Most Ordinary Americans in 2016 Are Richer Than Was John D. Rockefeller in 1916
cafehayek.com
cafehayek.com
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.
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.
I wouldn't.
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.
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?
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.
”Pregnancy and childbirth were dangerous times in a woman's life, and most women wrote their wills once they knew they were pregnant”
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?
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 (?).
In fact the EU mandates vacation time.
Few jobs are physically hard and lots of people have the option to choose between free time and money.
Sure being rich in 1916 offers some different benefits.. but I'm not sure I would swap.
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.
This is probably the thing that would make people swap.
I also feel like it's a thing that mostly affect poor Americans.
GP was from UK and if you ask the same question in Northern/Western Europe I feel like risks of bankruptcy and homelessness is a lower.
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.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/11/that-was-typo-t...
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?
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.
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.)
http://cafehayek.com/?s=inequality
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.
Source? I don't believe "most" is even close to being correct.
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).
According to Here's a marketwatch article: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-have-less-t..., 21% of households don't even have a savings account. They'd have zero months' worth of anything if they lost a job.
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.
No, CoveredCA, for example, provides aid to families with income up to 400% of the poverty line.
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.
The value of their wine cellar alone is several times my peak salary-- and they do fuck all nothing. Just attend social functions.
They're actually really nice people, just so completely divorced from reality.
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.
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.
This is sophistry.