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The plummeting costs of technology over time make it a poor barometer for measuring wealth.

Instead of mobile phones and TVs, look at bigger items like health care, housing, and education, all of which have gotten more expensive (in the case of education, astoundingly so) even as inflation-adjusted wages have decreased.

There's a simpler test here. If you weren't sure what color your skin would be, what income bracket you'd be born into, what level of health you'd have at birth, or even what country you'd be born in, would you rather be born in 2018 or 1950?

I don't think it's that simple. When I was 15 without a doubt I would have said today.

And now at 30 I'm pretty convinced that I would have liked 1950 better. Why ? Because the space and that I know that for 30+ years my life would consistently improve, maybe even 50+ or 60+, including an actual pension etc, even if I was born black. The basic standard would be different, but the constant improvement wouldn't. I mean I'd miss my PS4 and iPad, except of course I wouldn't, not really.

Maybe I'll change my mind again.

71% of the world's population lives on less than $10/day. You won't be getting a pension if you happen to be born black in South Africa in 1950. The world is still experiencing constant improvement. Every day across the world some 130k people achieve basic food security for the first time in their lives. The UN estimates extreme poverty will be gone across the globe by 2030. Not to mention improvements in healthcare, human rights, etc.

What about the idea that pride is the most important value to certain people and pride sometimes comes from your wealth, achievements, and performance relative to the rest of society? The paradox would then be that as society becomes wealthier, the gap between the wealthiest people and average people widens in absolute terms, broadly increasing negative emotions.

Maybe immersive VR solves this by allowing the mass of people to transition from "lives of quiet desperation" to being rulers of their own miniature virtual worlds.

I think you're too blinded by the US, which is not even close to the majority of the world in terms of population or land mass. Would you rather be a Chinese woman born in China in 1950 or a Chinese woman born in China today? What are the odds you'd have been a victim of infanticide then vs now? How about your potential for education, food security, holding a decent job, likelihood of being victim of violent crime, etc? Do you think that the potential for jealousy overrules all of that?

This test has been around for a while, more recently under the name "veil of ignorance" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

Instead of mobile phones and TVs, look at bigger items like health care, housing, and education, all of which have gotten more expensive

Indeed. I can do without my TV. In fact, I turn it on only once or twice a week for a few hours. I can do without a flagship mobile. In a pinch, I can get a cheap-o no-name brand for important calls.

Housing, health-care, education - these are all key moneypits that are more expensive, for less in return. Don't even get me started on pensions. For as long as I have been actually aware of pensions as a thing, all I have heard is how the fund was lost, raided, payouts going down, pensionable age going up, and without exception, those tat subside off their pension only live in abject poverty, often making choices between eating or heating.

> look at bigger items like health care, housing, and education

Indeed. Question is, what will a dollar buy you? We have more treatments for illness, we have more educational options, more and more.

There is no silver bullet to be sure, and there is no universal upside option, but surely now is a better time to be almost any income percentile, in almost any place on the planet.

Where geographically it has gotten worse, e.g. Flint Michigan, I am not sure how we make a world where Roger & Me is released in 1989, and 30 years later, the population is 2/3s what it was then. Part of life is change, and making the world better requires that people adapt with the changes.

Perhaps wealth can be described as a measure of being able to adapt to new market demands. Acquiring new skills or refactoring existing ones takes effort, money, time. Those considered poor are devoid of that, bogged down...

Ignore manufactured goods and focus on labor intensive ones?

No, I think it all matters. And the fact that technology is getting cheaper IS an improvement in our standard of living. People who can find anything within minutes and talk to anybody anytime ARE wealthier than those who have to spend large amounts of time to do the same things.

Potentially wealthier. If they find within minutes where their opiate supplier is, the new cat video and talk to anybody about what the Kardashians (sorry, Kardashians) were up to... are they really wealthier than when these sorts of things took longer?

So, let's say that their choice of media consumption indicates, or creates, their not-wealthier.

If they can tap into the entire universe of education and experience an Internet connection implies, and pick cat videos... what would you say is the critical link in their paupery?

I mean, horses to water and all that, and it's a matter of choice.

The Internet contains information, not education. Even the free academies are not as good as community college.

>I mean, horses to water and all that, and it's a matter of choice.

No, it's not. Claims like "education" should be based on reliable expectations of effects, not "possibilities" that ignore actual human behavior. The Internet has not actually made people more educated, with few exceptions.

Food and shelter are more important than Internet access. Having a house and a steady income in the 1970s is wealthier than sharing an apartment with roommates and working irregularly in the 2010s; we know this because people prefer it, which is the only actual measure of economic anything.

We ALL pick the cat videos.

Phones and mobile software are exquisitely engineered to be as addictive as possible. And it works.

Here I am, having this largely pointless Hacker News conversation, instead of completing a Deep Learning course or something.

>Here I am, having this largely pointless Hacker News conversation, instead of completing a Deep Learning course or something.

so... there is something deeply addictive about hacker news... but I personally think? it's the same thing as talking to someone for hours at the pub. same reward mechanism. I mean, the pub closes, and that helps; and most people at most pubs are... difficult to relate to. but I can remember just last month I was hanging out front of my local computer club talking to someone until like 4am.

I think the difference here is that hacker news is more like my computer club than it is like a random pub, just because the people I meet are more likely to hold my interest.

That's the thing about addicts. They almost always pick their addiction (wouldn't be addicts otherwise of course), and aren't very happy about it.

> Here I am, having this largely pointless Hacker News conversation, instead of completing a Deep Learning course or something.

Yes, like that.

"Ironically, I think that is pretty much how all cities work since crime went away. The days of the poor occupying prime real estate near a city is pretty much over."

This seems backwards. The poor never occupied prime (at the time) real estate, but cities did used to be more compact. The rise of crime (from the 60s) was one of the factors driving suburbanisation, as those who could afford to do so moved to more distant suburbs to be safer. Not just to have bigger lawns.

Their NIMBYism comes in part from this experience. Making sure your suburb stays expensive has the effect of helping it to stay safe, because it will only be occupied by people as rich as you, and will be able to afford plenty of police. Of course this is not the only effect. This protective blanket of high prices is an extremely blunt instrument, there is a lot of collateral damage. Nevertheless I think it's important to realise that NIMBYism isn't coming from nowhere.

> The poor never occupied prime (at the time) real estate

Couldn't agree more! That's the irony. For many cities, crime kept the richer people further away from the inner city, where many jobs are/were. In places like London, Sydney, NYC and SF, it is really hard to find workers for hotels because the people that do such jobs live so far away.

This is the great irony of improving city conditions like reduced crime. In a really scary way, crime was poor people's saviour from long, perhaps even un-profitable treks to work.

Take London. https://www.toptiplondon.com/transport/tickets/underground-t... if you trek in from a zone that is cheaper and further out, the costs as a fraction of income are huge.

The NIMBYism isn't coming from nowhere, but that doesn't mean it's a good or valid thing.

More entertainment, maybe, but "more" overall?

Would you rather live in a world with no smartphones where you afford a house/apartment, or one with smartphones where you can't?

> Would you rather live in a world with no smartphones where you afford a house/apartment

How rich are your poor? That may seem a silly question, but are poor people really buying houses? Did they ever? You seem to be talking about middle class people - perhaps lower middle class at worst.

The question is where is that threshold? At what decile is the world worse? The bottom 10%? The third bottom? Where?

This is not as clear cut as house no technology/no house technology. This is an issue that affects different percentiles of the income curve differently. There are no doubt some parts of the income curve in some specific locations worse off, but I'm not sure people have a full grasp of how much better life is in general in the 1st world today versus 1960, let alone 1920 or worse, during the Great Depression.

I suspect I was a lot happier before I got so addicted to my phone.

EDIT: Poor decisions are poor decisions and it's much easier to be productive today than ever before, if that's what you choose to be. There's no reason you can't "afford" a house, everything is relative.

Not sure I follow the logic, $350 on a passable phone that lasts 5~ years and affords me the ability to save time on banking (paying bills at least) and also connecting them to unimaginable numbers of people potentially while also granting access to the worlds information. Wifi hopping and pay as you go mobile plans mean that any cost outside of the cellphone itself is miniscule.

Why I think the value proposition of a smartphone is completely justified, it probably pays for itself many times over.

I guess my comment is more confusing than intended, but a smartphone and modern living easily lets you be productive enough to afford a house. It's not difficult when half the planet lives on dollars per day.

are you arguing that a person is "making poor decisions" if they are unable to parlay smartphone ownership into enough money to buy a house?

> even the very poor likely have a mobile phone, the internet, a games console,

This isn't true for a lot of impoverished areas. Most of the students my wife works with at her elementary school do not have any of these.

Anyone on welfare can receive a cell phone with a data plan in this country. Part of the whole Obama phone thing.

Can get != has, unfortunately.

Yeah, and part of the reason we have cheaper stuff is because of outsourcing/specialized firms like this.

Take the hotel example, it's probably much more costly to hire (and interview and vet etc) all your own bartenders and cleaning crews and all that piecemeal. Then you also have to train them and figure out a replacement when someone calls in sick or something. I'd imagine a company that's specialized in hiring and training bartenders could do it much more efficiently than a single independent hotel owner.

Those efficiencies (you specialize in bartenders and so are able to train them with less resources than other places) result in lower room rates and more money customers can use on other things.

But is this really a tradeoff we're making, or just two trends? It's pretty glib to say "well, inequality is worse, but that's the price of better technology"; inequality is worse and we have better technology. From 1880 to 1950 technology got better and inequality decreased. "Globalisation" becomes a grab-bag term for a lot of different trends and movements, and I wouldn't want to get paralyzed into saying "well, if we hired workers directly and not through contractors, we wouldn't be able to buy cheap consumer goods made in a newly industrialized China."

when you account for taxes in everything (not just income taxes), I think taxes are pretty much everyone's biggest expense. then housing

Not in my case, I don't pay income taxes (my income isn't high enough) and most of my income goes on rent.

However, I suspect my living costs (in an apartment) are actually somewhat lower than the Frugalwoods in their country villa.

Ah yes, the "The poor aren't poor because they have refresher"-argument, straight from Fox News.