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Comment by clarkmoody | Hacker News Reader

The immense productivity gains in agriculture have driven down food costs, which improves the standard of living of everyone. It also frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor in the economy.

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> frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor in the economy

That's the ideal, in reality too many of these people live in areas where there are no other opportunities. They are also often fed the line that the job can be brought back.

Put simply, we've observed generational shifts to higher-valued jobs in urban areas. A farmer, coal miner , etc who loses their job today is unlikely to re-skill & move to other industries

> A farmer, coal miner , etc who loses their job today is unlikely to re-skill & move to other industries

Don't confuse what is the current outcome with what has to be the outcome. Those individuals might not reskill in todays environment because of a combination of receiving an insufficient amount of the value they produced in their wages (preventing them from having the resources to retrain themselves), as well as social programs for reskilling being severely limited in both funding and how they constrain how and what skills are trained. (preventing gov't resources from retraining workers).

Neither of those has to be a forgone conclusion.

I don't disagree it can be done...

https://www.wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-...

I'm saying it can't be done at the current rate of change. There are just too many people caught off guard, compounded by technological & automation adoption too rapid for them to adapt.

I think you may underestimate the scale of the problem. Why so many people in the center of this country voted for a catchy tag-line on a baseball cap.

I agree with you on the rate of change, and the scale is only becoming bigger, and worse with student loan costs. Imagine 10-15 years down the line when a generation of workers needs to invest in some other skill set, and are still paying off their original loans? If we want to continue to advance as a nation/civilization we need to build in a social/economic way for people to afford potentially multiple major learning opportunities that can happen at multiple stages of life, without having to commit to massive life/lifestyle on the line risks.

It can't be this program that gets hauled out into the light occasionally, constrained by industry, geography, time, and whatever else gets thrown into the mix to constrain the program cost - it ends up costing us all more (in money and social instability) to not address the problem.

In theory. In practice, this has lead to collapse of rural economies, rampant poverty, and epidemic drug usage amongst rural populations. As to driving food costs down, that's trivially disprovable. Loaf of bread in 1950: 12 cents. Adjusted for inflation that's $1.26 currently. A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26.

Edit: of course this gets downvoted, because econ gibberish is certainly more valid than observed reality.

First, my local stop n shop sells a loaf of white bread for $1.29 and that's not even a sale price. Second the average income has gone up by more than inflation as well so you would expect the cost of staples to go up accordingly.

is that including the richest folks in the average or not?

my understanding is that other than the top 10% or so, average income is not keeping up with inflation

Median income adjusted for inflation, has been growing, albeit very slowly, for all groups, including the bottom quintile (+6.7%).

https://static.businessinsider.com/image/59bc19b538d20d7f378...

So you prove knieveltech correct, the price of bread has not gone down despite whatever productivity advances may have come about since then.

No because the average person can afford a lot more bread now than they could in 1950. But bread is not the best argument as it’s cheap to make even in the 50s. Go buy a roast chicken and compare that price and you’ll see a difference

Average income hasn't even kept pace with inflation since the 70's, go take a look at a graph of income inequality over time if you're curious where all those productivity gains went, you prove my point regarding no measurable drop in food prices (incidentally a loaf of bread is closer to $2.00 here), and would anyone care to take a crack at the larger criticism, namely total economic collapse of vast swaths of rural America or is "well, actually" over the price of a fucking loaf of bread the best HN can do?

You're the one that was calling the bread argument invalid and "trivially disprovable." Also, average income has more than kept pace with inflation since the 50s which is the arbitrary starting point that you chose in your first argument, but shifted to the 70s in this counter for some reason. That still doesn't help you as the avg income in 1970 was 10556.03 (39081 in 2017 dollars) and 50321 in 2017. (source https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/AWI.html)

A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26.

Actually that's about exactly what it costs at Walmart. I wanna say it's $1.28 but I'm not 100% sure. Granted that's literally the cheapest loaf of bread you can buy not an average nothing special loaf of bread.

Food prices are confusing. Back in the UK I could get cheap loaves of bread for 55p ($0.71 at current exchange rate), while here in Berlin I see them for €0.59 in mid-range brands for a slightly smaller loaf that works out as $1.08 when adjusted for size as well as current exchange rate.

I know this isn't the point of this sub thread, but in UKthe prices are:

The cheapest loaf of bread I can buy is 36pence or $0.47

A 250 g pack of butter is £1.45 or $1.88

A 450 g jar of thin cut orange marmalade is 49p or $0.64

This is from Lidl.

And includes sales tax

And you don’t have to tip the cashier

Why would you want it to include sales tax. If the government is taking a cut of a transaction the people should be well aware of it.

It's somewhat anti-consumer for the price listed to be different to what you end up paying.

A receipt in Australia for example will display total:$10 including $0.90 sales tax. it is illegal to display a price that doesn't include it.

You can include the VAT on the receipt that the customer gets after paying. Most food in UK is zero-rated for VAT.

Your observed reality knows the price of bread in 1950, the price adjusted for inflation, but not the current price.

It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?

He actually seems to have something of a point:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/92689-over-the-past-100-yea...

Note in figure 3 the gains since 1950 have been a lot less than from 1920 to 1950. 1950s and afterwards the gains have been a lot less.

A loaf of good-quality sandwich bread can easily go for $5, but cheap white can be had for around a dollar in most places.

Really?

The cheap loaves of bread in australia are $1 (that's in dollarydoos - so it works out to 0.71c in the US.) There's no state sales tax beyond that -- and the minimum wage is 18.93 dollarydoos (13.38).

frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor

But what if they don't want to? Yay for consumers but throwing people into economic limbo is a Bad Thing. That's like looking for the next record-breaking swimmer by randomly throwing kids into swimming pools.

Almost nobody who loses their job wants to. It's still a net win for the economy as a whole that people lose the jobs that are no longer worth doing.

But pure capital allocation efficiency isn't a good indicator of social well being, just as infinite sugar sounds momentarily delightful until you think about diabetes.

That's kind of irrelevant to my comment, unless you consider workers part of the "capital" that is being allocated efficiently.

Even if you do, allocating capital (and workers) efficiently usually eventually leads to better social well being than allocating it inefficiently. (Perhaps reversing the inequality makes the historical examples more obvious: allocating capital and workers inefficiently leads to worse outcomes.)

But note well the word "eventually". There certainly is room for doing better at helping with the social well being of those dislocated by this process...

Efficient how? Finding the leader of the grand "race to the bottom" and moving the work there?

Maybe the workers should be as free as capital in seeking a country that benefits them the most. Then it'd be a race to the top because people can just leave your abusive country for a place that sees them as human beings.

The economy as a whole does not matter. It is not a person, it does not have any moral or ethical value. The only people who benefit from "the economy as a whole" growing are people who have positioned themselves as parasites who extract wealth from everyone like bankers. People want healthy, security and happiness. "The loss of your job, home, lifestyle, culture and heritage is irrelevant. Move to generic urban cell block #45725 and acquire a generic cubicle placement in order to procure generic toxic soyloaf to avoid starvation." does not produce health, security or happiness.

Go out on your own and the a mountain man in some remote place and live on cheap land. Then you can take your health, security and happiness into your own hands.

It will be much harder for people to extract wealth from your investments if you have none. It will be much harder for the government to tax you since you have very few things to tax.

I know it takes capital to start but that is the world we live in. Everyone has already claimed everything. The system is world wide and looking to expand to Mars and space. (unless you move to Alaska, I think they still give free land away)

>Then you can take your health, security and happiness into your own hands.

No, you really can't. If you are white and try to create a self-sufficient rural community you are going to get Waco'ed. But even if that were not the case, it doesn't help any of the people we're talking about. Some random farmer or coal miner is just getting buy and has no way to buy land and fend for himself. Without his job that everyone is so desperate to take away from him, he can't keep paying the loan on the scrap of land he has now, how's he going to buy "cheap land" in "some remote place"?

Like what labor? Are they skilled appropriately to fill what's actually in demand?

Except most people don't do higher-valued labor, we mainly do completely pointless busy work either because someone somewhere thinks there is a chance they can extract a large amount of wealth from having that pointless busy work be done (every tech company on the planet) or because a government has taken money from everyone else and given it to people to do pointless busy work so we can say "unemployment is only X%". Nobody would pay the millions of useless bureaucrats if they had a choice, they only get paid because the government takes money from everyone else at gunpoint to give to those bureaucrats.

More to the point, I think you are incorrect about the standard of living impact. 150 years ago almost everyone could eat safe, healthy food. Now access to safe, healthy food is incredibly limited, in many cases impossible to obtain without growing/raising it yourself. We've traded our health and happiness for pointless gadgets, that's not an unambiguous improvement in standard of living. With the knowledge and technology we have now, families could easily provide 80+% of their own food with almost no work (and I mean what we have now, no need for robots of the future). Instead of having a tiny number of farm jobs providing massive amounts of garbage "food", we should have a huge number of tiny "farm jobs" producing good food in people's backyards.

I think you are romanticizing the past. 150 years ago most people were living subsistence lives, with hunger and malnutrition a constant issue.

No, you either have an incorrectly negative view of the past or don't realize we're talking about developed countries. Hunger was not an issue, and malnutrition was more an issue with the wealthy who could choose to eat expensive things they didn't realize were bad for us.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/victorian-di...

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