pick up literally any food I want, whenever I want. If I don't want to pick it up, I can get it delivered within 45 minutes. It's like I have hundreds of private chefs all around the city.

The whole idea of "private staff" is just really weird to me. They're basically just very well-paid servants. I mean, they literally are servants. I wouldn't mind hiring a cleaning service to clean my house, someone to mow my lawn, or some SF startup to come do my laundry. But you don't have to be extremely wealthy to afford any of these services.

I hate to break it to you but Uber, homejoy, postmates, task rabbit at al are private servants that you hire for an hour at a time.

Sure, but I appreciate the facade.

Are you kidding? Gates and Zuckerberg live in a borderless world with access to nearly anything they could ever want. They could take their personal jets to any country in the world and not go through customs. They can call up any socially connected individual on the planet and get an immediate response. They don't eat at Michelin starred restaurants every day, they have their private chef make homecooked meals tailored specifically to them. They could effectively pay to enact laws directly benefiting them. Every day that they work is a choice and is devoted to their passion.

Good on them for making it there but none of us have that level of freedom. In the end I don't care about Spotify or smartphones. I care about what I spend my life on, where I spend it, and who I spend it with. In those regards, Gates and Zuckerberg have freedom which I do not.

Not kidding at all, I have a very similar level of freedom, and I also live in a borderless world. I can fly wherever I want and live wherever I want, and I don't need a personal jet to do that. I also don't really care about going through customs. One time I flew business class and went through a priority queue, which was pretty nice, but ultimately it was not a life-changing experience.

I'm not convinced that I need a private chef. I probably wouldn't hire one, even if I could afford it. My wife and I both enjoy cooking, and we enjoy eating at restaurants (I guess you would call them "public chefs".) I haven't noticed a void in my life that would be filled by a private chef.

> They could effectively pay to enact laws directly benefiting them

I think you're mainly talking about the power they have to change the world. I would handle this responsibility if it were given to me, but I'm not seeking it out. It would feel more like you have the whole world on your shoulders, which would come with a ton of stress. I'd do the same if I were in their shoes, but it's a very difficult job. Very similar to being the President, in terms of influence and power.

> Every day that they work is a choice and is devoted to their passion.

I would also like to be there one day. I only need around $4 million for that. If you invest $4 million in index funds, you can safely withdraw $120k per year, forever. That's enough for me, but I wouldn't live in San Francisco.

>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.

Come spend some time in LA and you'll see that only the plebs dress up when they go out to eat at a fancy place. All of the celebrities and people with "real" wealth ($100 million+) don't bother.

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?

Actually poor people reproduce more.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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. :-(

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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"?

The claim wasn't that he committed plagiarism, it was that he lazily "repackaged" a blog post: 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.

Fair enough. I concede the point.

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.

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.

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.

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?!

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.

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.

It's easy to create equality: make all people poor. 10000 years ago we where a lot more equal than today. Was it better?

Almost any USA citizen is in the top 5% if compared with the rest of the world. How many of them are willing to share their excess of wealth?

I can't lay my hands on the source just now, but I've read the polar opposite to what you say - measures such as GDP show ongoing progress, whereas measures of happiness looking back hundreds of years (as I say, I cannot lay my hands on the source so cannot attest to the methodology) show that if anything we were happier a few hundred years ago, pre-industrial revolution: less complexity, greater sense of community, stronger familial bonds etc. etc.

Measures of happiness are nonsense. They are largely determined by by expectations.

Also happiness isn't necessarily the outcome that everyone in society wants. Some may want to maximize happiness -- others may want to maximize something else.

What else would be more important to maximize than happiness?

Means of getting happiness are a different discussion, and what happiness is might differ from person to person. But why would you e.g. accumulate more money or power if it didn't bring you any happiness?

There are technological benefits to being alive today but we must also acknowledge that that technology has made modern life much more complex, stress-inducing, isolating, and noisy. Modern life is not all roses...

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.

> 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?

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

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".

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.

Penn Jillette said there are two certainties:

1. The world is always getting better.

2. Everyone thinks it's always getting worse.

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

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.

>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."

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 :)

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