Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sure, crap like gadgets is now cheaper, but buying a house, giving your kids an education, and so on have increased. In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Such a house now would be on the verge of bankruptcy. And that's not even adding in the decline of working class jobs, and the instability of most modern careers (outside of IT which still has it good).
(in retrospect this wasn't one of my best thoughts)
The effect in its extreme form: people get evicted, buildings get built/renovated (“Luxusbeton”), int’l investors buy hoping for ever increasing prices, apts stay empty. Insane
Unfortunately without a change of economic system it doesn't seem like this trend will change course.
Beyond that - in 1948, radio was something everyone hard, Television was a luxury, a home phone was pretty universal, owning a car less so, even electric coffee pots were seen less often - no smart phones, tablets or home computers - though many had a typewriter. People wrote letters frequently, as long distance phone calls were a luxury.
Now I can replace all of that with a single device and single monthly bill - a device I need to have professionally anyways to participate in most of the economy.
My slightly younger millenial friends probably have monthly recurring expenses not a whole lot more % of income wise than the 1940's. They pay for a cellular data package and have a relatively modern phone, and that's about it. A 52" flat-screen TV is less than the cost of a radio in the 1940's today - it's just not relevant.
There is a convincing argument however to me, that the poor of 2018, have a better existence and are better connected to the world that the poor of 1948.
I dunno, it feels like responding to that with a comparison of a household in the 40s to one today is fair.
It's now going for over $225k in a flyover state. He bought the place in the 80's for $72k on a $40k/yr salary - and the job he held to pay for it pays $44k/yr today. The exact same house is out of each for the exact same job today.
Housing has skyrocketed by all available metrics. The one that matters most of course is % of after tax income spent, and it's never been higher.
The rust belt was booming then. There were more options. Now for the best opportunity you have to take a risk and live in the major cities with astronomical housing prices or long commutes.
> The other thing people were more willing to do in the 1940s was move to where they could afford to live.
Where can you move today that offers affordable living and a good, steady job? Lets say you were on the expensive east coast and wanted a cheaper, more affordable place to live, with work. You'd consider Pittsburgh or Detroit, maybe. Both tick the boxes - affordable, plenty of good, union jobs, enough to own a home and build a family.
Does Pittsburgh fit that bill today? The answer is unequivocally no. Sure, housing prices are down compared nationally - but the last 10 years have seen a boon in housing prices here. Flipping is happening like crazy. Rents have increased. But wages have not - because cost of living adjustments punish employees in places like Pittsburgh.
I assume you're coming from a tech perspective. It's easy for that to skew your PoV. Think of it as the lay person. It's a much riskier prospect today.
Pittsburgh is one of the worst cities in the country for retaining recent college graduates (Pitt, CMU, Duquesne, etc). Why? The job market simply isn't large enough.
I am coming from a tech perspective, but most of my friends and family are not. Their stories aren't wholly dissimilar - those of us who were in tech could afford homes faster than those who are not, but most everyone who is aiming to achieve that goal isn't having a problem doing so around here.
I remember being a kid in the 80’s and getting 5.4% on a savings account!
That means the house's value increased by about 30% over the past 33 years. I don't know the specifics of the situation, but some of that 30% is probably from increased economic development in the area it's in. Some may also be from improvements made to the house.
Regardless, phrasing it as "house used to cost $72K and now costs three times that" is inaccurate and misleading.
The other part of the problem is that the income for the same job has only increased by $4,000/year in the past thirty years, while it should have increased by about $50,000 over the same time to keep pace with inflation.
That's a much more serious problem than increased housing costs.
Disclaimer: I am not an economist so my understanding of the situation might be horribly flawed. Please correct me if that's the case.
Admittedly, they were pretty poor, but most people couldn't even imagine living in those conditions anymore. At the time it wasn't unusual.
Why do we live in houses? Partially to meet certain basic necessities:
- shelter from adverse temperature (too hot or too cold outside), adverse weather (rain, snow, wind): outside walls and roof
- a place to wash, a mirror to inspect yourself, a toilet: bathroom
- a place to sleep: bedroom
- a place to eat: a table and chairs
- a place for work: a desk and a chair
- privacy: a lock on the door to prevent theft, or violence
- a place for leisure or inviting guests: living room
Out of poverty leisure is likely to be sacrificed, but it may be possible to live a much cheaper life if these functionalities can be compactly (and probably inadequately) substituted. What features can be portably arranged into a suit? Imagine a kind of space suit -not intended for actual space- with smart temperature control say inspired on a rete mirabile [0] to exchange mass (say import oxygen and export carbon dioxide, while conserving heat), humidity etc, depending on outside and inside measurements. This would probably necessitate a cheap helmet to keep the conditioned air inside (during adverse outside conditionns). It should be weather proof too. It should require little clean-up, or alternatively the suit should be lightweight enough so an it can be carried or washed while the extra is worn. A big problem for homeless people is theft and violence. So the suit should have intelligent motion detectors, and possibly communicate to other high-tech low-lifes to share news of danger, in order to allow sleep. Sanitation will probably be commercialized cubicles of bathrooms. Similarily workspace will probably be measured in desks (with a selectable height limit for your stuff) and archives, and these will be stored as trays by an automated system, such that you can enter one of the vacant rooms, login, select one of your desks or boxes, after which your tray/desk is loaded in front of you, exactly as you left the contents on the desk the previous time. You rent the room at some price per hour, but also each desk or volume of boxes at their respective rates for storage.
[0] Rete mirabile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_mirabile
But I believe we will fix the housing issue in a more fundamentalist way.
And that's where all your money is going, to buy that sixteenth of an acre. The house itself is only a very small part of the cost in many of the metro areas beset by housing crisis.
Only if you insist on universities. You can get an education almost for free on the internet.
You've found the outliers, but the vast majority of people will never find themselves in that kind of work to begin with.
It is true that people who are born successful are successful in what they do, be it the workplace or academia, and as more people seek to attain a post-secondary education the share of those on the most successful end of the spectrum with higher education grows, but that's not particularly useful information to those who were not born successful.
If 100% of the population had higher education, 50% of the population would still be making less than $31k. I live in what the OECD calls the most education nation in the world, where well over half of the population have a higher education, and the median income is still almost exactly what you shared here ($33,600 to be precise).
Has that really changed?
A manufacturing business in my area is currently hiring everyone who shows up to an interview. They pay they are offering isn't wonderful (at least if you concept of money has been warped by the IT industry), but you should expect to make around $40,000 per year to start. Perusing the real estate listings, I see a three bed, two bath detached home near to that business listed at $139,000.
Rule of thumb says you shouldn't spend more than three times your income on housing, but many suggest you can go as high as five times income. We're at 3.4 times income. It's not ideal, but it seems doable, especially if you want to live like it is the 1940s. The cost of cell phone each month can easily apply $50-100 more to your mortgage payment each month instead.
I will point out that our example job is one that you can walk into and start today. If you take a little more care and look around and risk a few rejections before finding work, there are plenty of jobs that pay considerably more. In those cases, one person buying a home should not be an issue whatsoever. A $45,000 income would provide the necessary amount for the three times income rule of thumb to buy this home in question.
Not even in the 1940s or 1950s could you buy a house with a week's pay. Housing has always been a substantial cost.
We ought to include a full picture of required spending in relation to housing costs.
But your comment does raise an interesting question: If I were to hypothetically spend $100,000 for an optional status symbol like a Ferrari or higher education and can no longer afford to own a home due to that purchase, does that indicate a problem with the housing market?
Further good jobs use it to distinguish between those who are worth looking at and those that aren't even where the education isn't truly required to do the job.
Also we really don't want to admit to ourselves that the biggest step up would be to go back in time and drop out of the right uterus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_and_discretionary_i...
Per the wikipedia article of disposable income, I could afford a Ferrari (on a payment plan), but I would generally say I don't have the disposable income to afford a Ferrari because I still have to pay rent and feed myself.
Obviously the article defines that as discretionary income, I've always considered them to be equivalent terms.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disposable%20inco...
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/disposab...
Note that the Oxford Dictionary uses GP's definition, probably to distinguish themselves from Cambridge :)
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/disposable_inco...
It's probably a case of a word used incorrectly, but so often that ends up assuming a different meaning.
Housing and taxes make sense because they're generally inflexible costs, but how does clothing fit into this? Unless you're sewing smocks out of burlap, the majority of most people's clothing expenses is fully discretionary in every sense of the word (even including work clothes, for those unfortunate enough to have their employer force them to dress a certain way). That isn't to say it's a waste of money, but it's discretionary in the same way that eating at nice restaurants or going to concerts is: something you spend not to survive, but to improve your quality of life in some way.
When you look closely the two bed, two bath detached home it’s likely in a school district that is underperforming and while the home may be slightly larger than those in the past it’s 30+ years old.
This is detailed elegantly in the Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren.
The thing that is crazy is that there is any debate in the subject. Real productivity growth has averaged 2% for the last 100 years in the US. Early in the last century they they were speculating that if productivity growth kept up at that rate their grandchildren would only need to work a couple of hours a week and what would they do with all their free time?
How did we get here?
There is a quiet denial about how luxurious modern living is. People just flat-out underestimate how much work it takes to keep the infrastructure of the modern world in place and humming - traditional infrastructure, IT grids, distribution of goods and services (particularly maintaining an enormous fleet of wheeled vehicles).
I know a lot of people who are poorer than I am but spend more, because they just don't clamp down on things like car usage, sending money to their children, pets and ordering a daily coffee. The only thing that will force them to live a simple lifestyle is literally having no money.
Sometimes people maneuver into a position where they have no choice, because they make bad long-term lifestyle choices early on, but so far the evidence is that human demand for stuff and services is infinite. People use their spare hours to gather and consume more.
The poor are poor due to lack of money. This is caused by increasing costs of healthcare, education and houses, you know those basic things needed to live. And by a capitalistic class taking about 95% of all gains from productivity increases. Saying millions of people are poor because because of bad morals is disgusting and completely false.
Creating a budget and sticking to it requires behavioral changes that take time to sink in.
It's extremely unlikely that you make the perfect amount of money to cover your exact needs that result in you being broke. It's much more likely that people adapt to a system of spending all money that comes in on whatever 'priority item' pops into their mind because they lack the skill and/or discipline of budgeting. This is evident in higher income people as well that suffer from lifestyle creep.
Again, this has nothing to do with morals. It's just a statement about the appalling lack of financial education in the vast majority of the US population.
Absolutely! I genuinely marvel every time I go into a supermarket. I can buy a huge variety of delicious foods from all the corners of the globe. 200 years ago a king couldn't eat this well.
Also, I have literal robots doing my housework! A robot cleans the floor. A robot cleans the dishes. A robot cleans my clothes. It's nice to take a step back and appreciate all this.
A kind 200 years ago couldn't eat this variety.
But they could eat very much better -- all free-range, well made, top quality cuts (not hastily made, lower tier BS, with all kinds of additives to increase self-life or make it appear more appealing in the shelves), made fresh on their own premises or bought from the best artisans.
And of course all prepared at their whim by their army of personal chefs, and served by an army of servers.
And they had all the time they liked to enjoy those things, with friends and family, not having to gulp them down between 60-hour work weeks...
Math says that majority of people were among army of personal chefs and servers not among those being served. So, you are arguing by outliers.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-walk-that-changed-t...
There's also a big denial about how luxurious 1940s living was compared to 1840s or the palaeolithic ages...
...and that's just as well, because it's not really relevant. Living standards and necessities are determined socially, in comparison with what others of the same era have (and expect people to have), not with comparison to the past.
Someone that lives in nice large cave in Malibu with rocks for furniture and self-made pottery, and a stock of food he has hunted himself, would be considered well-off in the cavemen era, but homeless today.
By this definition aggregate living standards can never improve (nor decline) over time.
http://www.realestatedecoded.com/case-shiller/
Given that a relatively small percentage of people live in these places, I get the feeling the perception of a housing price crisis is larger than the reality. I don't mean to say that housing isn't unreasonably expensive in some places, but that the issue likely receives disproportionate attention because it most strongly affects those who tend to write and read about issues like a housing price crisis (i.e. journalists, software developers, economists, etc. who often live in these expensive cities). The people dictating and participating in these conversations are those who are living in expensive cities.
For the typical poor person, I suspect the costs of higher education and healthcare are usually a bigger obstacle than housing costs. Though this is probably not the case for a poor person in San Francisco.
If only I could get a job there that didn't pay poor salaries...
The top tier cities also have higher mean incomes. The top tier cities tend to attract the outliers. If you are Mark Zuckerberg, you probably live in a top tier city. But almost nobody is able to say they are earning like Mark Zuckerberg. And if you are earning like Mark Zuckerberg, the cost of housing is the least of your concerns.
It seems for the normal every day average person, they actually make less money in a top tier city.
Thing is, nobody wants that kind of a lifestyle.
It would place you in pariah status, for one -- and a lifestyle is not just to putting food in the table or a roof above your head, it also includes making you eligible for a partner, able to raise kids to do OK in society, and so on.
People lived in homes both rented and owned, there were few big flats of apartments. They didn't have cars but used bikes and public transport.
They had comparable quality food if not better. Ate somewhat less meat. Slept better and longer. Worked similar or shorter hours. (with exceptions)
More worked physical jobs, but a sizable number ran office jobs.
They tended to be more locally sociable and active I suspect too.
Fewer went to get higher education.
That might be a statistical impossibility:-)
Pardon my naiveté, but is this a common bar? I didn't grow up poor and I'm _definitely_ not poor now, but I don't think I've ever lived in a house that was less than 30 years old. I didn't even realize that was desirable; my impression was that the stereotype of new construction is "classless, soulless cookie-cutter Levittown" (not saying that I agree with this notion, just that it was my understanding of how the property market treats housing).
Am I mistaken here? Or is this perhaps different between cities vs more rural areas, or suburbs? I've only ever lived in big cities.
EDIT: As a reminder of the endless progression of time, a 30-year-old house would have been built in 1988.
The real median income at present in the US is 31k meaning half make less. 45k puts you at the 59th percentile better than almost 2/3 of people. Clearly not everyone who wants to is earning 45k.
A median earner with a spouse and 2 kids is liable to take home less than 1100 every 2 weeks after taxes but your 45k earner will have more like 1400. They will get 3 paychecks in 2 billing cycles but will have to live on 2 most cycles.
Median rent is almost 900 a month. Health insurance for a family is going to run 500 usd says that their food will be 150 a week 2 crappy cars maybe 400 a month. Utilities at least 200. Communications at least another 100.
We are already at 2700/2800 without including clothing or detergent to wash them.
The real question is where is the person supposed to save the money to move from the apartment to the house in the first place. At 45k you are too well off to qualify for a lot of benefits except in areas that are very expensive to live in, but still too poor to support a household.
Incidentally areas where you can buy a three bedroom house outside of the crime ridden hood tend not to have a huge number of jobs so everyone go and move to Ohio isn't a tenable solution for the present economic situation.
You will find that the full-time median income is much closer to $50,000 though.
> Clearly not everyone who wants to is earning 45k.
But, in fact, as this is a full-time job, you are actually below the median. When you add in high school students working part time, then you're right, but that's not particularly meaningful.
> Median rent is almost 900 a month.
Seems high for the area in question, but regardless, since you are buying a home, I'm not sure why you would also pay rent to someone else?
> 2 crappy cars maybe 400 a month.
Maybe the person paying for the house needs one car to get to work. Why do you need two cars?
> Communications at least another 100.
A landline phone where the house is located is $23.50/month. Another $35/month if you want internet service. That's a long way from $100 and already way more than someone in 1940 would have. If you really want the 1940s house-buying experience, you don't need internet service.
> Incidentally areas where you can buy a three bedroom house outside of the crime ridden hood tend not to have a huge number of jobs so everyone go and move to Ohio isn't a tenable solution for the present economic situation.
I don't know about the economic situation in Ohio, but the place in question has exceptionally low unemployment and substantial job growth. That's why businesses like the one I mentioned have to hire everyone who shows up. If they didn't, they wouldn't have any employees.
I don't think anyone expects that you should be able to throw at dart at a map and be able to afford a home anywhere it lands. Not even people in the 40s and 50s could do that. They had to be quite discerning about where they settled in order to do so. That much remains true today.
Sure, assuming the family doesn't have kids, the other person will never need to leave the house for errands, etc. (Or, you know, they don't want to be cooped up in the house all day.)
It is entirely understandable that expectations have changed. I certainly don't think twice about hopping in my car any day of the week, and own two of them at that. But if expectations have changed, why would we want to even try to to apply 40s and 50s housing logic to modern times?
That's household income, not per-capita. It is heavily skewed by two-income households.
Not even in the 40s and 50s could you live anywhere you wanted, while owning a house on a sole income. Like today, the houses affordable to one income were only found in certain places and only those who were willing to move (or were lucky enough to have been born) where housing was affordable were able to own them.
From what I recall, the homeownership rate in the 1940s was only around 45%. Owning your home wasn't anywhere near as common as it is today. To say that people with one income could afford their home back then is simply cherry-picking those who could, ignoring everyone else.
It's interesting how we are so quick to ignore the uncomfortable details about what home ownership in the 40s and 50s entailed, only focusing on the fact that it was possible, then thinking we can apply that to our ideal living situation in 2018.
That alone cuts out nearly half the country. The skilled labor economy has been hollowed out and is nearly extinct in most places. You and I live in similar places and the dream remains alive here, but it is long dead in the corner of the country in which I was raised.
It is not like in the 40s and 50s you could live anywhere you wanted either. In fact, the 40s and 50s is right in the heart of the urbanization movement that happened precisely because capital concentrated, exactly like what is happening in many major cities today, and regular people could no longer afford to live where they grew up and had friends and family, and were left with little choice but to leave their existing life and head for the city to start a new one.
It wasn't particularly pleasant. Most people don't crave that kind of adventure. Most people would rather stay near to friends and family and the life they know, but sometimes you don't get that option. That remains true today.
At some point there must be a paradigm shift in this line of thinking or very bad things will happen.
> Has that really changed?
Yes. From http://www.mybudget360.com/the-magical-2-housing-ratio-betwe...:
> Back in 1950 the median home price cost a little above 2 times the annual median household income [2.2]
> in 1970 the ratio became more favorable to US households [1.7]
> After this point[..] prices remained fairly stable only because of the two income household, until 2000 [2.3]
> After this point, things went haywire. Even today after the [subprime mortgage crisis] the ratio is still out of sync with 50 years of data [3.3]
Keep in mind that this data is comparing housing prices to household income, not per-capita income.
Is this a rural rule of thumb? Looking around me, I see people routinely paying 5-10 times their annual income to get a crappy city apartment and spending the majority of their income making mortgage payments. The alternatives, spending the majority of their income on rent or moving to an area where the majority of the income would vanish, do not seem better.
It's not only income-earning work that counts against prosperity: it's all work. Studies indicate that men and women gained 6-8 hours of leisure from 1965-2003. There are probably caveats and addenda to that, and you make other good points, but please also consider non-income work in your arguments.
Ref: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/55560/1/508634636.pd...
Upper and middle class women did not worked, poorer women (significant part of population) did and had to work.
[1]: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
Also, less work being done at home isn't necessarily a good thing. More people eating microwaved ready meals or takeaways probably means lower quality of life overall.
I've got no other points to defend. But I'm happy to look at any of your points, and I understand and accept the argument that hours of leisure time is not a direct measurement of well-being. (:
Edit: Of course, as parent notes the drop in number of children represents at most _part_ of the increase in leisure hours. We can definitely attribute part of it to things that are definitely modern advantages, like labor-saving devices such as dish-washing machines. The year 1965 is kind of a poor year for my argument, in that by that point most households had the most labor-saving devices: refrigerators that allow you to shop and cook days at a time, washing machines that saved many hours of labor washing clothes, etc.
Hard to know if that was cause or effect though, it seems unlikely that the monetary system changed because everything was going well. It does suggest the modern monetary system is a bit of a lemon.
EDIT scratch that, it is madness to say it is causal. But it does do a great job of hiding symptoms.
Something like the gold standard works well if you have a zero sum game. As one economy does well, another suffers. Wealth is transferred from one economy to another. However, it doesn't work like that. Especially as Japan was starting to kick into high gear, overall wealth increased.
Lots more interesting reading if you care to dig into what both the US and the USSR were doing with gold reserves at that time. My own impression is that the gold standard was unsustainable and would have resulted in catastrophe if they had persisted. Others clearly disagree. ;-)
Bretton Woods comes with its own problems, though. Making capital available in order to bootstrap growth is kind of an obvious solution from an economic perspective, but I think that making capital too available allows bad actors to play a lot of funny games. (Bad actors being those who optimise for their own gain while intentionally or unintentionally screwing everybody else over). In the west there was a lot of deregulation in the late 90s and early 2000s as well, which has made the problem worse.
Even now, I think that the economic policies of most countries are positively loopy. You've got most of the western world hovering on a knife's edge of personal bankruptcy and most of the growth tied up in extracting even more money from the common people. In Japan (where I live), we've got Abenomics, which is just Reganomics in disguise -- we'll give rich people a lot of money and they will disperse it to the poor people (really, they will... I promise). There is a massive national debt, which isn't actually that bad because taxes are low, but now they've loosened the rules on personal debt and... will normal people actually be able to pay the bills?
So I wouldn't say that Bretton Woods is really at fault, but I'll agree that the subsequent economic policies that Bretton Woods enabled are making it pretty easy to ignore the underlying problems that appear to be getting worse. Whether it all blows up on us in the near future?... No idea.
Do they have to rely on historical data, or is there some experiment they could perform to determine who is right? For example, suppose I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's. I would subsidise their housing and education costs, but they would pay more for clothes and food and air travel and phone calls. They would not have the internet and would only have a black-and-white TV with 4 stations and a gramophone record player for entertainment. If nobody accepted such an offer, would that settle the argument?
I think we have to go to even more basic questions: what do people think about when they say prosperity? Having more money? But is it having more money than today's average or having more money than they used to have?
One thing's for sure, I wouldn't say more tech = more prosperity. By this definition alone almost every person is the world lives a more prosperous life by virtue of having a $20 burner phone that they didn't have in the '80s.
No, prosperity is "financial success" and that's related to the people around you and to some basic standard, a baseline of the times you're living in.
If that's the case, then prosperity is purely relative term (as I suspect the "basic standard" will be redefined every decade or so) and hence can never improve. To me, what you're describing sounds more like inequality than prosperity.
(Btw, TV was in color by the 70s and literal gramophones were long gone)
One issue is we are constantly bombarded with things we don’t have. Basic cable has far more channels than existed in 1960 but the menu constantly shows every channel you don’t have while making menus harder to use.
A computer you bought in 2010 would be more than capable of running most modern non game software well.
https://www.computerhope.com/history/2010.htm
In fact, I was using a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell (circa 2009) running Windows 10 as my Plex Server until last week. It was only slow when trying to do something interactively while Plex was transcoding. It also ran PlexConnect to serve a Plex client to my 3rd gen AppleTV.
The 1st gen iPad was also released that year. I still have one (not my main iPad). I reset it last year. It can still be used for most of the streaming services - Netflix, Hulu, etc.
For a couple years it was a dedicated seedbox. It's mostly by BTC-trade-only box these days, but if my desktop died I could re-image it and use it for 95% of my life without issue.
But I walked to class cold and wet on many days. Gortex hadn’t been invented and I couldn’t afford a car. When I got my first real job I bought a car, but I carried a toolbox in the trunk. Cars broke down frequently and with no cell phones you were on your own if the car stopped running. A car accident could kill you in a 35 mph crash. I also carried a state highway map and a city map of around 100 pages in a spiral bound book because there was no GPS.
The best medicine available seems primitive by comparison to today. I had classmates that wore leg braces due to childhood polio. People were still dying from rabies, TB, and even Smallpox. There were cholera pandemics. No MRI, no CAT scans.
I was studying programming. I had to walk to campus at night to punch cards. No internet, no terminal, just a place to drop off cards so that you could pick up your output in the morning.
I was middle class in the 70s so I had it much better than many others. Most of us grew up with a single wired phone in the house, only one full bathroom, one black and white TV that received three channels, no DVD, no CDs.
A VCR player in 1975 was big and heavy and cost over $5000 in today’s dollars so none of us owned one.
Ubiquitous discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice made it harder for many to be middle class like I was.
Even in the 1970s, life was still much much better for me than my parents that had grew up on small farms during the dustbowl days of the Great Depression.
The countercultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we
landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three
weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when
progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. [1][2]
Perhaps our dominant leftist culture's 'ideological stagnation index' is the unmeasured metric that could explain why we feel the way we feel despite technological progress.
Thiel on the same topic:
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science.
It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction
movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar,
Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you
would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to
be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world
where actually believing that a better future is possible that
you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is
actually radically countercultural.[1]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM&t=3m22s
[2] Technology Stalled in 1970
http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled...
Perhaps this will add more context:
Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there
is a difference between the election of a black
president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in
their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights
parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these
ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s
Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually
might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless
fake cultural wars around identity politics are the
main reason we have been able to ignore the tech
slowdown for so long.[1]
https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thie...
I believe Thiel is correct in what he is saying and that is terrifying. It is going to take Westerners a long time to finally wake up and when it finally does it'll be jarring and immensely depressing.
I've been following, causally at first, his ideas through books written about or by him, many hours of youtube videos and essays in and around the topics he talks about. It is difficult to distill this into a synopsis because although I can provide a TLDR it doesn't mean you'd get any predictive power of it.
I suggest doing your own homework and coming to your own conclusions. I think I'd give a lot for a photo of his bookshelves.
Here's a start.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thie...
A common theme in Thiel's thought is that 'reality is often very different from the mainstream conception of it'. Ron Unz wrote this essay which gives body to this belief.
http://www.unz.com/runz/our-american-pravda/
Another theme is that humankind is highly mimetic - meaning they have a desire to be copying each other. This comes out of the philosophy of René Girard and you'll have to read something of his to fully understand where we're going with this.
https://woodybelangia.com/what-is-mimetic-theory/
Watch this if you only watch one video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY
Peter Thiel is at the intersection of an unusually large number of obscure and strange topics, that's the reason why he's ahead of the curve over and over. Things like Seasteading, Urbit, if you ferret away at the peripheral you start to see interesting stuff, some of which gets ferried back to the mainstream sooner or later he's not the only talent scout for weird ideas like this but there's surprisingly few people out there in these strange circles - I've found that I keep running into the same people over and over, only a few hundred of them I'd guess. I'm tired now, it's near GMT midnight but good luck on your quest!
A lot of Tyler Cowen's ideas intersect with Thiel, that's another good line of enquiry.
When I hear my parents talk about growing up in the segregated south in the 50s, there is nothing about it that makes me think - "wow life was so much better back then".
But the OP was talking about the 70s and there is a world of difference. Once you get to the 70s the statement "wow life was so much better back then." becomes debatable for whites, at least.
Gore-tex was invented in 1969 but was hardly necessary. Wool has always worked extremely well and still does: polyester was pretty good except in northern USA. I lived in the south and wore predominantly cotton: Levi jeans and cotton t-shirts were our uniform in the summer; winter we bought a jacket and lived with it.
In 1971 I bought a used American car with everything on it for $300. My East Indian college roommate loved to ride in it and very quickly got a license and car of his own. I later drove my $300 car from Texas to New York via the Midwest and DC to graduate school. I later drove that car to work and school around DC. I had tools but rarely needed them except for maintenance. The car was extremely reliable and needed only tuneups and tires. I gave it to a friend when I bought another car.
You didn't (and still don't) need a cell phone. It was (and is) easy to get help from strangers.
A car accident can kill you at 35 mph but they usually didn't (and usually don't). Cars are safer now and I appreciate that, but they weren't _that_ unsafe: people would not have driven them otherwise.
You complain about carrying a map and a zip code book - you should still (I do), since your phone or network could fail at any time. But you don't b/c in your heart you believe that you can rely on the kindness of strangers!
Medicine today is not much better than it was back then. Trauma care _is_ improved (the lessons of Vietnam were absorbed). But antibiotics worked better back then than today and other than antivirals and statins, the use of drugs hasn't improved much. As someone once said, doctors got no respect until antibiotics came along and, were they taken away, doctors would not get much respect now.
The remnants of the polio epidemics was still present in students of the 1950s (Salk developed his vaccine in 1952 and I was vaccinated ~1957). I too had classmates with polio braces, but polio in the USA was stopped by the vaccination campaigns before the 1970s.
People didn't die of rabies in the 1970s unless it was untreated.
People didn't die of TB in the 1970s unless it was unattended and/or advanced before treatment.
Smallpox was wiped out and routine immunization halted in 1970. The only cholera pandemics were offshore USA (e.g., the El Tor pandemic in Indonesia->Pakistan in the '70's).
I too carried punch cards (I started in the 60's) and was glad to do so: programming turned into a career. 4 years later in the mid-70's I had a terminal and multiple computers available in a network.
3 TV channels was plenty: I got the news and entertainment too, although after awhile I began to notice TV was turning into something akin to the "Bullshit Web" of today:
https://www.metafilter.com/175703/The-Bullshit-Web
VCRs were about $1000 in 1975 but they were available used for only hundreds of dollars. I have a used one that runs still today! In comparison my first CD player died after 3 years.
Neither discrimination nor bigotry nor prejudice were ubiquitous but they _were_ still present. Your description of prejudice fits the southern USA of the '50's, NOT the '70's.
Indeed my grandparents were small farmers (sharecroppers) and their and their children's (my parents') lives were hard. But the opportunities my parents had during their time were enormous and their lives were rich and memorable.
It probably remains true even today that antibiotics are man's most significant improvement of the last century.
But in summary I find your description of the 70s is off by fully 20 years.
Cars were a lot less safe in 1971, that is a fact. No air bags, no anti-lock brakes, no traction control. Older cars didn't have seat belts, shoulder belts were rare, cars weren't built to crumple, steering columns would impale you, etc.
Fact, not anecdote: In 1971 there were 4.46 fatalities per million vehicle miles traveled (MVMT). In 2015 it was 1.18 fatalities per MVMT.
So yes, in fact cars were three times as dangerous as today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
2) I simply don't agree with your use of relative statistics, which reeks of alarmism. My doctors use such arguments in attempts to convince me to take statin drugs, which would at best extend my life for only a few days if I took them for 30 years. He always tells me that I'm "X times as likely to die from a heart attack" unless I take statins. I always remind him of the nature of his statistics, the side-effects of statins, and the non-present longevity payoff of taking them.
Once the number of fatalities per MVMT is below a certain value it ceases to be likely in the overall scheme of things and becomes unimportant.
Relative statistics ignore the prior probabilities - the fact that I'm unlikely to die driving in the first place. Yes, 4.46 deaths per MVMT is about 3 X 1.18, but both are low deaths per MVMT.
I may die from falling off a ladder or get eaten by a shark but neither is likely, nor am I now nor was I likely in the 70s to die in a car accident. Some other damn thing will most likely get me (that isn't anecdotal either).
Do I also get a dozen brothers and sisters? Eat food, drink water and breath air without having to constantly worry about being them polluted or toxic?
> would only have a black-and-white TV with 4 stations and a gramophone record player..
Sure. I would rather have a gramaphone record player or cassete player (which is more like 70s i think) that played ABBA or BoneyM than a 4k lcd tv that plays Lady gaga or Justine beiber or what ever crap that is "trending" today.
Sorry but you have a very rosy view of the 1970s. Would you drink this water [0]? Or fill your car with leaded Gas [1]? Use asbestos in your building [2]? DDT on your fresh food? [3] Air quality around the world is vastly superior to the 70s (people are still suffering because of it [4]).
> than a 4k lcd tv that plays Lady gaga or Justine beiber or what ever crap that is "trending" today.
It's your choice. Your 4k TV today can still play Abba or boney M, and many other bands you couldn't afford. A record cost $3 in 1970, which adjusted for inflation is about $19. For the same (adjusted) cost as an album a month in 1970 you can have access to basically every artist from the 70s (Spotify) along with most TV shows (nrtflix/) and still have enough change for a beer to go with it. Nobody is forcing you to leave your TV tuned into listen to Bieber. There was also a deluge of crap in the 1970s that you just weren't exposed to. There is also plenty of great music being produced now that can easily be found.
[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3769068219/... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestosis [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT [4] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076728-people-today-ar...
Who said pollution did not exist back in 1970. Just that it was more feasible to get stuff that you know that is not polluted. From local produce or farmed yourself.
> Air quality around the world is vastly superior to the 70s (people are still suffering because of it?
Oh yea? Can you provide some citations. By what factor have the number of automobiles multiplied?
> Your 4k TV today can still play Abba or boney M.
You are missing the point. The point is that the technology to consume art is irrelavant if the art produced is low quality in itself. I mean, where is M-tv today?
>There is also plenty of great music being produced now that can easily be found.
Oh yea? Again, where is M-Tv then? It's been ages since a new song have really captured my attention.
There are plenty of ways to get locally farmed meat and vegetables. The fact that battery farmed chickens and industrially grown tomatoes are now easily accessible all year around in your local Walmart/Asda doesn't change the fact that I can go to my greengrocer and get fresh fruit and veg from 30 miles away.
> Can you provide some citations.
Yes, I did for everything I said in the previous post at the bottom. I even numbered them.
>art is irrelavant if the art produced is low quality...
> where is M-tv today
You don't have to judge by the lowest common denominator.
Just because the most popular music right now doesn't capture your imagination doesn't mean that 1) all popular music is bad, or 2) the older forms which you enjoy have been taken from you.
And you think that is free of toxins?
>Yes, I did for everything I said in the previous post at the bottom. I even numbered them.
No. You said air pollution around the world is vastly superior now. The link you provided said "People are dying from pollution sustain during the 70s". If you don't see the difference, then I wish you a good day and let us drop this conversation.
To me it sounds like the American Dream, not so much like American reality of the 40s and 50s. Let me remind you that a) this was mainly about white middle class, and b) even among the white middle class this dream did not regularly come true ("Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller).
I don't know if I'd say IT has it good. IT just doesn't have it bad the way the rest of workforce does.
This assumes IT as a technical/business role, not just "tech" in general that includes software devs and hardware engineers. The python gurus and embedded systems analysts are doing okay, it's the cable monkeys and tier 1-2 support folks feeling the pinch.
Thus we have weird and shapeable metrics of varying use even without pushing an agenda. What do you call a tiny supercomputer that were previously unavailable to even governments more expensive healthcare and housing? Using 1940s terms a homeless person with a cellphone would be the richest man in the world as it would be priceless given the ungodly expense and time to catch up to it.
Utility is technically the true way to measure but good luck unambiguously quantifying it, much less in a way everyone could agree with.
1) real inflation (ie, cost of living has skyrocketed due to rent/medical) outweighs any income increases.
2) overall wealth was not accounted for - in fact many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, probably far more than at any corresponding postwar period in the US.
In short "prosperity" != income. Ignoring things like cost of living and the high possibility of surprise bankruptcy due to medical emergencies lead to a very inaccurate picture.
Simplifying things to the extreme, take 100 people where half of them earn $1 and are unhappy and half $2 and are happy. Give one person a $150 raise-- you just doubled the GDP but at best increased happiness by 1%.
It is no secret that a small percent of people have been getting very rich [1].
[1]: https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/i...
Any description of happiness that makes sense would have to say that it's some sort of local comparison, across various axes: how am I doing compared to previously/expectations/other people?
This is why when you acquire some new gadget, you say you're happy. You can now mow your lawn, which you couldn't before. Going forward, you expect to be able to mow your lawn. If your lawnmower breaks, you're sad. If it doesn't, a working lawnmower was already priced in.
This is why billionaires like Elon can be unhappy, too. Otherwise they would be bouncing off the walls giddy with joy all the time.
The human psyche has its pluses and minuses. The fact is, humans are never satisfied with what they have, they always want more.
This is good when it comes to driving progress. We’d never have gone to the moon if we were satisfied with just colonizing the earth.
At the same time, it’s the root of a lot of unhappiness. People have grand expectations for their life - and fall into depression if they never reach them, despite the fact their life is far richer than most people experience.
I mean that is exactly what a manager tells you when they cut hours, increase work, and dumpster workplace morale. They have very obvious financial incentive to provide less for the same output and there is no determinable metric of what is "reasonable". You're much better off in this case in actively searching for a better job if it is affecting your day to day life negatively.
People seem to forget that consistently throughout history that the societal shift has fallen so far negatively that it has resulted in the final resort of being solved by violent revolution.
This is a twisted way to view happiness. Wouldn't you be happier if you helped others succeed? Feel connected, part of something you really believe in?
Happiness is so much more than prosperity. Money helps you avoid death. Happiness exists on an entirely different foundation.
I don’t see how the second sentence follows from the first. Can you explain? What rate of increase are you assuming?
Well, the measure of wealth in the modern era ought to be orders of magnitude bigger than it was in the stone age. Back then people had control over something like 10 items. There were no property laws to ensure you kept them, either. If you got a minor cut it could get infected and kill you, there was no modern medicine. Your wife had a massive 5% chance of dying each time she gave birth, and that was a lot of times.
Whatever you thought the function was, the value ought to be much, much higher now than then.
This is what I don't understand. Why should this make happiness "orders of magnitude bigger"? Isn’t it possible happiness has increased, just not by orders of magnitude?
So if you expected wealth to be connected to happiness, and the connection is linear, you would expect happiness to be similarly off the scale.
It doesn't seem to be the case, so maybe it's something like a logarithm, so there's still an upward slope but it's barely anything.
I actually do think it's plausible for happiness to increase with material wealth, but not because we're delirious with joy now, but rather because life was really, really, _really_ fucking horrible for the vast majority of human history (by our standards today).
Significantly, we can't actually measure happiness, and have to rely on "reported happiness", which is pretty much by definition anchored to expectations and thus not appropriate for long-term comparisons. Your point applies here: you wouldn't expect reported happiness to change directionally, on average.
In 100 years, people will look back and say things like, "How did they survive 100 years ago? Some countries didn't even have decent governments, let alone proper healthcare for everyone. Some people lived on the streets. People could just walk up to you and kill you! Bang! You're dead.
Now that we've got personal electron shields and everyone is guaranteed food and medical care, people should be a lot happier than back then."
But in the end, it's all relative. We look at what we have and what we didn't have, we're thankful for it, and we go on. People in third-world countries are happy, too, despite not having all the modern conveniences.
And there are plenty of miserable people because people are people, in the end.
Headline: Most Americans are one paycheck away from the street
Subheading: Some 63% of people can’t deal with a $500 emergency
The website is CBS Market, fairly respectable, draws on several plausible studies.
Link: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-pay...
The major source for this assertion is that most American's don't have $500 in savings accounts. Which is true. What is also true is that a large percentage of Americans with plenty of emergency cash don't even have a savings account -- it is an anachronism from a bygone era. Most Americans no longer own savings bonds either.
My emergency cash is in a checking account, like many Americans, so by the measure used in this article, I am completely broke.
Given that, I'd say a large percentage of Americans do not have plenty of emergency cash. That's not to say most of America is "one paycheck away from the street" like the parent comment quoted...
[1]: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/survey-how-american...
The exact wording of the question is going to have a significant impact on the results and what they mean. In the real world, if I incur an unexpected $500 expense I'd put it on my credit card, which would get automatically paid from my checking account at the next billing cycle. It's not clear if that would incorrectly categorize me as not being able to afford it.
I'd be in the 'reduce spending' camp since I try to avoid touching my savings.
Labor has become vastly more expensive than it traditionally was, while physical goods have gotten much cheaper. (Housing excluded, obviously)
"Nonfarm Business Sector" is defined as "a subset of the domestic economy and excludes the economic activities of the following: general government, private households, nonprofit organizations serving individuals, and farms. The nonfarm business sector accounted for about 77 percent of the value of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000."
The phenomenon where labour gets more costly despite no gains in productivity because on average society has become wealthier is called Baumol's cost disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease). While a servant is not much more efficient than they were 100 years ago, they cost a lot more because there is now better alternative uses for their labour that bid up their price.
Employers everywhere are saying the same thing - we can't find anybody competent at this form of labour. The normal response on HN will be "raise wages" - which we do and we tell them we can pay a lot more if they can perform ... except we still can't find anybody who has their shit together to the point they're capable of earning themselves a minimum wage. The opportunity costs of hiring create a situation where hiring anybody is a losing proposition - making employers very conservative despite the market braying for new workers. We want to hire because we want to make money, we'd do it if we could.
We can get people 'available to work' but they're so inept they can't be employed productively or even trained up because the snobbery of poverty is real and - a value judgement I know but it has to be said - prospective employees are also typically unusually unreliable people with smartphone, videogame or drug addictions, distracted, zero attention span.
I despise that arrogant middle class perspective of those who believe you just need to throw warm bodies at blue collar work. It does not work. It hasn't been true for a long time. "The world needs ditch diggers too" doesn't operate in a world where the ditch digger is using a mechanical excavator and is paid $60+ per hour is competing with an idiot using the excavator who will cost tens of thousands if he busts a pipe or hits something valuable. Literal shovel ready jobs do not exist! Tyler Cowen describes this in his book, Average is Over - the situation is not what politicians and most people think it is.
There's was a natural aptitude or blue collar culture that went unappreciated that is simply missing today. Now people are going to pay for that expertise in a way nobody had to before. Most blue collar workers operate together with a collection of machinery to augment their effort which is very expensive - a joinery guy installing a kitchen I saw last month had 20k of Festool tools laying around him, that's not even his workshop - the barrier to entry is getting higher all the time.
People have been saying labour compensation would occur (migration, middle class adaption, upskilling, machine replacment, houses built in factories) would occur for over a decade now and it hasn't happened in a meaningful way at scale and now the average age of a plumber in some states is near 60.
If you want to send in the Androids to do work, now would be a good time Silicon Valley... I suspect it's not really happening.
In a nutshell - just as infrastructure has been physically neglected in the West - so too has the skillset of the workers that maintain it. Where are the AR Platforms that teach a framer how to toenail studs into place? Has anybody here heard of companies producing such modules?
In ten years things are going to look very dire for the typical white collar worker, probably a good portion of the population is going to go bankrupt and lose their property - potholes and lots of anger.
As you've mentioned when the middle class lost all their servants to the factories and farms because the wages were higher - suddenly women who never had to clean or cook had to learn those skills - this was one of the drivers behind electrical home tools for cleaning and cooking (most cooking books were invented around this time says the Gastropod food podcast) and the feminist political movements. I think this will happen again and automation will occur but it's on the scale of decades, not years.
tldr; This gets worse before it gets better.
But she also mentioned she wouldn't need to. There, she didn't have to worry about saving money for her kid's college and a medical emergency was affordable without touching into life savings. Buying a house was the big she could think of saving money towards.
The paper does describe that hollowing out in clear detail. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% and the middle class's share of society has been reduced to 26%. There's even been a chiseling out in the size of the middle class declining from 38.8% to 32%. And that's pretty much where most articles tend to leave off the state of economic change. It's all true and it sounds pretty grim.
But context, as always is, is everything. This is the change in the size of each economic group from 1979 to 2014 as a percent of the total population:
- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%
- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%
- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%
- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%
- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%
The reason the top's share of income has increased is because people are moving, at an incredibly rapid pace, from the lower classes the upper classes. Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging' - though I think the paper is extremely transparent in their methodology. But if one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. I found this all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview. Economically we are doing something very right.
[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...
All of these are more important for the class discussion than a snapshot of income, in my opinion. What is probably happening is that long term wealth is building in certain zip codes, where the chances of success are larger and larger compared to other zip codes, also why it costs so much more to live in a handful of urban areas than other places. The competition for these high performing places causes quite a bit of insecurity.
If your household income is $100K, you're close the 4th quartile of income.
https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...
Many households in the US see six figures as an unattainable dream.
If on the other hand you're a dual income family in one of the more expensive parts of the country and both of you work 60 hour weeks in a very insecure job market to clear a combined $100k then you're probably not upper middle class.
Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of consumption. Western culture and power structure is wired to create financial wealth, not dismiss it.
This is true after a certain point. It's independent of consumption, but there's an amount of wealth we need to attain to meet a baseline of material needs that's are simply necessary.
As the grandkid of a woman who couldn't afford shoes, a living space or sometimes even food when she was young, I can attest that my grandma's (and my family's) life got much better and happier once they were able buy food, clothes and a house. My grandma is very happy now that she can travel and get to be marveled by the beauties of our home country with money she saves and my aunts/uncles give her.
As much as we shouldn't pursue material wealth for the sake luxury, superficiality and consumerism, we shouldn't dismiss it as completely unliked from happiness because up to a point it is the source of lots stability and security.
There's also the phenomenon of reverse hierarchies (essentially, lower ranking members band together to keep anybody from dominating them). Which has at the very least been proposed as an explanation for altruistic behavior in humans, too.
And then there's the point that happiness is not related to status, or access to mates, or even access to resources beyond a certain point.
The world's a bit more complicated than ev. psych suggests.
Edit: No matter if you agree or disagree, Boehm's paper is certainly an interesting read. https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pd...
The problem is that environments of abundance basically do not exist, because the population of a species quickly grows to consume any excess. The situation that humans in the developed world face is novel. We are not evolved to deal with abundance because abundance has only ever occurred during the brief gap between when we invented a new technology and when the population has expanded to fill the new, larger ecological niche which that technology enabled.
And IIRC, in both cases the reaction to abundance wasn't overpopulation, but the development of a sharing trait. (Because it reduces the cost incurred by unnecessary competition)
In the case of Melanesians, they were at some point taken over by relatively resource-poor Polynesians. (Inequality will cause trouble). Bonobos escaped that problem since they have no competitors in their natural habitat, and they evolved a somewhat interesting mechanism to cope with any of the smaller conflicts that might pop up. (E.g. access to favorite food instead of just normal food). If you're not familiar with it, I recommend reading up on it :)
The only way a population doesn't expand to consume available resources is if there is something else which is controlling population growth. For many species, that would be predation. But humans are an apex species, so that's not a factor.
Disease is another possibility. The bubonic plague kept European populations below the malthusian limit for a long time in Europe. But not long enough to really have an effect on our evolved traits. Generally speaking, it's difficult for disease to be a significant problem without agriculture and the population density that it allows. But the consensus is that people who lived in agricultural societies pretty much universally had poor diets (ie, they were living at the Malthusian limit).
The other major factor that would prevent human populations from reaching the Malthusian limit is violence. But violence is usually committed for the purpose of increasing or maintaining status. Either by killing competitors within the tribe or by stealing women and resources from other tribes.
> Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/41062232
Of course, the relation is not perfect because there are probably more than half a dozen other major things that can go wrong; most prominently disease, relationship and work situation.
I could imagine that dissatisfaction due to disease also largely comes from comparison with others. If everybody is healthier, then more minor diseases have a stronger negative effect on life satisfaction; so not much is gained.
Work satisfaction might have improved, but the hedonic treadmill probably also diminishes the returns in that case.
I could imagine that relationship satisfaction has decreased with the loss of the classical gender roles and culture regulating all of that. E.g. it is known that premarital promiscuity results in decreased marriage satisfaction:
http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...
What I am saying is that humans are not wired for the concept of "enough".
We have already had something similar to UBI in the form of fossil fuels and the abundant energy they provide, which have tremendously lowered the cost of the bare essentials in the developed world in the last 100 years. You can go into any super market in the US and buy a days worth of calories for about $3. And then you can go into a Walmart and buy a complete wardrobe for about $200. If you want to get crazy and provide yourself with the utter luxury of gasoline powered personal transportation (not a thing available to any human being until about 100 years ago), you can buy a pretty good car on Craigslist for about $1000.
But rather than use the excess provided by cheap and abundant energy to just chill and enjoy the good times, all I see is people (myself included :P) tripping over themselves to buy nicer clothes, and nicer car, or a house in a nicer neighborhood. So I'm having a hard time seeing how people will act differently with UBI. That said, I think something like UBI will be necessary to keep the masses from revolting against the rich. I just don't see it bringing universal happiness.
Well actually that's hardly even touching on the issue. Consider those that can't even get into Star Fleet! There'd be entire movements from these "poor" individuals indignant at the inequities in society. Star Trek rarely tackled this issue as it was always intended to be an optimistic, not necessarily realistic, view of the future. However, it did indirectly delve into these issues in one episode - Tapestry. A brief clip of it. [1] A longer cut of the ending scene there. [2]
I don't think that's true. A lot of people are OK with getting high enough to have a life they view as decent. Only very few want to get as high as possible.
The list is quite long but to name a few: horrible personality disorders,childhood trauma,relationship issues(opposite sex,parent,society,coworkers,etc...),physhical health ailments and so on... All these can become obstacles to happiness and throwing money at them to the most part does not help overcome these issues.
Here is my question: 1) isn't happiness a bit overrated? 2) is happiness really all that important? 3) if prosperity is happiness then why are there so many happy poor people in 3rd world countries?
I am going to be unhappy, even frustrated trying to improve things or create new things (as an artist or engineer). Healthy unhappiness, as I see it, is required for evolution/human-advancement.
The problem is the individual cannot perceive this. The typical person cannot perceive unemployment falling a few tenths of a percent or personal income rising a quarter of a percent. if income is rising as fast an inflation, then it may be impossible to notice. You can buy a bigger Iphone and Netflix, but healthcare, rent, and tuition keeps going up.
Nowadays, we have a lot of stress, because the requirements an individual has to fulfil in order to survive have skyrocketed.
You also have to keep in mind that areas such as California have some of the highest homeless rates in the entire nation, so if your perception happens to be based on areas such as this - it's going to be skewed. It'd be like gauging prosperity by looking at what's happening in Monaco.
[1] - https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-ca...
People now have smartphones and expensive TV's and financed cars but all the important things in life are consolidating in fewer and fewer hands.
GDP increases higher and higher, and the actual economic gains go to fewer and fewer people in ever larger amounts.
Education and healthcare has become prohibitively expensive, the financial services industry concocts ever more complicated financial instruments to disguise their greedy quarterly-focused predatory profiteering.
House prices and rent in places where the jobs can be found are skyrocketing, made worse by a free-for-all of foreign property purchases.
The products we used to buy and own and now being leased out to us and our control over devices we have in our own homes has been slowly and quietly taken away from us. We are not even allowed to fucking legally repair shit we've paid for a lot of the time.
Bribery and corruption have even been legalised in the US and the group that can reverse that obscene series of decision are the ones benefiting from it.
The copyright industry is basically a cartel of middle-men at this point, doing nothing other than causing the stagnation and loss of our cultural history.
And to top it all off every 'free' western nation is spying on its own citizens and arming its police all in the name of 'terrorists', despite terrorist attacks being rare occurrence.
I feel like all we have done with our progress is create a new aristocracy and pave the way for a new type of feudalism.
It doesn't help that the disparity in pay board to shop floor is wider than back in the day of servants.
Redirecting mental effort to no material life is hard. Plus the economy tanks when we don't spend.
Having nice things, TV, mobile phones and other similar items reflects the overall product of industry. Those are technically luxuries.
All good, and welcome, but wealth, security needed for happiness us a different thing.
Wealth, in the basic human sense, is all about time and how much of it is availiable for people to assign purpose, rather than have that purpose mandated somehow by others or genuine need.
Happy people use that time in ways that they find rewarding, a core part of happiness.
In a macro sense, we as a nation are prosporous.
In a micro sense, people do not see that prosperity as basic wealth, and it manifests as their personal cost and risk exposure not matched to their income.
This costs them time, and limits on scope of desirable purpose on what portion of "free" time they have.
Having lots of money, that requires vast amounts of time to obtain and or service, is not wealth in the simoke human sense. Sans this basic wealth, happiness is much harder to achieve. Some people get happiness out of work. Most do not, and it ranges from the work being mundane to varied desire to work.
Secure people, not having to dedicate large amounts of time to meet basic needs, can be happy much easier, despite a lack of luxuries in their lives.
TL;DR: Reduce overall personal cost and risk exposure, and the time needed to do that, and happiness metrics will improve.
People need to be people. When they can't be who they are, do qhat they will do, they simply will not be happy no matter the luxuries they may find availiable to them.
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>In a micro sense, people do not see that prosperity as basic wealth, and it manifests as their personal cost and risk exposure not matched to their income.
This isn't a magical mystery. It's very simple to explain. Wealth is a power law. An average is the most useless metric to use yet everyone still does it. In the same country with Manhattan, you have people with lead filled pipes and raw sewage on their front lawns because wealth is not distributed evenly.
And this isn't by accident. Wages for most working people have not kept up with inflation, and wages diverged from productivity since a little before the Reagan area. [0] The value people create doesn't evaporate, it goes to the top.
[0] https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
-NY Times