And yet we are 30x richer per person in a 10x bigger population since the Industrial Revolution started.
That is 300x more than a zero sum model would predict.
That is 300x more than a zero sum model would predict.
Of course people are better off with food and iPhones, but in many major European cities people with middle class incomes share apartments that were literally single family worker apartments around 1900.
In terms of living space, the quality of life for the middle class is worse than 100 years ago.
Texas had a population of 212k in 1850 and 29 million today. How can you compare the size of a house or land ownership then to today?
You are pinning your argument on houses in _TEXAS_ having gotten smaller? lol bc if anything they have gotten larger.
most urbanites of today don't own a chicken, let alone a cow, in 800's standard they're worse off than serfs.
Today, the average life expectancy for Americans is 78.7
We may see another example of this if Andrew Yang and other folks bullish on automation are correct. The few people who own the AI systems that replace truck drivers will get fabulously wealthy, while the large mass of workers will get nothing.
In the past ~50 years in the US, labor has been on the back foot, and productivity gains have gone almost exclusively to the wealthy, rather than the working class.
How so? The poorest working people in the US today are much much much better off than they were 50 years ago. It's not even close. A lot of people have recency bias, technology gains etc have given much more freedom to individuals, made work easier and less labor intensive, that is largely due to private industry. Globally, poverty has plunged.
Real wages have been stagnant for the vast majority of workers in the US.
And the "pulled people out of poverty" thing is such a BS stat. Converting subsistence farmers into sweat shop workers so that they they have $1.50/day instead of $0/day isn't a real metric of pulling people out of poverty. It's more a metric of how tied into the global system they are.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
Total compensation at all income levels has vastly outstripped inflation over the past 50 years.
Median is $60k household. People making $30k each aren't having side perks thrown at them.
In the meantime, you could make the same argument about farming equipment in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yeah 90% of the population used to be farmers, and yeah the equipment automated away most of that labor, but did the former farmers and laborers lose out or did they gain, by access to the same technology... either via personal automobiles or via cheaper, more reliable supply chains of abundant food.
Likewise, if and when transportation is automated, people will gain from their time saved in traffic. They will gain from cheaper costs of transportation overall which will reduce price of goods at retail. They will gain from the availability of 24/7 cheap, reliable, on-demand transportation.
And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.
The issue though, isn't that a specific job is going away, but instead the whole class of "human as control theory implementation" is going away. That's way more disruptive. Like, people instead becoming control software for guillotines level disruptive.
> And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.
"Real wages" mean inflation and CPI adjusted so you can actually compare them in a meaningful way. They have indeed been stagnant for median wage earners since the seventies.
I'm well aware of what real wages means in terms of inflation.
"From January 2019 to January 2020, real average hourly earnings increased 0.7 percent"
I literally see Embark trucks going down the I-70 mountain in the snow. They are already here.
Here says they are already making deliveries (albeit test ones): https://www.wired.com/story/embark-self-driving-truck-delive...
> I'm well aware of what real wages means in terms of inflation.
> "From January 2019 to January 2020, real average hourly earnings increased 0.7 percent"
> https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm
And meanwhile when you don't cherry pick a single year (and really 0.7% increase isn't something to be writing home about in the first place), they've been stagnant for decades.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...