What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
loc.gov
loc.gov
Especially with regards to this passage::
"In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day. Those Americans will know that it is practically certain that they will die much in the same position as the ones in which they were born. Those Americans will therefore be less enterprising and much more pleasure loving. They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much.
The effects of this, which I am sure sounds regrettable to many of my readers, will, in my opinion, be good. It was essential that the American race should be capable of intense labor and intense ambition if it was to develop its vast country. But one result has been haste, overwork, noise, all of which is bad for the nerves. In 2022 America will have made her fortune and will be enjoying it as well as she can."
Once people have certain comfort they cease to be productive and look for ways to while away their time. Sometimes its neutral, sometimes it may be a productive hobby and sometimes it's detrimental (as in they know what needs to change in the world and they will make it so).
It's also telling that at the dawn of the XX cent, the US was not a wealthy country. Per capita we were more or less on par with countries that are today still "developing". Out position isn't a foregone conclusion and needs active development to remain there.
We don't live to work, we work to live. Once less work is required to live, more living can be done. Some people may 'while away their time', others do valuable things that don't produce monetary value.
There are countries with lots of people --but whose contribution to innovation is substandard. There is no societal support so innovation is stunted.
It’s like thinking justice will happen just because… No, it happens because society supports justice. Justice or innovation don’t just “happen”.
[to answer weakfish who appears "dead": no it's not wrong to revert to a subsistence existence, but it has trade-offs. Just be aware of the trade-offs.]
The lack of real political and economic agency for most of the population is one of the defining features of US capitalism.
Reducing the work required by each individual to survive and support society is a natural effect of technological progression. If people are getting more work then we are regressing.
Agriculture is more work than hunting and gathering, but it's a much more consistent food source.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/hunter-gatherer-farmer-ti...
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
That depends entirely upon the ratio of agriculture to other industries in a society and the level of automation.
People operating today's corporate farms in the US probably work fewer hours than their 1920s analogues, but produce far more output. People operating today's small/"family" farms are probably about on par in terms of hours worked, but still produce much more and there are far fewer of them.
They do create significantly more for their time, true. But this idea that exists that automation has given us more free time isn't quite borne out by the evidence.
Leisure, as we understand it is a pretty modern development. In that study they are defining leisure as the opposite of labor. I wouldn't call that leisure personally. Partaking in or consuming entertainment and hobbies is leisure.
Maybe technology developed for conflict came first but I’d guess peacetime uses also put demands on innovation.
Interestingly, I watched some video somewhere where in some part of India[1] there were people who were harvesting wheat with a curved knife (sickle) like implement rather than a scythe. So people had to bend down to harvest a field. Meaning sometimes technology doesn’t diffuse everywhere —even well known solutions.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...
Agriculture did not free up time, it costs more time. It also has been a catastrophe for the human diet, which was superior before. Besides food, living constantly next to cattle has caused all kinds of new diseases.
Finally, agriculture established the concept of property. Almost all the negative behavior we commonly attribute to people...greed, competition, theft, envy, hoarding...come from the invention of personal property. It's not a natural occurrence of human behavior.
So...the middle of the Venn is the important part. Insofar as leisure is both joyful and productive, good. Insofar as we continue the "opiates of the masses" arms race and make ever better Netflix + ice cream, bad.
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
I wouldn’t necessarily take anything they say as fact. Lol
They’ve been talking about this for a long time
I was pointing out the anti-United states propaganda has been going on for years.
The WEF is just liberal capitalism. The trend towards technofeudalism (everyone is renting their existence from big corps) has been going on for a while, at the hands of capitalists. Because its profitable. See: the growth of financing/credit, software subscriptions, etc.
You can get a sense for Beck's work here:
Conspiracy theories aside, I've read Schwab's book, and it's a moronic, badly-written pile of buzzwords and corporate jargon that says nothing of interest and reads like the work of a hungover undergraduate who's padding the wordcount the night before the deadline while hoping the professor won't realise he hasn't done the reading. I'd tell you to ignore it, except Schwab is a man of enormous power and influence, so his apparent inability to produce an intelligent thought is really quite troubling.
German and Soviet troops that met in Poland after invading from the west and east had no trouble in celebrating their victory together, holding parades and such.
As John Gunther—who was in Moscow when the world learned of the pact's existence in August 1939—wrote, "communism and Fascism were more closely allied than was normally understood".
It always did, because the US had slaves, and ex-slaves who had no much opportunity to 'climb'.
The US now also has a giant class of a specific kind of migrant - Latinos from Central America, who are completely different than those from Spain or Cuba and the rest of the world. They exist in a kind of 'separate' USA and while technically might have the opportunities others have, they live in a system that is not suited to exploiting them. They are happy in their version of he US, they're family oriented, patriots - but not going to college or after the white collar trades like migrants from 'everywhere else'.
Those two cohorts make the US 'very different' in terms of social mobility, and so you have a situation a bit akin to Brazil etc..
Canada and Australia are 'Immigrant States' without those cohorts, and newcomers do reasonably well or somewhere approaching 'normal' after one or two generations.
I'll bet social mobility among non-African American and Latino Americans, is about on part with Canada or Australia, and maybe even a little bit better than UK, and most of Europe (even Sweden) which also have vestiges of class.
Some indicative data here [1]. You can see mobility gap between Black and White in the US, it's very crude and subject to interpretation, but it does line up with PISA standardized testing results which show the same, that non-Black/Latino America is actually 'a lot like' Europe or Japan in terms of so many outcomes. 2018 PISA test scores here [2] (download the PDF).
FYI I'm not 'endorsing' or 'supporting' any kind of system here, just pointing out that the the US has a 'multi system dynamic' different than other places and it's essential to understanding how it works esp. on a comparative basis. FYI a lot of E/S European countries are poor, and represent similar kind of 'isolated communities' which is why gini coefficient etc. for the entirety of the EU is much worse than it is for any individual EU state.
From 1922 until today - most of our progress has been incremental. Other than satellites, and maybe computers, it seems as though they ave predicted a lot. Maybe not quite the social impact of them however.
What will change in 2122?
If we have successful Fusion at scale, it could change a lot of things.
If not, maybe it won't be that different: longer lives, more fashion. Maybe we figure out Climate Change and get plastics out of he ocean, but we'll probably still be arguing about 'what is normal'
Eventually, we'll be able to colour our skin, eyes, hair very readily, we'll have cosmetic limbs (i.e. pair of wings that don't to much but flap a bit). And maybe mechanical uterus - where you provide the eggs and sperm and it will make a baby in 9 months. If the identity wars are a bit complicated now just wait.
We will send a probe to Alpha Centuari and they'll be a small station on Mars, but it will be boring and young people won't even care.
Reduced population in the West and massive population booms in Africa and some other spots will crate some odd international dynamics. Africa will be much better off, but mostly still corrupt with crackpot leaders and nuclear weapons. One of them will use one on their neighbouring country.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-a...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm
The smallest nuclear devices aren't anywhere close to as large as commonly believed. An M28 "Davy Crockett" with a yield of 20T - 0.02kT - isn't that much different from a conventional GBU-43/B MOAB, which has a yield of 11T.
Tactical nuclear weapons are basically a faster and more effective version of conventional strategic bombing. "Little Boy", the first weapon used in combat (in Nagasaki), had a yield of 15kT. That resulted in an estimated 66k deaths and 70k injuries. Compare that to the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed ~100k civilians and burned the homes of over a million more.
Strategic nuclear weapons... they're in a whole other category. Obviously lots of people are killed during conventional strategic bombing, but most of the damage is ultimately done through fires set by the destruction of the intended targets. Some people have a chance to escape.
What's more, conventional bombing is WW2 wasn't generally a "one-night" affair; it took days or weeks to saturate a target to the point of neutralizing it, and after the first couple of attacks many people would have left the target area. The firebombing of Tokyo resulted in so many civilian casualties precisely because it was a (very effective) one-night event, and people didn't have a chance to flee. That was exceptional even in WW2.
Strategic nuclear weapons are effectively instant. They're incredibly powerful. We stopped building bigger ones not because we didn't know how, but because we couldn't see any reason to. If a 50MT blast won't do the job, a 500MT blast isn't going to either... so why spend the money to develop, create, and maintain bigger ones?
Finally, the idea that even a full nuclear exchange between major powers would be an extinction-level event is absurd. It would utterly destroy the countries involved, devastate the world economy, and poison huge swaths of the planet practically in perpetuity. Between the direct and indirect damage and the societal impacts on the remainder of humanity, it would set us back centuries as a species - but we would rebuild and it would take much less time to do so than it did to get to where we the first time.
Two points:
The first bomb was on Hiroshima, and killed many more people. The reason why the Nagasaki bomb killed "so few" people is because they missed. They were supposed to do a visual confirmation of the target, but the weather was cloudy so they (probably) used radar targeting, which wasn't particularly accurate in 1945. A lot of the energy hit the side of a mountain.
Second, there's a huge difference between a conventional bomb and a nuke of the same size simply because of the fallout. It continues to kill well after it's dropped.
Ugh. I hate when I do that. I don't know why I reversed them, other than the fact that I've been commenting on HN all day instead of working and probably just got overwhelmed :).
> Second, there's a huge difference between a conventional bomb and a nuke of the same size simply because of the fallout.
This applies much less to airbursts than groundbursts, and airbursts are the norm for modern weapons.
That's not to say it's not there - it is - but it's significantly less of an issue than commonly believed.
This is so wrong and misinformed it's hard to know what to say. This sounds like the happy slaves justification for slavery.
The fact of the matter is that Latino immigrants from Central/South America follow the same path of assimilation as immigrants from anywhere else do. From the outside it may not see like it but that's because there's a steady flow of new immigrants. I've taught a lot of second-generation Latino immigrants who are very much interested in college and white-collar trades and not looking to continue in low-wage service jobs.
To the extent that there's no opportunity to climb it's because of racist attitudes like yours.
Their experience, on the whole is different.
For some obviously much more than others.
Latino Household income is 1/2 that of other recent migrant groups of colour i.e. Asians [1], who fare better than 'White Americans', a simple fact which makes your 'it's all racism' immediately, well, probably wrong.
Latino Americans are more likely to live in a segregated version of America almost due to their own choices, much like many other groups have historically, and much like 'micro enclaves' (i.e. Armenian, Persian, Chinese, Turkish) form among migrant communities across North America, UK, Australia, Germany etc. - the difference being, their cohort is enormous. Entire cities, or regions of cities are formed by relative newcomers from Central America, that doesn't happen with other migrant groups.
Latino Americans fare considerably more poorly in school, and in terms of academic achievement; the independent test scores (to which I referred) point to that, and there's ample evidence of that otherwise.
The 'it's all because of racism argument' holds little water, obviously, because other 'migrants of colour' in the US do actually very well. Would you imply that Latinos face 'racism' but migrants from India don't? That's not a very sound argument.
There's even more detailed data to refute your argument, right in the 2018 PISA references I provided. While migrants across the board fare more poorly in school than regular citizens, in the US, Canada, UK (aka Anglosphere) - once you normalize for income, migrants overall actually do as well as or better than local kids. The same is not the case in Germany or Finland (ostensibly #1 place for education). This is really strong evidence that actually, migrants tend to have 'opportunity' at least in the Anglosphere, at least the level of education.
China, India, and Europe have high, even elite standards for education at least for a minority, and migrants from those places are likely to be from the upper tranches of that spectrum. Canada mostly accepts only those with a University degree.
Migrants from Central America not only come from nations with very poor educational standards, but they're also individually, very poor. Many people cross the US border with literally nothing, often as refugees.
The contrast between Latino Americans and others holds even for rates of crime, where Latino Americans are over-represented in almost all forms of crime, while their counterparts, migrants from other nations, are actually underrepresented in crime data.
Latino Americans, unlike African Americans, are not represented as much pop culture, music, sports and media nearly to the same extent, almost as though 'they don't exist' - or rather they do, but in 'their own media'. Even during the 'Oscar's So White' uproar, nobody wanted to point out that nary 100% of the Latino prize winners were not American. Nobody seemed to care.
Go ahead and name for me some Black SNL cast members. That's easy. Now name the Latinos ones. Much harder. I can't think of a single one other than Fred Armisen who has a bit of 'Latino Heritage'.
If you take a moment to visit those areas of Texas and California, you'll realize how vast the submersion in 'Another America' many of them live in, and that it forms an existential artifact of their integration experience, which is very much unlike those of other migrants.
(Again, it's not entirely the case, obviously there are millions of Latino Americans who live as 'statistically normative Americans')
"To the extent that there's no opportunity to climb it's because of racist attitudes like yours. "
I think it's probably people screaming about this or that and throwing names around that is 'a core problem'.
Latino America is 'different enough' from the other cohorts, and they are 'big enough' that this implies differing policy measures, approaches etc..
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
That's an understatement. Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives.(<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...>) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.
As you note, Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
Let me translate
“you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.”
I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research why it was created - not just wikipedia, get some books published between the 20 to 60s. When was public education first introduced at scale? When was eugenics promoted in the United States?
The 1910s - 1920s was the beginning of the major authoritarian and progressive movements in the United States. Read about the history of Woodrow Wilson.
At the end of the day, the United States during the 20s was losing its independence already. It was openly talked about on higher-class circles.
In that context all these predictions are really aspirations.
That said, I think the United States is still one of the most free and diverse countries on the planet. Has its issues and can 100% improve. But the same people and families who are part of the WEF are the same families / people in the 1910s - 1920s promoting the same general ideas.
This thread is an interesting summary of possible "eugenics" type applications and if those surveyed consider them moral today:
edit- the USA was divided strongly between states, which had constitutions of their own. There was a very bright line between the Massachusetts colonies and the Virginia colonies, and then others.. Property rights and real education for women were a large topic! slavery was hated for good reasons .. the social contract that "my particular ancestors" created, specifically are what the PP were dismissing.. its inaccurate to dismiss that
And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life.
And what 'freedoms' have you lost?
Well, there's more taxation.
And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.
And you have to prove drugs work before selling them.
You have to pay workers a minimum wage, and make sure they don't die on the job.
What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain?
Many of the "your not allowed to do that"s of the past are still in place for entire neighborhoods, only the words changed.
Only about 50% finished HS - now it's 95%.
Doctors were not very affordable by anyone - now it's >90%.
Most people didn't have running water and electricity yet now it's almost 100%.
The only thing that's not as nice as 'real estate' - housing was cheap, but the houses were crap, and often you were isolated.
If you want to go out of major US urban area, and build a small home to 1925 standards, then it's affordable.
But if you are young, then I am actually sympathetic to you: education and housing costs are 'worse' now than in then 1990's. Those are the two things I will say Gen Z 'has it hard' with. That, and having to grow up where everyone has social media, which is not a social benefit, it's dystopian if you ask me.
Higher education is far more necessary for even a middle class existence than it was in 1922, and the middle class is getting less and less affordable. One of my grandfathers worked a family farm. My dad was able to grind his way out of the lower classes by working at Friendly's and other odd jobs to pay for college (up to and including his PhD). My father in law's uncle was a high school dropout who started showing people around at the local hardware store and was such a good salesperson the owner hired him after a few weeks. None of those are possible for most Americans these days (good luck pulling the leave-it-to-beaver "prove my value to the local store owner" at Home Depot or Walmart).
US citizens are now regularly advised to take Uber to the hospital if they can survive the trip, as it avoids the cost of an ambulance, which is often over a thousand dollars in a country where most can't afford a $500 emergency. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "affordable", and certainly not affordable to 90%+. Granted this is primarily an American issue.
More important to me than the quality of the house is the quality of the school district that it's in (see previous remarks about the modern necessity of education). I can fix/improve a house, I can't fix/improve schooling short of private school, which would probably be more expensive than fixing a house over the long term. Good look finding an affordable house in a good school district near any major metropolitan area with jobs.
Upward mobility is still available and just as rare. The health, intelligence, and drive that allowed someone in 1922 to better themselves are the same things that still allow someone to better themselves in 2022. It’s not easy, but it was never easy. Just look at how many people in 1922 where held back by the color of their skin.
As to getting a job at Walmart, have you ever actually applied? Their standards are incredibly lax.
I'm not arguing things are equivalent to 1922 on an absolute scale, but on a relative scale they're closer than they were in the recent past. The prosperity of the previous century has shifted the goal posts for what defines upper, middle and lower class. But after a long period of shifting the goal posts in a positive direction, we've had three or four decades of things shifting in the opposite direction, and that trend appears to be accelerating for the moment.
As for upward mobility, that largely only exists for people with college degrees these days. And even then only a few select degrees are really worth anything. And college costs are insanely inflated compared to where they were in 1980, let alone 1922. Is it possible to better oneself in 2022? Sure, but I'd argue there were much more opportunities for middle class people just 40 years ago. A Unionized coal miner with experience could make an upper middle class salary without the burden of higher education that costs as much as a house. Ditto for many factory jobs.
A job at Walmart making minimum wage that hasn't been adjusted for inflation for decades does not have anything resembling the same purchasing power as a minimum wage job 60 years ago. Walmart jobs are notorious for requiring food stamps despite working full time hours.
It’s similar to how new cars in 2020 are both substantially more expensive on average but also of vastly higher quality. In both cases the cheapest options represent a tiny slice of the overall market suggesting cost is generally less an imposition by outside forces than a choice.
That said, this stood out to me:
> A job at Walmart making minimum wage [...]
According to Glassdoor[1], a retail cashier at Walmart with no experience earns an average of $22,049 / year. Assuming 50 weeks @ 40 hours per week, that's $11.05 / hour.
That does not include cash bonuses or profit sharing, which Glassdoor says adds another ~$1k.
Indeed.com[2] shows the average wage for a Walmart cashier is $10.56 - so we're at least in the right ballpark above.
My own experience at Walmart was unloading trucks from 4pm-1am the summer after I graduated high school (2002). I made $7.25 / hour then, when the minimum wage was $5.15.
Trying to build a life on that kind of money isn't easy, and I'm not trying to say that it is; I do want to point out that even Walmart doesn't pay minimum wage as a rule.
That's not to say there aren't other "tricks" that employers use, like limiting hours to prevent employees from qualifying from full-time benefits and such. There are.
The minimum wage in 1982 was $3.25. Today it's $7.25. The purchasing power of the minimum wage has certainly decreased, but I strongly suspect that many more businesses paid minimum wage in 1982 than 2022.
McDonald's in my town of <15k people pays $13/hr with no experience, with a $500 signing bonus and a guaranteed $1/hr raise at six and twelve months. The largest manufacturing employer here produce stamped sheet metal parts, and they have a large sign and banners lining the road claiming $18/hr, a $1,500 signing bonus, and fully paid family benefits. My California-based "healthtech" company employer doesn't even have health insurance as good as theirs.
1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walmart-Guest-Service-Team-...
The size of the group that benefits from modernization is indeed growing, as your numbers point out, but if you're not in that group you're just as stuck as you've ever been.
The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations.
Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, but if debt obligations grow too large, people increasingly forfeit their future productivity and the future of their children’s productivity to paying interest.
No one can enjoy increased freedoms if they are spending all their time paying off individual and collective interest.
Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge.
It’s worth noting, as an aside, that the trend line on cost of servicing public debt in the US has been downward (though I would expect this to change): https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-debt-has-increa....
It's a blatantly undemocratic power grab, effectively allowing a consortium of private banks to limit Congress's power of the purse. Or at least that was the theory. As we're seeing now, that one putative upside is nonexistent and the Fed is happy to cooperate with Treasury to spend trillions a year. The rentier class appears to be consoling itself with massive asset inflation, while still banking the seigniorage.
The United States could just as easily once again fund all of its spending by creating new U.S. Notes[2] (perhaps without the public debt clause) and then control inflation by extinguishing those liabilities through taxation.
China has a central bank, but it's fully publicly owned and is not politically independent of the CCP. The ECB, in comparison, is owned by the central banks of constituent banks. And on the other extreme, the Swiss National Bank is publicly traded and a minority of its shares are privately held (i.e., not by governments). (Perhaps related or perhaps not, the Swiss Franc also has historically had very high trust and very low inflation.)
My point is, there are multiple flavors of "central bank" ownership and independence; it seems odd to argue that the primary purpose of central banking is to allow private bankers to violate political oversight when, in some cases, the bank is fully public and not politically independent. Conversely, some examples of significantly more private central banks than the Fed seem to show a history of good management in the public interest.
For reference, public debt tends to be higher when based in currencies that can be more easily debased. This was true in Roman times as it is now.
I’m on my phone, so I’d have to look up the book, but it’s well documented.
I should have noted that this applies only when it’s your own currency.
Would you also consider triple bypass surgery done on morbidly obese patient as irresponsible? It enables bad behavior and arguably the patient may be better off dead than living in a life of pain, but it's undeniable that emergency heart surgery is a good thing.
I didn't mean to imply that.
Most of those things didn't come from Central Banking.
That said, modern finance has 'enabled everything' just like having a highly literate education 'enables everything' as well.
The saver gets to decide whether to lend out his money, to spend it or to simply keep it forever. The money is no longer circulating within the economy, which means someone, usually the government, is forced to borrow the money back into the economy at an interest rate that is simply not sustainable.
For me I'd like to not pay money for the "privilege" of having a central organization constantly and unapologetically spy on me.
Never thought about this before: Suppose I’m Black, respond to a Craigslist ad for a $10k car for sale by owner, and am refused for my skin color. What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under?
Most of the anti-discrimination laws I know of apply to companies, usually companies with more than N employees.
Start your research with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
> The term "employer" means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees [...]
I suppose the root of my question is this: Where is the law stating that an individual cannot act with prejudice against another individual, outside of an employment context? I've always assumed such a law exists, but never asked exactly where it is.
It leads to a small elite being in control of trillions of dollars in national capital allocations every year, with virtually no democratic oversight.
It leads to financial institutions capturing 42% of corporate profits since 1973, with all of the growth in wealth inequality that goes along with that.
It leads to gigantic corporate welfare programs, like the government mortgage guarantee program, where financial institutions buy $1.5 trillion worth of government guaranteed mortgage backed securities - where profits are 100% privatized, and risk is 100% socialized - every year.
>>And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer,
You always had that freedom. Now you have the power to get the state to force the employer to keep you employed, and not replace you, while you strike.
This power has given public sector unions total control over public finances.
For example, New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. That is where all the social welfare spending is going.
>>Well, there's more taxation.
Yes, the state now forces you, under pain of imprisonment, to work 40% of the year to pay a bloated bureaucracy.
>>And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.
And every one has to suffer higher costs, and less advancement, as a specialized caste of anti-discrimination lawyers extract billions of dollars per year from corporations for their failure to comply with impossible-to-comply-with anti-discrimination laws [1] while forcing the private sector to 1. spend billions more in "anti-racism" training, that includes lessons on the supposed omnipresence of "white privilege" [2] and 2. institute affirmative action programs, that waste resources and lead to less competent work forces, respectively.
>>And you have to prove drugs work before selling them.
Yes, you need the approval of a centralized regulatory gatekeeper, which is often incompetent, and prevents people from accessing life-saving medical products/services in a timely manner [3][4] or denies people access to a vaccine due to a risk from side effects that is orders of magnitude lower than the risk the vaccine mitigates. [5]
>>women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job,
Women had jobs back then. The jobs available to women have improved due to the cultural impact of much higher per capita productivity, which makes people far more independent and assertive.
>>you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life.
That is entirely due to higher per capita productivity, which enables more people to be supported through their post-secondary schooling years.
The massive per capita productivity growth seen since 1922 could soon be a thing of the past in the advanced economies, as the growing repressiveness of the state has steadily reduced per capita GDP growth rates over the last several decades, and this trend sees no signs of abatement or reversal.
[1] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...
[2] https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-co...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johns...
Workers have always had the freedom to strike. And employers should have the freedom to terminate striking employees. I don't see the need for regulation here. The "freedom" to attend college has created a mountain of student debt and an overeducated workforce. I fail to see the benefit.
All in all, directly, I'd like to live in a society where people are entitled to only what they can negotiate for, not more. And one that does not strive to protect people from the consequences of their own misfortune or inadequacy.
The arguments against it were vague references to tyranny, orchestrated by people whose wealth is generated from resource extraction and inherited wealth.
They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money. It’s an irresistible temptation that I don’t trust any man to resist long term. That kind of power shouldn’t be in the hands of any one person or organization.
There are a countless other ways a country can do this and most of those are more targeted. The tax code is the most obvious example. Inflation is a flat tax of a few percentage points. If the goal is to wield power, it is much more important to control the tax code and move the income tax from 0% (generally true before the 16th Amendment in 1913) to 91% (1954-1963) or from 91% back down to 37% (the current rate). Blaming central banking as the primary cause for these issues just doesn't make sense to me.
A country? The federal reserve is run by private individuals. It is a private bank. Don't let the name fool you.
It does not only happen at the central-banking level, but it's another tool used by them. Let me give you a similar example, not directly involving central banking, from my country. Paulo Guedes is the founder of BTG Pactual bank. He goes on and funds the candidate Jair Bolsonaro for presidency. Once elected, Bolsonaro appoints Guedes to Ministry of Economy. His monetary policies decisions makes the USD/BRL go from R$3.71 to R$5.70. November/2021 comes by and pandora papers are released. We find out the dude has almost 10 million USD stashed in offshore tax-heavens. His decisions made his personal fortune grow by 14 million BRL(equivalent to 956 years of minimum wage).
This does not involve central banking directly but the idea is the same: put the financial elite in positions that allow them to make large scale decisions to grow their personal fortunes while affecting the lives of all others. It's a scam.
Your entire point rests on this premise and once we accept this premise we acknowledge the entire government is already compromised. Once that happens why does the central bank matter when everything that follows could be accomplished some other way through that already compromised government? That is my fundamental point. It isn't that the central banks don't have power. It is that a central bank's power pails in comparison to the overall government. Therefore conspiracies theories about taking over the government to gain control of the central bank don't make much sense.
I agree.
>Once that happens why does the central bank matter
I guess it matters because public awareness is necessary for us not to allow history to repeat itself. As Ford once said: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
But it is a symptom rather than a cause of the corruption. The energy spent on raising public awareness about this would likely be better served drawing attention to what we both seem to think is the underlying problem, the outsized influence that the wealthy have on the government.
Maybe we say it is private but the government serves as the board :)
Seeing the tension over the years the Chairman, the President, and Congress implies to me that the government does not have absolute authority over the Fed.
>The Board of Governors--located in Washington, D.C.--is the governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is run by seven members, or "governors," who are nominated by the President of the United States and confirmed in their positions by the U.S. Senate.
Not everyone who works for the Fed is appointed, but that is also true of the Supreme Court, Congress, the FBI, or any other part of the government. The leaders are political appointees and they oversee a bureaucratic system that includes many workers who are ostensibly apolitical.
>Seeing the tension over the years the Chairman, the President, and Congress implies to me that the government does not have absolute authority over the Fed.
Once again, just like the Supreme court. Both of these entities are designed to be more independent of the day-to-day political squabbles of the president and Congress.
[1] - https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/structure-federal...
It’s more akin to a public authority.
Flat tax on cash holdings, which poor people don't have.
It's a negative tax on debt, which poor people tend to hold. It doesn't apply to assets.
Now if wages don't keep track with inflation, that's not a tax, it's an employer reducing wages.
I'm sure that's upsetting for wealthy people with investments
For the mom working 3 jobs at Macdonalds, as long as Macdonalds continues to pay an inflation linked salary, her debts being whittled away, that's great news.
Now if Macdonalds can cut salaries relative to inflation, that's a whole other problem.
Sure, having your debt reduced by 6% or whatever is good, but the government could also easily forgive all federally owned college debt and 100% reduction is certainly better than 6%. Increasing the minimum wage is another example. That would more directly benefit that mom with 3 jobs more than inflation.
Whatever your political goals are, there is likely a much more powerful tool to accomplish them than nudging the inflation rate up or down a few percentage points.
Huge assumption. Wages have not kept up with inflation since the 1970’s. Know what has? Asset prices. Guess who owns stocks/gold/real estate?
Thank you!! This is the first time I've heard someone acknowledge this since the "inflation crisis" started. Inflation is good for student debt holders.
The other thing is that costs go up. The impact of this is much greater if you are poor which could also affect your ability to actually pay the loans. One has to eat after all.
So imho, it's a lot more complicated for an individual. Sure for a corporation that borrows tens of millions for a new capital expenditure it makes debt cheaper. But that may or may not translate to someone that is poor and paying off debt.
They hoodwinked an entire generation of children into going six-figures in debt, made the high school diploma worthless etc.
Before: -HS degree -no debt -immediately start a factory job that makes enough for an average home, 2 cars, and a spouse that doesn’t work
Now: -4 year degree, delaying income in prime years -graduate with a small house-worth of debt, with no house -your new job’s earnings in real terms is barely enough to rent -your spouse has to work too -have to make one car work
The American people have been robbed of their prosperity and sold a bucket of lies.
A) Which makes it basically another form of tax.
B) The raising of which always driven the wealthy into fits of rage no matter how necessary or beneficial.
Having your car loan evaporate over three years doesn't mean crap if you can't afford to make the payment after one.
Sadly, my internet degree in armchair economics doesn't give me the ability to come up with a functioning tax system (however much I think I can beat the status quo) so I have no further pearls of wisdom.
Going to need some evidence to back up that statement.
Without centralized banking you essentially have no set policy one way other the other. I can understand why one would take issue with the current governance structure, but I don’t agree that letting money randomly fluctuate with no mechanisms for intervention to be a good thing.
Isn't that the idea of liberty though? No central authority deciding what is a "good thing" - just keeping the peace.
You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not?
If liberty is “fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you” then how is having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as long as it comes from a “legitimate” source of power?
It seems like what your saying is you believe taxation is legitimate, but requiring taxes to be pain in USD is illegitimate. Which, like, is just your opinion man (and makes the whole argument circular) I don't see any generic argument that makes taxation compatible with your definition of liberty but taxation in USD incompatible". I don't see really any generic definition of liberty that would distinguish between those two actions.
I'm rate limited, but to your example below of a currency no one could obtain, the government could equivalently apply a greater than 100% wealth tax. Or the government could define all speech as force or any number of other things. A capricious government can do bad things yes, but requiring taxes to be paid in a particular currency doesn't give them any more powerful ways to be capricious.
Said government could pass a law stating that all citizens must be in two places at once, and achieve the same effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
If there is a state _at all_ there is force involved. I don’t really understand what you believe is possible here. What you’re discussing is tantamount to assuming that American traditions of due process just exist in a state of nature when they absolutely do not.
If I ask myself "what should the state be allowed to do?", it's basically answered by "what would I be comfortable holding a gun to someone's head for?". To take a popular example: If it's wrong to hold a gun to a doctor's head in order to force them to treat a patient (which I think it is), and it's wrong to hold a gun to a bystander's head to force them to pay the doctor, then it's wrong to fund healthcare with taxation.
Yes, I'd have no problem shooting a thief, especially in defence of my primary food supply.
> violation of a contractual agreement
I'd have no problem holding a gun to someone's head in order to extract what compensation is due to me under a lawful agreement.
> I'd have no problem holding a gun to someone's head in order to extract what compensation is due to me under a lawful agreement.
So if a doctor enters into a contractual agreement with the state to provide healthcare, then it’s ok?
Unless there is some definition of “lawful” that exists outside of writing and enforcing the laws. Which begs the question according to who? In this instance that someone seems to be you.
Taxes are “lawful”, therefore under your framework, they are neither theft nor robbery.
Unless, somehow, lawfulness has nothing to do with laws. In which case what you’re saying is just straight up nonsense.
In the same vein, I'm using the common definition of "robbery" without any legitimizing window dressing. I'm asking "under what circumstances is it ethical to rob people?" and "under what circumstances is it ethical to enslave them?"
Surely some exist. For instance, being drafted to fight a war and being enslaved are basically equivalent in terms of lived experience. We've decided that yes, in order to defend society against existential threats it's ethical to enslave people. I don't disagree, and would like to point out adherence to the maxim of violating liberty only in direct defense of liberty.
But this does frame the draft to fight WWII and the Vietnam War differently. It's much harder to make the case that North Vietnam was an existential threat to US liberty, so drafting/enslaving people to fight there seems much less ethical.
Following this line of reasoning, the question is "Is it ethical to rob people to pay doctors?". And since lacking a doctor doesn't deprive anyone of liberty, the answer must be "No".
You'll note that all of this can basically be derived from the following (from the Declaration of the Rights of Man)
> 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights...
> 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights...
A couple comments ago you said it would be ok to murder someone for stealing an apple.
By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways, right?
> Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power.
I didn't say they were synonyms. I said prosperity was a prerequisite to liberty[1]. A poor person isn't free to inhabit a house, and if they try to do so the state will use force to prevent or remove them.
[1]: actually I said all else equal, more prosperity means more liberty. To use your example (which I don't really buy, a rich slave is sort of not a thing), a "rich" slave is able to purchase better food for themselves than a poor slave whereas a poor slave would need to resort to theft, and risk force as a consequence.
> By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways
Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free.
Sure. But a rich homeless person is no longer homeless, and a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home. You haven't addressed my point.
> Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free.
Right, so when I said
> You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not
I was correct. The government decides which things are good or not (using force in disallowed ways) and prevents those. Generally governments high in libetry also do things like punish fraud, because fraud is bad and misleading people and stealing their money...reduces liberty? Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty, and should the government even do it?
I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement.
> Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty
Fraud is related to securing of property rights, which are a part of liberty. How free are you if people can remove the food from your pantry? Fraud as a criminal offense has been derived from "theft by false pretense". But I'm pretty sure we'd be fine if we decriminalized it and relegated it to a tort.
Is level of confinement the only thing that defines slavery?
Assume the rich person and the poor person want the same thing. The rich person can acquire it. The poor person cannot (or can only do so by risking force in response).
All else equal, the rich person can do strictly more things. How are they equally free? The definition of freedom is usually something along the lines of "the ability to do things". The rich person can do more things, they're freer.
The term for what I'm describing is sometimes "freedom from want" and is a commonly considered to be a freedom/right when discussing freedoms if you look beyond liberalism as it was in 19th century. The idea being that while liberalism does a decent job of ensuring that the government doesn't oppress you, it does nothing to ensure that other people don't oppress you. Granting some standard of living to everyone ensures that you can't be taken advantage of because you have no better option, no one can treat you worse than the living standard the government provides.
The government does this by... oppressing you, by limiting your choices and your freedom. Nature itself is oppressive. We are all born naked and hungry and at the mercy of others. This does not constitute oppression by other people, and no amount of governance can change this. All government can do is provide due process to resolve the inevitable conflicts. What is should not do it paternalistically dictate how people should interact peacefully.
It very much does if it involves limiting what terms employers and employees can agree to. And it certainly requires oppression if you're going to seize and redistribute wealth to finance the required bureaucracy.
You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state. Provide government healthcare and benefits to all citizens equivalent to say $10 an hour, and you don't need to limit how employers and employees interact. They have the freedom to quit.
> And it certainly requires oppression
So we come back to the beginning: all taxation is oppression?
Keep in mind that my scheme actually probably involves less government force than yours. People will be less violent, requiring less respondent force, if given a minimum standard of living. So do you want the government to use more force? Or is "oppression" the issue, I can't keep up.
Why is providing a welfare state a prerequisite here? From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?
> all taxation is oppression?
Of course it is - it's robbery. Just like the draft is slavery. The important question is "What circumstances make it ethical to rob/enslave people?". They do exist, but they are quite limited.
> do you want the government to use more force
It's not about degrees of force, it's about what situations force is applied to. The only acceptable application of force (read violation of liberty) is to defend liberty itself from imminent danger. Applying any degree of force to compel cooperation is indistinguishable from that degree of slavery. What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?
I'll answer this with a question: you said elsewhere that its unethical to compel doctors to treat a patient. Let's assume that's the case. What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.
A bystander calls an ambulance. Then what? The ambulance service, the hospital (and the doctor) have no idea if you can pay for their services. Let's assume you can, you have fantastic insurance. What is the right way to resolve this situation? It seems to me your answer is that the hospital should have every right to refuse to serve people without identification (and in fact this is probably in the hospitals best interest, from a pure ROI perspective).
So do we throw our hands in the air and let some people who, by any account, don't deserve to die (they're insured, if their wallet wasn't stolen, there'd be no issue at all!) through no fault of their own, or do we protect people from the total consequence of their misfortune by providing some kind of guardrail?
A more general answer is that people, in aggregate, don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state. If you provide absolutely no welfare state, and I lose my job and can't find a new one, it is very likely that the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone. And people generally speaking dislike that because unlike robbery from the government, which involves paperwork and court rooms, that kind of robbery really actually involves guns. And people seem to find suits and paperwork to be less force than guns.
So you pick your poison: a democratically controlled nonviolent robbery that you can influence and plan for, or a stochastic violent robbery that you can't control at all. Personally, I find paperwork to be less violent than a gun, but you have weird ideas about what constitutes violence, so I'm curious what you'll say.
> What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?
It doesn't exist. Is coercion voluntary? If it's violent to threaten someone's life by holding a gun to their head, why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live (or the money they need to buy the food they need to live, or the healthcare they need to live, or the money they need for that healthcare)?
You are at this point reliant on the charity (read: voluntary) of others. Even if you were identified and your insurance accepted, the paramedics or doctors can just refuse to do their jobs, for whatever reason, and face only professional consequences. You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.
Also, the insured could demand coverage for this case from their providers, with liability to their estate if they are not treated. This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.
> don't deserve to die
What do you mean "don't deserve?". If you're laying shot in the street, then clearly you're going to die soon without lots of outside intervention. This is your lot. Insurance isn't there to provide a guarantee of some outcome, it's there to reimburse as best it can after the fact.
> don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state
Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.
> the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone
That depends on the risk/reward balance between stealing and figuring out how to be productive. If the punishment for robbery is severe, then chances are you'll figure out how to be useful to someone before resorting to it.
> Is coercion voluntary
Yes? If your grandmother offers you a cup of tea, insists, and will be offended if you don't take it, does that make it involuntary? She's clearly coercing you.
> why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live
Everyone needs inputs to live, and everyone is born without the means to provide them for themselves. Therefore everyone must, at some point, enter into a negotiation with those who possess what they need. Absent any law and order, these negotiations often turn violent. All we've any right to do is make some rules around the negotiations, not prescribe universal cooperation.
The ROI here functionally never makes sense for the insurer to do this, unless clients are paying enough to offset the cost of paying all unidentified people.
> You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.
Are you saying that this is the case today, or that this is how it would be. Because I agree with you. Despite laws that require doctors to treat you that exist today (to prevent this exact scenario), no one ever holds a gun to anyone's head. There's no need for violence. Professional (and in general civil) consequences are enough to enforce this.
> She's clearly coercing you.
Coercion requires force or threat. From me shooting you is the same as the harm from me starving you, so the threat is the same. A grandmother being upset isn't a threat, and certainly not the same level of threat, not is it force. So perhaps let's ask a different question: is choice freely given when your life is threatened?
> Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.
Utilitarians would disagree with you.
The root problem with how you approach the world is that you see any government force as worse than all force by everyone else. Like given how your approach contacts, if I coerced you to sign yourself into slavery, that's acceptable, since it meets your definition of "strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual".
If you believe government is the worse bad and nothing else can be as bad, sure that's a viewpoint. But it fails when you have other powerful organizations that hold the same power over an individual as a government does.
Imagine for a moment another extreme example where the government has a total use of force monopoly, and I have a monopoly on the water supply. You say that is unethical for the government to act against me, and also unethical for individuals to act against me, no matter what. This is true even if I use that Monopoly to enslave people or commit genocide, because I'm doing it without violence, only coercion. If that's your ethics, something's broken.
And pragmatically it's also stupid: people will lose faith in a government that fails to protect them. So a government that fails to protect its citizenship effectively will quickly cease to exist (the people with guns will desert to protect their families and tada: a new government). So once you accept that democracy is ethically good (and really even if you don't), the ethics are irrelevant. Governments must keep people happy or they will quickly cease to exist. And I subscribe to the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does. Governments try to make their citizens happy. If they don't, they'll be replaced by one which does, because that's what the people want. Your job is then to convince me, and everyone else's that sacrificing my safety is worth a government that is in your view more ethical.
Why does the state need to “keep the peace”? It does so through a monopoly on force. Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit?
The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making, ie the rule of law, consent of the governed. I realize I am in the minority in modern day America though.
> Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit?
They can, so long as they do peacefully. What the state provides is simply due process for the resolution of disputes, and the expectation that this process will be used instead of violence.
> The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making
This is democracy, which is somewhat tangential here. You can have a decidedly un-free democracy or (more hypothetically) a very free dictatorship.
I don’t accept the popular, modern definition of negative rights vs positive rights as the bedrock or liberty. It leads to nonsensical conclusions.
There is no such thing under my definition as a “free dictatorship”. A system where rulers aren’t bound by legitimate laws is by definition un-free.
I don’t think my definition is super far off from yours though: liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another.
> liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another.
Yes exactly. I just see things like "interfering in private negotiations/transactions between free, equal people" as fundamentally authoritarian/dominating.
Yes yes, “keeping the peace” but how is such an authority deemed to be legitimate? Who gets to define due process? How are they funded if not by taxation?
At the end of the day I don’t understand how you aren’t just an anarchist.
You've pretty much got it. These are the only legitimate violations of liberty. Doesn't seem nonsensical to me.
With money one party has to borrow it first and pay interest. With barter nobody is paying interest. The money lender is clearly abusing his "authority" over money by excluding it from the economy. He uses that power to charge interest and thereby render economic activity that can only cover its own costs unprofitable.
Here is an example. I sell you an apple for $1 and you sell me a banana for $1. We are both better off because I like bananas you like apples. However, if I had to borrow the money first from a bank with interest, then the trade would not be profitable. This is the real source of unemployment. Artificial minimum profitability.
Money is just cut paper, a convenient medium of exchange. If you have bad credit, your liberty is not in danger. The only thing in jeopardy is the willingness of others to cooperate/transact with you. Since they don't owe you anything to begin with, the point is moot.
you cheeky monkey
For those unaware, the quote is actually from Stalin.
The United States would have been pushed into a deep depression, but for JP Morgan’s vacation plans being a little different. Early 20th century America was not a radical place, the fact that the Federal Reserve was created underlies how fubar the system was.
By what metric? For who? Surely it was good for some and bad for others, much like any other place. How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are.
> how fubar the system was
All we basically disagree about is how the general welfare clause is to be interpreted. It had a narrow interpretation for most of US history, and then a broad one starting in 1936 with United States v. Butler. The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there. I don't see why a continued narrow interpretation would be catastrophic.
That would be false.
"The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there."
That would be false, too, unless you were very wealthy. Just because it was better than, say, starving in Ireland does not mean it was "good". Source: My father's father was a sharecropper.
I do not know any single word or short phrase that describes "the freedom [you are] referring to", since as far as I can tell, the concept you use is known only among certain libertarians where it is called "freedom". Perhaps it would be "the absence of a hypothetical[0] threat of legally sanctioned violence from 'the government' in response to actions outside of a certain limited range". (Personally, if we're discussing the threat of violence, I am much more concerned by non-legally sanctioned violence from 'the government'[1][2], where by "much more" I mean "not very much at all" since violence and the threat thereof is actually fairly low on the useful methods of coercion scale.
Now, if you are interested, my personal definition of "freedom" is along the lines of (OED, 1978 ed., "Freedom (4)") "the state of being allowed to act without hindrance or restraint" with the additional proviso of something like "...not infringing excessively on the freedom of others..." and made all lovely and transitively closed by the Kantian version of the golden rule.
[0] Before you get all wrapped up around "hypothetical", consider: let's say your state health officials declare a mask mandate and you, like all rational people, do not wish to obey; you go into a convenient Half-Price Books mask-free. Many freedom-loving libertarians seem to believe that the next event would be a member of the 101st Airborne popping out of a convenient closet with an M1A1 Abrams under each arm and reduce you to a fine mist for your temerity. What would much more likely happen would be a store employee or manager asking you to leave. Unfortunately, that presents a problem for our libertarian friend---at that point, you are technically trespassing and even the fiercest libertarian would say the use of force against you is legitimate, no?
[1] What is the dividing line between 'the government' and any other human institution, and why do you regard it as more dangerously coercive than, say, your family?
[2] Y'all do realize Rand Paul doesn't want people who vote Democratic to have their votes counted? The methods for that are technically legal, I suppose, but it's not really very far from "round'em up and shoot'em" (which would be illegal) in the grand spectrum of historical human behavior.
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.
> you go into a convenient Half-Price Books mask-free
The problem with this scenario isn't the liberty of the patron, but the liberty of the proprietor. Mask mandates have been varyingly enforced, but generally the government will issue extremely stiff fines or force closure of noncomplying businesses. I'm of the opinion that, like my house, under what conditions I choose to admit people to my business is none of anyone else's concern. I support the right to discriminate against masked and unmasked, shirted and shirtless, tall or short, and any other arbitrary criteria that the proprietor solely chooses.
> What is the dividing line between 'the government' and any other human institution
The government is the sole authority which is able to legitimately use force against you. They also govern public spaces, where you have a right to be, and reach into private interactions. If your family tells you that you have to wear a mask to see them, you can tell them to go to hell and face no consequences. If they beat you up or take your property, you have recourse: you can call the police or take them to court. None of this is true if the action (deemed "legitimate") is taken by the government. They can kidnap you, confine you against your will, and seize your property, and you have no higher power to hear your case.
> but it's not really very far from "round'em up and shoot'em"
I hope you're not comparing election fraud with mass murder. I would implore you to watch some videos of actual mass murders and see if you change your mind. Even a beheading video would do it I imagine.
...
"...which injures no one else..."
Broad swaths of the middle class commonly fit within this framework as well, they leverage debt to buy houses.
The poor tend not to have mounds of cash sitting around, so the effects of inflation are only negative if there are not concurrent wage increases.
Pre central banking and stable (low) inflationary regimes, wealth has always been heavily concentrated in the upper class in the western world. The only real exception was the post war booms, which was during a time of heavy global monetary regulation.
The phenomenon you are describing has existed since before central banking was established.
Even if you were paid 19% interest and the rich not you would not have enough money to break even.
“Hard money”, gold, Bitcoin, land, etc focused policy only benefits the return on assets for the people with those assets.
What we have now is the worst of both worlds.
They get away with it because they don't make the distinction between price inflation and asset inflation. The cost of bread doubling is a huge problem for the poor, but means little to everyone else. The cost of assets doubling doesn't matter to the poor, because they have never, and will never save enough money to buy assets. The cost of assets doubling matters greatly against a yuppie who is trying to buy a home. The cost of assets doubling matters greatly in favor of someone who bought a home last week.
Inflation sucks for you if you earn minimum wage, because half the country thinks that raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation means will bring about the apocalypse. Inflation doesn't matter much to you if you're in a high-demand industry, with wages rising to match it. Inflation sucks for you if you're not working, but doesn't matter to you if you are, and there's a labour shortage, which increases your wage bargaining power.
If inflation robs the poor person of the $500 and helps the middle class person with a mortgage.... all other things being equal, we transferred wealth from the poor person to the middle class person. yay, with me so far?
By the same account, if the middle class person is helped a little bit by inflation, (but also has some cash) the rich person who is leveraged many times over into 10 properties, and has most of their wealth in equities (which themselves are leveraged because of corporate debt) is going to be even better off after the increase in money supply.
Their share of the pie grew and the middle class persons maybe grew, but not relative to the rich person. Therefore, that is wealth transfer.
The majority of US equities is held by the upper class and corporate debt dwarfs consumer debt (including mortgages).
When he retired, his compensation was greater than the sum of salary for the entire company. The company paid for his Tesla lease, but orderlies making $12/hr had a uniform deposit deducted from their first few checks.
Inflation helps people who owe more than they lend out (most poor and middle class people). People who lend out more than they owe, directly or indirectly through stake in companies that do lending, are the ones experiencing less profit because of inflation.
We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich people have, you can look at what % of equities is owned by the upper class and you can go compare consumer debt to corporate debt.
Now as to the banking system, there's a little bit of a feedback loop here because they're really the ones creating money, so no they're not really a net creditor either. I owe my bank 700k on my house, but that's new money being created in some respects.
No. Not at all. Apple, #3 on the list for example, has hundreds of billions its loaning out because it has nothing better to do with its excess cash [1]. Almost every company on that list has positive total equity, some on them on the orders of hundreds of billions of dollars.
> We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich people have, you can look at what % of equities is owned by the upper class and you can go compare consumer debt to corporate debt.
I'm really baffled at what you mean by this? Yes, the rich own most equity. But how do you interpret this has having more debt? Equity isn't debt, it's ownership in a company.
> Now as to the banking system, there's a little bit of a feedback loop here because they're really the ones creating money, so no they're not really a net creditor either. I owe my bank 700k on my house, but that's new money being created in some respects.
Sort of? Banks don't get to regulate currency supply, the Fed does. It's true that banks leverage more than they have in their reserve, but that doesn't necessarily increase the money supply.
And my point is if you owe 700k on your house and inflation doubles (all prices go up 2x, but so do all wages) then this is very good for you. You effectively got a house for half the price. If you are a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who's writing mortage loans, then this not good for you. That money invested in the home loan isn't even going to keep up with inflation.
"has hundreds of billions its loaning out because it has nothing better to do with its excess cash "
It's really fixed rate loans that are 'creditors', not investment firms. Some googling tells me they also have ~230 billion in outstanding debt. So I think it's safe to say in this example they're a net debtor.
>But how do you interpret this has having more debt?
>Sort of? Banks don't get to regulate currency supply, the Fed does.
>If you are a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who's writing mortgage loans, then this not good for you.
No, I'm not with you, because it's not the poor person who is fronting a million bucks in cash that the middle class person borrows, in order to buy the house.
For the obvious reason that he doesn't have a million dollars to lend out.
FYI, corporate debt is ~60% of household debt in the United States. (~10T vs 15T). Corporate cash balances are ~4T, and household cash balances are ~5T. [1] Net corporate debt is ~6T, and net household debt is ~10T.
You look at these numbers, and you tell me - who benefits more from having debt inflated away?
[1] https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/average-savings-account...
In our contrived example, now the middle class person owns a bigger slice of the pie after the pie doubled in size due to their leverage.
So yes, if we have an incorrect contrived example that doesn't even attempt to serve as a proxy the ground facts, and we ignore half the consequences of it, yes, of course, we can draw whatever conclusion you want.
Still not with you.
[1] Yes, obviously, its possible for a government to spend that money on stupid shit. It's a good incentive to elect ones that spend it on useful things.
>our contrived example very conveniently excludes what inflation buys
So once the contrived example made sense to you your first response is to move the goalpost completely and talk about something unrelated?
We're not talking about the necessities of monetary policy we're talking about the effects, please focus on the relevant parts of a debate instead of jumping around to avoid conceding a (very basic) issue.
As an aside, you picked infrastructure as your main deflection point? Do you have any idea what % of US revenue is spent on infrastructure compared to everything else?
You also seem to misunderstand per capita vs. aggregate. Do you think if poor people have as much money in aggregate as one rich person that means they're rich? In the same way, comparing all outstanding consumer debt (of which the vast majority of mortgages) is not helping your argument, you'll have to show me a breakdown that shows on average a poor person is more often a net debtor.
You also need to distinguish debt into assets vs. depreciating assets. Using leverage on stock is not the same as buying nikes with a high interest credit card.
The rest of your argument unravels, because you've based it on this fundamentally flawed assumption.
>The rest of your argument unravels, because you've based it on this fundamentally flawed assumption.
If there are two groups of people and you give them both newly created money, but one group more money, the group that got less is worse off. Just because number go up doesn't mean they're better off.
You know that the arguments about poor grandma with $500 life savings are bullshit, because everyone making them would happily let grandma die for a buck.
The only reason resource extraction types care about inflation is that most use debt to avoid taxation, and increase interest rates hurt their return on assets. Because the perversion of the US Senate has happened, we care more about corn companies, oil drillers, etc than anyone else.
And this is true for everything. For housing, for stocks, for lent out money.
A negative interest rate forces money to circulate and it encourages you to pay off debts. Thereby it eliminates both inflation and deflation.
“Wealth” as most people think of it comes from power over money more than from the absolute value of net worth.
I had a lot of credit card debt in University. I was the richest person my friends knew. That money gave me access to people and opportunities I would not have had otherwise. Today, I owe a million dollars ( mostly mortgage ) but am considered quite well off I think. Don’t get me wrong, I am far from wealthy but I am probably the “richest” person in my family.
In University I used to joke that if you gave $50,000 to a penniless man with nothing, he would have $50,000 ( be doing pretty well ) whereas if you gave it to me I would be broke and it would not change my life at all. Today, I guess it would be several hundred thousand instead but otherwise still totally true.
If your average Latin American country was able to borrow as much per person as the US owes, they could build roads and factories and hospitals and universities and chip foundries and be instantly wealthy. The only problem is who is going to lend it to them?
Wealth is not what we think it is.
This is exactly my point: someone who borrowed money for, say, university or to buy a house or a car is helped by inflation. By comparison wealthier people who are more likely to have bought those assets outright, are not. And the wealthiest people who are - directly or indirectly - the ones lending out money to other people see their wealth transferred to the first group.
People with more ephemeral assets and in service business are harmed by inflation. The service sectors in particular are full of low quality, debt-laden companies who can’t withstand interest driven financial stress.
This is completely incorrect. The rich are net lenders. They are also net interest recipients.
The companies they own are also net lenders.
No, it is a means of wealth transfer to the government without raising taxes. Where does the trillions in deficit spending come from? Inflation!
The politicians, of course, know this. But they keep up the misdirection by blaming it on greedy capitalists and/or unions.
The notion that it is for monetary stability is also propaganda. Milton Friedman in "Monetary History" showed that instability increased after the creation of the Fed.
Saving creates a hole in the economy, the trillions of deficit spending are a very stupid way of filling that hole. It works better than doing nothing which is why we do it.
>The notion that it is for monetary stability is also propaganda. Milton Friedman in "Monetary History" showed that instability increased after the creation of the Fed.
Uh, that is a property of capitalism. It's great at first when debts are low then it gets worse and worse.
Also, Hamilton (who wanted a monarchy) had a lot of very authoritarian ideas and his ideas (and him generally) we’re not well liked by people supporting democracy or the formation of the republic.
The US is definitely one of the most diverse large countries. India is probably more diverse along language lines. China is definitely not along any dimension. Even the EU states (that depend on US for defense and use oil to power their economies) are less diverse.
The US is a far more free country now than it was 100 years ago or at any point since the introduction of agriculture.
Compared to one hundred years ago, there's political changes:
- Minorities and women can vote
- Labor rights
- Consumer protections (No more debtor prisons, etc.)
And tech changes:
- People aren't stuck on their farms all day
- Families aren't stuck doing chores all day
- Birth control has allowed sexual freedom
- The trains, planes, cars and the internet has allowed freedom of location
Etc.
For example does enabling a person's ability to vote actually increase one's liberty in a corrupt/narrow system.
Energy crisis, like running out of heating gas is already hitting Europe. And shortages of fertilizer will be here this spring. China and Russia are not exporting. US doesn't make enough. Farmers will be planting without it. Expect higher food prices and possibly food shortages.
Things are running short in the supply chain, from chips to little bits and pieces. When things break, they will break fast. Make a plan B people. The wave is coming.
For poorer people, stuck in older homes with baseboard heaters. The rising price of electricity meant they couldn't heat their home as much. So they're already suffering. While also being told by politicians its better for the environment this way.
A better, vastly more reliable, and powerful alternative of building new nuclear plants lost out due to political posturing around the environment. My province of Ontario, killed two nuclear projects, and our electrical prices nearly doubled. The professional class deference to "feel good" saving the environment experts they see on TV is a bummer to see. But they will not be isolated from these feel good, but poor decisions into the future. So I don't need to convince anyone. The bill will come due.
Energy prices was at a historical low just last year. This year the price has doubled compared to last year, but compared to 10 years ago its the same. People need to have a plan B, through hopefully it will involve investments to use modern standards and energy efficient heating.
By what metric? More importantly by what magnitude?
Would "in the top 20" count? Axross 200 world countries maybe, but to patriotic Americans who speak about freedom abstractly, knowing that they are 16th in democracy [0], 44th in press freedom [1], and 20th in economic freedom [2], probably wouldn't cut it as "one of the top".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking?wprov=sfla1
[1] https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom?wpro...
Also, this is a Quebec-only curfew. Take it up with your provincial government. If separated as a country, perhaps Quebec wouldn't make the list. Quebec has plenty of other counter-freedom policies including your government-endorsed islamophobia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#By_death_tol...
Also, quebec is still part of canada. So again, your point is just strange. You are just deflecting very weakly what I said.
That's not an argument for restrictive Canadian freedom, that's an argument for INCREASED freedom in Canada for individual provinces (especially Quebec)
"You don't like it -> move" is an argument that doesn't work very well across international borders, but ABSOLUTELY works within a country. If you find Quebec to repressive, move to a different province.
But that sounds like optimizing a society for reckless individual expressionism that the government looks the other way on, vs ensuring that every human being in society has their basic needs met despite their race, gender, gender expression, socioeconomic class, diablement, or mental health.
Is it freedom if you can shoot guns at a barrel in your back yard without getting prosecuted, but can also be legally fired from your job and not have a house rented to you, solely for being trans?
As an example, the US press was allowed to publish on the Snowden leaks but in the UK policemen forced The Guardian to smash their hard drives. UK is 11 places above the US: https://rsf.org/en/ranking/2021
The freedom ones often pick and choose freedoms. For example: none include self defense possession, but do include same sex marriage (something that was invented two decades ago).
Is there another way to index multiple countries and measure against each other?
Sounds like you might disagree with the freedoms they chose rather than the process of defining and measuring "freedom." That may be an expression of your own bias.
What was invented two decades ago is treating gay people with enough humanity to begin to CONSIDER giving them the same universal freedoms as straight people get.
So yeah, at this point, in 2022, same-sex marriage is an objective basic freedom. I am not interested in any religion-based counterarguments. Anyone's freedom to hold religious beliefs cannot impune on OTHER people's freedom, regardless of what religious people will claim.
Self-defense posession is a subjective one, I agree. I personally think it's an archaic freedom desire [1] (Honestly, to me comparable "I want the freedom to be able to beat my slave"). But I understand the alternative arguments. This one happens to be something on which the US is a massive outlier from the rest of the "developed" world.
The main point, though, is I don't think people on HackerNews seeking "freedom" are talking about freedom to own guns. I might be wrong.
It is impossible to consider that the whole of society has been created and planned in advance. To think that the upper classes manage everyone (they always did), that the schooling system produces people that are incapable of seeing the outside the box (and yet believe that they are free, nay - they 'know' it), that finance is the main weapon in the wealth extraction, that it is planned for us to move to technocracy (with a bio-medical-wallet-etc-id, tracked everywhere in spy-cities, not allowed to even leave your 110sqft micro-flat unless the computer says so), that all the disasters we face have resulted in incremental steps towards this aim (911, covid). Its a lot to consider!
That we have been harnessed and put to work creating someone else's heaven on earth (and hardcore slavery for the rest) is a bitter pill to swallow. And the techies here have recently been the greatest driver of this change. Their livelihoods do depend on it.
Anyway, good on you, for bringing some of these issues up.
Now, is being a peasant, with all the concomitant limitations on one's livelihood any better than being a slave to the mental health of the bright and ambitious? Perhaps not, but it would be significantly more deleterious to their physical health.
I also understand that reasonable people can debate whether physical or mental health is more important.
But that is not really the nub of it.
Slavery is really a mental state - having been through the system we have been propagandised that the government is a good thing, it's the right way to manage ourselves - anything else is very bad. This is the creation of the slave mentality, putting the policeman inside your head, so that you feel highly uncomfortable just considering non-standard ideas - they are thoughtcrime.
Thoughtcrime egs: that news is just another show, a serious type of advert. That pharmaceutical companies will run world wide campaigns, seconding governments, drafting laws, to poison millions - this will fill up their pipeline with sickness for the coming decades.
100% right. But let's not lie to ourselves that this is also morally right.
You may kid yourself that you are freely doing something meaningful when you vote to be governed by someone else, but the reality is that is based in fear (of others or the government).
You don't in fact need governance when you meet family members for social occasions. This natural behaviour can scale up.
But no, I don't think we are heading towards freedom. I think government is too powerful. Government would create the anarchic situations to allow for the strong paternal government response. In fact, this is how it has so much power now! It creates the objects of fear, and proposes a responses that just happen to require more from its citizens. More money, more control, etc. Its a one-way street.
Unfortunately, you cannot comply your way out of tyranny - so we are heading towards greater slavery and greater governmental control. This is because people are unable to take responsibility for their decisions - they don't even know what right and wrong are ffs. (Do not do unto others..)
This is a good example of what I'm talking about.
Maybe you think of it as slavery, but in reality, it's the very definition of peasantry.
Slavery is you get no money. And by the way, if you disagree with it, the power holder beats the tar out of you. Or maybe s/he just kills you and gets another slave. Whatever's most convenient at the time/place.
Other than money, there are also a host of other differences between how we live and slavery. Including the fact that slaves don't choose their masters. There is no right to leave. Less than expected productivity results in severe beatings. And on and on and on.
Again, peasantry is its own special form of perdition. No need to exaggerate to get that point across. I was only saying that it's clearly not slavery.
If you try to withhold payment of taxes, I suspect you will feel a the force of the law.
"There is no right to leave."
Can I stop paying tax without a negative effect?
--
I am not free if I am forced to pay 100% of my income - that is slavery by your definition.
But if I pay 90%, am I free now? What about 40% - is that the 'freedom percentage'?
Please let me know what amount of income a free man should hand over under threat of force if they do not consent willingly.
The government uses your money to build infrastructure that makes the land the rich own more valuable. The government itself is also a victim.
I'm actually unsure what this means. I take it to imnply that physical health is more important, but I'm not convinced of that. Physical health impacts the individual and loved ones (via emotional labor and support). Mental health impacts the community (mass shootings); it's hard to predict the outcome of poor mental health per individual but it's clear on the whole that it's often the community that pays for it.
Also, the premise that finance people are just naturally evil isn't based in reality, its just fetishism.
It's also complicated by the fact that those who push against it haven't exactly made a name for themselves as reasonable people (at least the most vocal ones haven't) leading to derision of "freedumbs" and so forth.
I mourn the dearth of different perspectives and not assuming everyone is on a "side".
Yes because it implies there is a conspiracy requiring God-like abilities to plan the long term outcomes of a multitude of decisions and actions many of which have conflicting goals.
What is more probable, that the current situation just emerged organically or that some elite group has conspired and executed flawlessly to make the world just like it is ?
There are subcontractors who work for my CM in China and I doubt they are paid much. It wasn't my plan to create wage-slaves and if I paid my CM more they would just likely pocket the difference. I'll admit I contribute to to problems you describe but that's very different than having intent and control.
But lots of wealth and a clear long-term plan is.
Do you think that those individuals that own corporations, would be interested to gain greater control and wealth? Wouldn't it be good to transform society in a way that is most beneficial to them? Do you think that those individuals would be pretty ruthless in their execution of their plans? And that they would also try to be secretive? Of course.
Do you think that politicians can be encouraged to vote one way or another? Those on the blue team and on the reds? Given lots of money, lobbyists, etc? Or threats? I think it would be naive to think that they do not.
And if you control governmental policy, what would you work on? Education - to train obedient workers? Finance? The legal system? All of those.
Would you create or buy the media companies to ensure that your message is always provided, and that any negative exposure is squashed? Or get people talking about all the wrong things? Yes again.
Would you seek to increase dependence on government or increase people's self-reliance? Increase dependence on government, of course! What is the direction of travel do you think?
Would you even create a ready way to smear those who do raise the reality of the situation. A handy handle that allows you to dismiss those who are sharing information that you don't like. This too has been done - and the handle is 'conspiracy theorist'. This smear allows you to ignore whatever evidence might be being presented, and allow you to carry on with your day - no further investigation required!
My view is that if you have a good handle on human nature, specific goals and lots of wealth, it is actually not that hard to create the fish bowl. You will have created a class (the majority) of people who are too invested (financially, emotionally, spiritually) in the unnatural system you have provided. They will go to the schools you created, learn the values you want, just like their parents.
If you control the terrain, and provide the method that people use to "verify" information for themselves (and the method is accept the evidence free claims given, maybe occasionally double check something on Wikipedia) you can really go very far! No one checks anything - we are so invested in this we have to trust that "they've got this".
The truth is that "they" look at you and I as cattle. And they are just executing their best herd-management procedures. And - I think - they have been running things like this for a long time.
I can't even get my business partner to agree with me on mundane things let alone a grand plan to shape the world regardless of wealth.
Your argument hinges on this hypothetical "you" and that is like identifying the handful of termites that coordinated the building of the colony's mound.
Besides does this mindset serve you in any way ? Even if you are right, keep in mind there is a third role: sideliner. Many financially independent people are neither cattle or rancher.
You don't have enough money.
"Your argument hinges on this hypothetical "you""
It does. So, do you think that politicians, businessmen - the really successful ones, are there on merit? That these are the best of us? Or the worst? Do they even have a morality?
"Besides does this mindset serve you in any way ?"
Fair question.
It doesn't serve me when it comes to finding motivation to earn more money, get my children into better schools, having a fantastic holiday, a holiday home, etc.
If you are prepared to consider that there is more to life than contorting yourself that enable you to make more money though, perhaps. I seek to uncover as much truth as I can in my way. I think my search does serve me in my attempt to live a meaningful life. Regardless of what others may say is a meaningful life.
One way to consider it, is that when we die we judge ourselves. We might ask, did we do what should have, did we do it right, did we even try? Why wait to do the things you think/know are right?
Are you sure? You don't need a conspiracy theory. All you need is compound interest. Just think about it. An asset produces returns above what you spend on consumption. I.e. you are a net winner of the financial system. But milk, eggs, cars, houses have to be built by someone and you can clearly see poor people at the construction site of your house. You don't see rich millionaires build your house.
Meanwhile most people are paying into this system and they are net losers.
"The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman's office. (Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions.)"
"Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
>the Miller Court unanimously concluded that the Second Amendment did not apply to the possession of a firearm that did not have “some relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” And in 1980, in a footnote to an opinion upholding a conviction for receipt of a firearm, the Court effectively affirmed Miller, writing: “[T]he Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have ‘some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.’
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/john-paul-...
"In reality, the district court judge was in favor of the gun control law and ruled the law unconstitutional because he knew that Miller, who was a known bank robber and had just testified against the rest of his gang in court, would have to go into hiding as soon as he was released. He knew that Miller would not pay a lawyer to argue the case at the Supreme Court and would simply disappear. Therefore, the government's appeal to the Supreme Court would surely be a victory because Miller and his attorney would not even be present at the argument....Miller was found shot to death in April, before the decision had been rendered."
Myself, I think 2A is just an anachronism. Militias as they were at the founding don't exist anymore. Almost no one in modern US society meets military readiness standards. Armed forces use bonkers weapons of war the founders could never have imagined. Even individual person-on-the-street weapons are pretty boggling by 18th century standards. And this is just considering firearms, expanding "arms" to whatever the US military considers to be a weapon (software/hardware exploits, biological weapons, chemical weapons).
Further, I think "2A as a check on government" is meritless because Congress regulates militias, and the Constitution (Article I, §8) reads: "The Congress shall have power to... provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." Allowing governments to suppress insurrections is the opposite of allowing checks on government.
I'm not like, super into gun control--I think the US is too big for a one-size-fits-all policy and I think a lot of implementations just land men of color in prison w/ felonies. But none of the pro-gun 2A interpretations make sense to me, and from where I sit the debate is more a reflection of Congress' ongoing slide into irrelevance and sclerosis as other less encumbered institutions in the US do the actual legislating.
So to me, that kind of means the terrorists win. China/Russia would like nothing more than for that to happen--it would be a self-inflicted wound of insane magnitude, with global consequences. I don't know that any political issue is so bad that it's worth solving at that cost. Maybe climate change, but the groups of people who are heavily armed and the groups of people who care about climate change are mostly separate.
So I still think 2A is an anachronism. I'm not sure even TJ would agree that refreshing the tree of liberty at the cost of the west makes any sense at all. The world has just become unrecognizable in the last 250 years.
It's only the in past few decades that the Second Amendment has been perverted into the right to carry any gun you want where ever you want.
Ref: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/09/why-accura...
You see, "private property" was a step up from Feudalism. It allows you to own things. For example, the Web disrupted AOL, MSN, Compuserve, cable channels, radio stations, journalism, etc. But then, people started to just make their own "private" sites bigger. "I built it -- I own it!" OK, so Mark Z owns facebook, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, and so forth. Our public discussions take place on "privately owned" platforms (really, owned by Wall Street bigwigs, but even they can't vote Mark Z out, they try and fail every year).
So basically the current system has led to a bunch of surveillance capitalism. That iPhone and Kindle can yank the apps and books you "own" out from under you. That Alexa and Siri listens to whatever you say all the time. That car you "own" will also soon have a bunch of software downloaded to make sure you are limited in what you can do -- which is probably the scariest thing because some sleeper attack can make all cars suddenly crash into gas stations at once.
In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a small level but then you get these large corporations that continue "owning" things, and not giving them to you (infrastructure, backend software, AI data sets, you name it -- even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights).
This IS a feature of capitalism, that we might want to rein in. Perhaps there should be a principle that courts would enforce private property less and less when it came to scale. So on a small scale (enforce my right to chattel property, my first 3 houses etc.) it's fine. But just what does it mean that I "own" 999 houses, and see no lessening of my ability to evict people ACTUALLY living in the house as squatters, just because I contracted with a bank and some "People with Guns" to enforce some "deed of ownership"? The land used to belong to some natives hundreds of years ago, or some other group that the current group just "took" from them. What moral system are you going to appeal to, that would allow unlimited private property ownership? Even John Locke's "homsteading" concept had a "proviso" saying that you should only own that which you can reasonably use. Even Adam Smith writing about the "invisible hand" was actually writing about how the Rich are led by an invisible hand to distribute goods equally (in his time) because they can only eat so much.
We see this pathology in online systems as well. Just like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow sending unlimited amounts of money in a fixed time for a fixed fee, this necessarily causes a bottleneck somewhere (proof of work miner, for instance, or everyone storing everything, leading to "flash loans" and other crap on the "world computer"). Actually, they charge the maximum fee for every transaction (even sending 5 cents) because the entire network secures everything. It's built for really huge transfers.
It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, and happens through enforcement of some rules. The resources to enforce rules should therefore not be deployed for unlimited value of ownership by accounts, they shouldn't even be centralized (e.g. proof of work mining elects one "consensus leader", or Facebook has a huge centralized server farm) to the point that you get these pathologies: the elites at the top are out of touch with the people who are ACTUALLY using the products / services. Same with politics / states / etc. Keep it decentralized whenever you can.
Private property absolutely existed under fuedalism as well, albeit in a more limited form for most people. Serfs generally worked land privately owned by - or granted by the crown to - private individuals. Minor nobles had property rights equal to and exceeding those of private landowners today.
Property other than real estate was privately owned by serfs. This included all of their possession and in many cases and countries, their homes. They were usually nominnaly free to move elsewhere, though in practice this rarely happened for cultural and practical reasons.
> So basically the current system has led to a bunch of surveillance capitalism.
I agree completely with this, except for the "capitalism" part. Our current system has arisen in an increasingly regulatory environment, and most of the issues with it are directly attributable to that.
> In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a small level but then you get these large corporations that continue "owning" things [...]
Ah, this strikes me as important. The concept of the corporation - or more specifically, limited liability - is 100% a product of our governmental system. One place where I break from the mainstream in a big way is that I believe that those responsible for a company should be responsible personally for damages caused by that company. How that breaks down between employees, managers, officers, and shareholders is left as an exercise for the reader but suffice it to say that when Exxon covers the Gulf of Mexico with crude oil I believe the damage caused by that should be remedied by everyone involved, including those who allegedly own a share of ownership in the company.
> even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights
My position here is very adequately described by "Against Intellectual Property", by Stephan Kinsella
https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0
> But just what does it mean that I "own" 999 houses, and see no lessening of my ability to evict people ACTUALLY living in the house as squatters, just because I contracted with a bank and some "People with Guns" to enforce some "deed of ownership"?
It means that if people don't agree with your practices as a landlord, they shouldn't rent from you. If it's that egregious, homeowners should decide not to sell to you or to demand a higher price.
If people don't want to rent from you, you will have to lower your prices to maintain occupancy. If people don't want to sell to you, you'll have to increase your offers to continue to grow. Both of those things decrease profitability. When they intersect, then you'll have to start selling those houses to recoup your investment.
> Even John Locke [...] > Even Adam Smith [...]
John Locke and Adam Smith are surely foundational, but they are hardly representative of our modern concept of "Capitalism".
For that matter, Thomas Paine is usually thought of as one of America's Founders; he'd likely be considered a Communist today based on the ideas he wrote about.
> It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, and happens through enforcement of some rules. The resources to enforce rules should therefore not be deployed for unlimited value of ownership by accounts, they shouldn't even be centralized (e.g. proof of work mining elects one "consensus leader", or Facebook has a huge centralized server farm) to the point that you get these pathologies: the elites at the top are out of touch with the people who are ACTUALLY using the products / services. Same with politics / states / etc. Keep it decentralized whenever you can.
This statement is really interesting to me. I'm an Anarcho-Capitalist. Obviously, based on your post here, you and I have very different ideas of what an optimal socioeconomic system would look like.
... yet I completely agree with the statements "Centralization is bad" and "Keep it decentralized". I would go so far as to say that while our policy ideas aren't compatible, our worldviews are. We could likely work together to build something that worked well and that we both hated in equal measure. :)
The way I arrive at it is like this:
1) Property requires “men with guns” to enforce. How do we as a society determine property on a larger scale than personal property? However we do it seems to centralize control in the hands of a few, to exclude others from using a resource.
2) People form organizations, and those organizations make rules (of which property laws represent just one aspect). Organizations can be small (neighborhoods, small forums like this) or large (cities, states, federations, Big Tech)
3) Governments are just the people in charge of running the organizations. Every organization is run by some rules. The question is what system leads to the best results. I don’t criticize “THE government”. I criticize large organizations like states, corporations etc.
4) Taxes are just the analogue of rent. Private landlords can force you to pay rent or get out. If the scale is larger, a city makes you pay tax. The city is the landlord. Consider that Disneyworld is owned by a corporation, while Boca Raton used to be privately owned but then sold to the residents.
5) What would you arrive at if you applied the same critiques of intellectual property — owning ideas, songs etc. — to owning water, air, and so forth … and then down the line — owning huge forests or fields. What does “ownership” of such huge things really benefit people? When the eviction moratorium expires, from a consequentialist point of view is a nation with many nearly-homeless people going to be richer?
On my side, I would really love to hear how you work out this “exercise for the reader”you mentioned — it seems way above my pay grade hehe
You can think what you want in the US but you cannot express it publicly if you have a significant following. You will get blocked, censored, ridiculed etc.
Maybe you mean something else with freedom? Freedom to carry out work and get payed for it? Sure.
Do you have any sources on this? I’m not trying to degrade your point though, just curious about the topic.
You can see this today with the anti-work movement and the overindulgence in tv shows, movies, porn, junk food, social media, and video games. All these things are corrupting the future generations of kids.
The corporations that create these have made them too accessible. Once kids start indulging at a young age, it's harder to control when they get older. Their lives will revolve around gaining short-term pleasures, and the world will lose out on the potential long-term creative value they could have contributed.
In short, I think people adapt and figure out their priorities. If someone wants a life of binging Netflix, who am I to say that’s a wasted life? (So long as that person doesn’t make me live such a life.)
honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about right. A lot of that isn't even lost productivity, it's cutting back on the general time overhead of working in an office.
I don't think that Americans are so prosperous that we've become less enterprising due to class immobility. but we do seem to be getting more efficient with our time
This is, with the most possible respect, a position of great privilege. Most people in the US are not remote workers that get to work 7 hours a day. They are expected to be physically present doing things like retail service work, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, etc.
The average HN user is in a very specific demographic that has benefited enormously from recent economic trends, a benefit that is not distributed evenly. Many (most?) people are working more then they ever did for an increasingly smaller piece of the pie.
This is not entirely accurate — as much as 69% of all full-time employees worked remotely during the pandemic: https://news.gallup.com/poll/355907/remote-work-persisting-t...
While we certainly do have professions that require in-person presence, it’s not every role in those professions and certainly many more people can enjoy the benefits of remote work. Those who cannot should be rewarded for that and added enjoy benefits/guarantees to compensate.
This is more or less the opposite of what happens to these professionals - they are often those who are paid the least and work the longest hours under hourly contracts on multiple jobs (because, if they worked more in a single job, the company would have to give those benefits).
And going to work with COVID symptoms because they can't live without payment.
That’s a very grotesque illustration of perverse incentives. Ask anyone, I doubt they’ll tell you that it’s worth having a sick person show up to work over providing sick leave/benefits and yet, here we are.
I remember reading the same back in the 1990’s. America’s growth will flatten.
That was a terribly wrong prediction.
I don’t disagree that American’s economic expansion won’t flatten at some point. But as long as the brightest and most entrepreneurial keep going to the US, the growth will continue.
I mean where else will they go in the future? China?
"In spite of the holy promise of all people to banish war, once and for all, in spite of the cry of millions 'Never a war again,' in spite of all the hopes for a better future, I have this to say: If the present monetary system, based on interest and compound interest, remains in operation, I dare to predict today, that it will take less than 25 years for us to have a new and even worse war. I can foresee the coming development clearly. The present degree of technological advancement will quickly result in a record performance of industry. The build-up of capital will be rapid in spite of the enormous losses during the war, and through its over- supply will lower the interest rate. Money will then be hoarded. Economic activities will diminish and increasing numbers of unemployed persons will roam the streets; within the discontented masses wild, revolutionary ideas will arise and also the poisonous plant called "Super-Nationalism" will proliferate. No country will understand the other, and the end can only be war again. (28)"
The only good news is that our fractional reserve system is not as rigid as a gold standard. I.e. we will get a silent depression rather than a great depression.
>Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods.
>It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will roll by their side.
(Edit typo fix)
It doesn't have to be a completely self-contained solution.
[1] Also armed forced with deployed troops would love this too as it makes food logistics much easier.
(NASA does not like the side-effects of an all-oil diet on space toilets, I suspect.)
But actually how much mass must you necessarily lose to stay alive each day? Most of it is probably water, so if we allow "four pills plus as much water" at a meal then it's harder to rule out the pill diet.
Maybe a better way to bound it: apparently we exhale around 1 kg of CO2 each day, which has 370g of carbon in it so unless we can radically reengineer our metabolism I guess you need a minimum of 370g daily to maintain carbon levels. 370g / 3 meals / 4 pills = 30g per pill. Even with the density of diamond that would be (picking a convenient rough number) 8 cm3 or 2x2x2cm.
Which is... a hard pill to swallow. Maybe not impossible though.
With 2000 kcal, three meals with four pills equals twelve lard pills, each in a squishy 2.7cm cube format, easy to swallow. ;-)
Anecdata – I'm on of these people. I live in central Stockholm, Sweden, and almost any hour of the day I'm able to either order in or go out and buy a meal. I don't even recall last time I cooked at home. Last time anyone cooked at my place was when a friend of mine who's also a chef stopped by for a visit. My kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling or space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when I do shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at home. Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make sandwiches, but that's maybe once every couple of months and it's the extent to which I shop for groceries.
But when I go to my summer home on a small island with no grocery store, I cook every single day. I think it's a combination of necessity (you have to buy groceries and anything else back on the mainland, and it's a trek) and the fact that usually I'm not alone in the summer house, my brother is usually there too so I have someone to cook for.
I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it and I don't even mind the tedious tasks like peeling potatoes or chopping onions and other things. I just never do it at home, for myself. Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? That way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it all.
It's odd, but for me it really is very location dependent. It was the same when I lived in London, I don't think I cooked at home even once during those years.
Because
> I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it
?
Also if you are even just an average/mediocre cook, you can usually cook more tasty and interesting food than what you typically find on Uber eats, unless you order from a different high end restaurant every single day.
Sure if you're growing food as well on the side so that you can sustain yourself completely, it could be a happy way of living life. But if you have to work 8 hours per day to make a living, the spare time is valuable and subject to prioritization. Some people do some of these things on the side, as a pleasant hobby, but practically no "modern person" does all of them.
This may not be worth it for some, but I've found the time savings of ordering in/carryout is marginal or actually worse than cooking and reheating leftovers. Waste and grocery trips generally sort themselves out in a couple weeks as you figure out a schedule. This obviously scales with number of people so for a family of 2-4 you'd save $16-32k/yr for little extra effort.
These sort of home economics seem to have really fallen out of favor in my sphere, even in 2+ person households where $40k+ in maintenance/service/food costs can be saved (factor in childcare/education and I image the number can get to $100k+). I don't understand why people leave so much money on the table. There aren't many ways you can make $16k/year for a <5hr/week moonlighting position.
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> That way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it all.
You have to cook larger batches and eat the leftovers. I've had bad luck with bread too tbh. I might just start making my own smaller loafs, because the quality is also just bad.
EDIT: it’s also worth pointing out that savings values are post tax
The incentive to cook yourself instead of ordering food is multi-factorial, but a significant part is financial. People who only cook "touristically" like you describe are people for whom daily food expenses are a rounding error, whether ordered or cooked by themselves. This could include single well compensated people or very wealthy families. This is further amplified by the fact that food consumes a smaller portion of household income than it has historically.
In contrast, when working and middle class families decide that they need to save more, the first place they usually economize is in their restaurant expenditures.
Or a large casserole that takes an hour to cook but gives eight portions. Quick heat-up for lunch during the week saves time too, and you stay in control of the salt intake unlike with ready meals. So cheaper, healthier, faster. Downside is that those meals are pretty basic and repetitive, but then again eating out feels a bit more special if you don't do it every day.
I do cook "real" recipes too with more steps and more flavor, but only with my partner as I don't care to do it just for myself for weekday meals.
I think there is a distinction here between people who buy meals-and-snacks as opposed to people who buy ingredients. When my partner and I shop, apart from the fruit and similar, there are very few things that you would directly eat. When my niece and her partner shop, there are numerous packets of biscuits and other snacks as well as prepared ready meals that can be microwaved / oven heated with no other effort required. They generate a lot more plastic waste, as well.
Thanks :)
This means that for about half of the year, my body does not see the sun. Glass windows will prevent vitamin D production so sitting by a window during the day will not help.
Between 70% and 97% of Canadians demonstrate vitamin D insufficiency. It's also important to highlight that people with darker skin need even more sun exposure to produce vitamin D as skin pigmentation negatively influences vitamin D synthesis.
Contrary to popular belief, vitamin D is a hormone. It impacts calcium absorption, which is the most known side effect. But it's way more than that. Many of the body's process simply cannot happen properly without vitamin D and the only way to get it naturally is from the sun.
One relevant symptoms these days is a weakening of the immune system. Many studies already show that vitamin D deficiency is one of the main factor behind the severity of covid infections.
Other symptoms are bone density loss, muscle pains, cancer risks, heart disease, nerve issues, blood pressure.
Another very important issue related to vitamin D is Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is similar (but different) to clinical depression.
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Edit:
I was wondering when Vitamin D supplements and enriched milk came around, since the current conversation in the context of this 1992 event.
There's a nice goldmine of information here: https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_vitamin_D
"1930 - Drug launch: Vitamin D prodrug dihydrotachysterol is developed as a method of stabilizing the triene structure of one of the photoisomers of vitamin D. This represents the oldest vitamin D analog."
"1952 - Product launch: Synthetic vitamin D2 and D3 compounds start being produced."
Isn't that just having servants?
Edit: it works in Firefox (Fennec), here is the content in a normal picture: https://snipboard.io/uxGWaZ.jpg
1971: https://www.blogto.com/upload/2014/03/20111020-royal-alex-f0...
2009: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Royal_Al...
We phased out most coal in the 70s with the last eliminated in the early 2000s. I do not miss the vibrant orange sunsets in summer.
If a male writer, the article is even more impressive given the clear sensitivity to, and awareness of, women's issues and the likely impact of technology and social changes on women.
That said, the author was likely a person of privilege rather than someone more representative of the population of 1922. A starving writer was unlikely to have been so focused on the challenges of hiring good household staff.
(W.L. = Walter Lionel, as revealled by a bit more searching)
But it is unlikely that women will have an achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery.
He's definitely on point 100 years later.
Ex: http://www.simonstalenhag.se/bilderbig/by_procession_1920.jp...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Allm%C3%...
- Commercial flights had started a decade earlier. There were even successful transatlantic flights.
- The women empowerment and feminism movement was in full swing. Women had just got the right to vote. A large percentage had careers and even unions.
- Wireless radio and telegraph were established in most parts of the world.
- Cinema, with sound and color, was already a thing.
In fact he missed the mark on his actual predictions – food pills, paper mache furniture, no private dwellings, glass domed cities, nationalized industries in the US, no more opportunity in the US (funny since we are on a SV entrepreneurs forum right now).
However, having just recently replaced a couch from a chain retailer, I can attest that they are pretty much made from paper mache.
Wait till you find out what that Ikea crap is made of. :)
Maybe the "paper" in the "mache" is not as finely ground and instead made of more granular wood chips, but its definitely made of a thin lamination of wood grounds held together by some adhesive.
Its light as a feather though, so that's pretty nice.
It's certainly not designed to bear my weight on 4 small spots, however, so I wouldn't even try that. It's not made of solid wood, but the furniture-equivalent of an F-22 wing.
All of my previous ikea desks are also spending their sunset years toiling away in the shop. The oldest one is 20 years old and I use it for assembling heaving parts because nothing sticks to whatever plastic coating they use on their desktops.
Also, the obligatory note that Ikea does sell solid wood furniture. It's made of softwoods, like pine or fir, but if you put it together with wood glue, it will absolutely outlive you. I have a dresser that's survived six moves where I never bothered to unload it.
It might even be this exact one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vNRY6natiY
Paper mache furniture no but disposable furniture, yeah, kind of.
Private dwellings you could maybe stretch to make some sort of comparison to rates of renting vs owning but that is a stretch.
On nationalized industries and trust busting we seem to have gone against his prediction.
Regarding "no more opportunity" I think the possibility of The Information Age was not even in the same dimension as this guy's RADAR.
But only now, but less so during the 80s
"It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded the idea that they are primarily "makers of men". Most fit women will then be following an individual career."
...
"But it is unlikely that that women will have achieved equality with men."
Alimony and child support do apply to women as well as men in the US, though it's obviously not equally distributed today. Even if we assume that's not because of a flawed system, I can think of several reasons it might be the case. For example, any or all of the following could cause that in a fair system:
* wage earners are still disproportionately men
* women tend to be much more likely to retain (and desire) custody of children
* women tend to be less likely to work outside the home
While I do believe the system is biased against men, I don't think it's nearly as bad as it may seem depending on your own view of things. There are plenty of stories out there of men who have been unfairly saddled with alimony and child support, and those stories get a lot of play. I think it's fair to say that the trope of "a woman left penniless, with no marketable skills, to care for a family after the man left to shirk his responsibilities" is a trope for a reason - because it is and always has been a common ocurrance.
You don't know what you don't know so there's nothing about computers here, but most of this article was really well done.
> I'm sure that technological advancement in 2022 will be amazing, but they will be nothing as amazing as the present day than it is over 100 years ago (i.e. 1822).
I don't know about that statement.
We have some cool stuff compared to 1922, but you could argue the shift was greater.
Airplanes existed in 1922. But nobody you knew flew on them. You didn't take them from the US to Europe on business trips; you took a ship. You didn't take them from New York to LA, either; you took a train. You sure didn't book flights online while sitting in your couch at home.
The same (in fundamentals) technology existed in 1922. But all the social change came after that.
The first transatlantic flight by Charles Lindberg was 1927, 5 years _AFTER_ this article was written.
People were trying to do a transatlantic flight in the 1920s the same way as we are trying to make hydrogen cars, applicable artificial intelligence (self-driving?), or other "nearly true" things today.
There were many notable attempts at a transatlantic flight. As such, the article is able to point out the issues (ex: the lack of oxygen in the upper atmosphere, leading to hypoxia).
An individual pilot can do a transatlantic flight with the use of a breathing apparatus, similar to a scuba diver. But large-scale flights wouldn't be possible until the invention of pressurized cabins (used as a secret-weapon during WW2: the US Superfortress Bombers would fly so high thanks to pressurized cabins, that other airplanes couldn't reach them).
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Predicting a successful transatlantic flight would be like predicting a self-driving car today. We see lots of cool tech demos and people starting to understand the issues / technology... but it clearly doesn't exist yet. Not in any way that's usable.
We're probably 5 years off from a plausible tech-demo (ex: Spirit of St. Louis like attempt), and decades away from a commercial offering.
Lindberg's flight was of 33-hours. This article is suggesting an 8-hour flight time, well into the realm of science-fiction by 1922 standards. The 400+ gallons of fuel of "The Spirit of St. Louis" was manually strained and manually purified by the team, for no commercial process existed yet to make the fuel pure enough for high reliability.
A trans-atlantic flight was "inevitable", because the march of progress over the last 10 years was so dramatic, so incredible, so inspiring, that it almost certainly was going to happen. But it absolutely was still science fiction by 1922 standards.
- Radio
- Movies
- Motorized Rail Transit
- Airplanes
- Blimps
- Recorded Audio
- Electrification (esp. lighting)
- Telephony
- Cars
- Subways
- Fax
- Early Television
- Telegraph
- Skyscapers
- Underwater tunnels
- Air Conditioning
- Elevators
- Modern Hospitals
- Machine Guns, Tanks, Dreadnoughts and other tools of modern war
- Stock Tickers
- Early computing (Tabulators, IBM, etc.)
- Modern Steel Manufacturing
I would bet that the people of the 1920s would find the world of the 2020s much more recognizable than the people of the 1820s would find the world of the 1920s.
Let's start by explaining smartphones, then Twitter and Facebook and then on how companies used them to hijack elections and destabilize democracies in multiple countries.
Or, for an amusing time, try to explain how a cryptocurrency works.
My mom, born in 1935, doesn't understand what I do beyond that I write computer programs (which isn't even that much true anymore).
Remember when we needed to go to a payphone to tell our parents we were in the mall and to ask them to pick us up? And that they had no way to phone us while we weren't home?
You can ask your phone what's the molecular mass of methane. Or ask it to identify a song that's playing in the restaurant.
They had electric telegraphs, telephone and radio, so I'd explain it as miniaturized wireless telephones and typewriters combined, additionally with capabilities of paperless networked teleprinters of a kind. Some of the stations would be libraries with expert librarians on hand to tirelessly answer your questions.
> then Twitter and Facebook
I believe this is already covered. Anyone can now own a small personal broadcast station.
> try to explain how a cryptocurrency works.
I'd use the analogy of a network of tabulating machines with accumulators controlled by inputs according to something quite like point to point teleprinters instead of by punch cards. Records with a copy on each machine, would store on a very flexible type of automatically configurable control panel board with a special arrangement of relay circuits capable of acting as a memory, rather than in boxes of cards. Such a machine could track some quantity, addable and subtractable like a currency. I would then bring up the difficulty of protecting against liars and double spending. One solution might be to connect each machine to automatic slot machines and have them play till there was a winner who then got to broadcast an append to the record with the longest history in their collection of records. I'd also note that the more slot machines there were, the more slots were magically added to each. The idea being to make it costly for any one view to dominate the network.
Far from perfect but the gist could be communicated to anyone with a bit of imagination. Modern technologies have had a large impact on life but can be connected to 1920s tech. This is unlike the gap from the 1820s to 1920s that saw electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, radio broadcasting, telephone, electricity and electric engineering, atomic physics, flight, automobiles and more.
Both Ponzi and tulip mania pre-date 1922. So, not that hard.
Also, fiat currency, cryptography, wire transfers, and banking all existed before 1922.
Information still traveled at human recognizable size in 1922, largely the same in 1822 (just got a bit faster over telegraph). Whereas today the first website you visit probably contained more information (bloat) sent to your phone than a person in 1922 would have came across in an entire year.
In other word, the largest transformation is not on the front end, but that doesn't make it less significant. Everyone can make a Google landing page - but it's the stuff behind it that makes it Google.
We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.
The reality is that we do not know. Some things may be out of our reach forever, but contemporary world has by far the highest count of scientists ever and the talent pool is widening as countries such as Bangladesh escape their previous crushing poverty. To this comes politics. A second Cold War with China may be terrifying and yet enormously scientifically productive, much like WWII and the previous Cold War was.
I am personally not willing to make any technical/scientific predictions beyond 2030. Political even less so.
> The reality is that we do not know
Yeah, but it works both ways, I see a lot of people on reddit claiming aging will be solved in X years (usually in their lifetime) and it does not sound any smarter.
We aren't anywhere close to, say, solving cancer, but we are conquering new territory inch by inch, with a massive difference of outcomes in last 50 years or so.
I suspect the same is going to happen in the longevity field. Dr. Gregory Fahy managed to rejuvenate the thymus in several individuals (TRIIM and TRIIM-X trials) and lower their epigenetic age. It might have well been the first baby step on that journey.
I routinely saw similarly outlandish claims about AI in general.
Will you have AR displays that hide the information an make a room otherwise appear devoid of technology? Yes...because normal people don't fetishize technology and HGTV tells me it should be hidden from sight.
Will it be a display projected on your contact lenses, a mist excreted from a rod with lasers shined upon it, or a projector with a funky short throw lens? Man, I've got no clue...but all the fiction I've seen with fantastic display technology shows: We'll will it into existence.
Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.
It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear chunky black leather.
Compare with something like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is far more adventurous about possible futures.
The background problem is that the 20th century was set up for an explosion of invention by the late 19th, with Maxwell/Heaviside leading the charge and eventually leading to game changer developments like relativity and quantum theory. In math Boolean algebra fell out almost by accident from attempts to find a theory of computability which eventually led to modern computing.
These were all bedrock insights which completely changed what was possible in the physical world.
Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory.
Quantum Gravity might be the next game changer, but it also might not, and in any case it's an unknown distance away. The rest is detail work, not ground breaking transformation.
I think Machine Learning today is equivalent in magnitude to the other scientific breakthroughs you mentioned. I don't know if you're overlooking it because it's mainly engineering-led.
"Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?" - Mark Sullivan, April 9, 1953
We are analog.
It's also telling that older SciFi gets this all wrong. In Asimov's Lucky Starr the protagonist had a space ship that can travel through the outer layers of the sun and someone had a dwelling on an hollowed out asteroid. Tables use energy fields for easier cleaning. Yet, the ships board computer doesn't even have a display and needs to print everything.
I'm not actually very confident about that last part...
Yes. It was called a communicator in fiction of the day. Did they get the exact details right, or every use case (e.g. replacing flashlights and music players)? No. Some of them used holograms from watches or big old handsets with a screen instead of a keypad but still big ear cups. But a portable device that could be used for voice calls, video calls, information lookup, note taking, certainly existed in fiction prior to the 90s.
https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio
and the video in 1964:
https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_TV
More or less both are (fictional) "miniaturization" of existing, known technologies.
I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical features of spaceflight correctly.
https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/histor...
Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the smartphone around that timeline.
If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty remarkably prescient predictions.
Yes
It's getting increasingly difficult. The world of 1600 would be easily understandable to someone from 1500 or 1400. When I was born, no human eyes had seen the far side of the Moon (although it was reasonably sure someone would, shortly, as happened in december that year) and the closest thing to a cellphone was a prop being used by Captain Kirk on the 23rd century.
> the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate
There are physical limits to that, so the exponential factor may be reduced for a while. There is also a limit on how fast we can develop new things that will give us a hard time (at least until we develop a general enough AI, at which point all bets are off - because we are literally not smart enough to predict what happens next).
BTW, a couple years ago I had an accident that, if it happened in 1900, I'd lose my leg.
So, yeah, 2022 is good for me, but I wouldn't turn down a chance to last until 2122.
I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the present though, it's better than any time in history save for possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a certainty.
- "white countries"
- "radial energy"
- "the servant problem"
- no smoke in the house, "perhaps not even tobacco"
- "the child is likely to be taken over by the State"
- His vision of a house filled with frequently replaced disposable surfaces
- "king of Jugo-Slavia" [will still reign]
- "the American race [will become homogenous]"
- "there will be no more opportunity [in America]" but that's a good thing
I'd be interested what daycare and school looked like in 1922, because arguably childcare is mostly state run at this point
* the high school graduation rate was around 16%. (Up from below 10% in 1910!)
* only 8 million women were in the labor force
* Child labor laws either actually or functionally did not exist (the major federal laws were not passed in the 30s.)
* The industrial revolution was in full swing, but huge swaths of the labor economy were still very agrarian.
For the working class, early childhood care was provided by mothers and beyond that daycare/schooling was provided by the factories and farm fields.
For a prediction made 100 years out, I'd call it dead accurate.
In first world countries, may be. Now more of them are true for more and more people all around the globe too.
The Economist, December 4, 2003”
― William Gibson
Bertrand Russell also famously predicted this. I believe I’ve read that in the 1800’s people were predicting industrialization would do away with labor. People are still predicting this today, with the advent of Machine Learning that’s good enough to automate things like driving.
Will this prediction ever come true, or is there some kind of human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter what we invent?
Seems abundantly clear to me that there indeed is something in our nature that keeps us grinding. I do hope that we at least continue to increase the freedom to choose what and when we grind
We desire the best mate possible. No industrial or computer advance has (yet) provided any of us with better mates. Mates are as scarce as they were hundreds and thousands of years ago.
Mates choose each other according to relative status. By definition, there is no way we can increase everyone's relative status.
So the reason people grind as hard as they used to is that they're facing the same incentives and barriers: For the mate you want, you have to grind your way up the status hierarchy (or at least enough to avoid falling). Competition is just as stiff as it was in 1950 or 1850, or 1000 BC.
Things will only truly change in this respect when we invent artificial ways to satisfy peoples' desire for mates. However, this won't happen soon. Sexbots are only a small part of it; a mate is much more.
Now this creates a bit of a crisis since the automated production produces things that need to be bought by the workers they displace, who now no longer have any money. The outcome as I see it is an extension of credit systems and the propagation of tedious nonsense jobs (ala Graeber's Bullshit Jobs).
In order to bring about the ideal of automation creating more free time for all without diminishing their income you'd have to transfer ownership of the automating forces to the workers they're replacing. But then I'm just a Marxist looney so what do I know.
I once read a commenter here on HN claim that any increase in productivity is inevitably 'eaten up' by an increase in debt/credit and that this is why we don't see a corresponding decrease in time spent working. I think that is very insightful.
On the other hand, it’s typically employers that generally control hours and pay, and employers that both seek and use most of the profits from productivity; employees often only get the scraps. If employers are the major force for asking people to work hard, and offering jobs and pay, how does that fit into the idea of debt eating the productivity gains? Are we talking about corporate debt here?
Increased productivity -> increased income -> increased discretionary income -> increased ability to service debt -> larger mortgages -> higher property prices -> less discretionary income (which could otherwise have been used to 'buy' free time).
It's true that some of this borrowing will lead to new wealth in the form of new houses and associated infrastructure, but I suspect that a large amount - if not most - of the borrowed money is spent on driving up the prices of existing assets, in which case the winners are the lenders who have successfully captured the increase in productivity.
It's really interesting to read this, genuinely prescient, starkly logical analysis that seems quite liberal and self-aware while also deeply soaked in un-acknowledged bias.
The time this was written was around the peak of the suffrage movement a couple years after the 19th amendment. That, perhaps, contributes to the placating tone in the author's description of how little progress the movement will have made by 2022.
I think especially noteworthy is the apparent blind spot towards the speed of information. He spends a lot of space articulating the physical characteristics of a City of Tomorrow but no consideration of what it might mean to quickly and easily read anything that has ever been published.
Really interesting article.
EDIT: Another note regarding his whole segment on work, production and leisure: he seems to only conceive of work as labor. Where, for example, an additional hour spent shoveling coal means another hour's worth of shoveled coal while forgetting to consider the possibility of "critical thinking" production where an additional hour spent working does not necessarily mean an additional hour spent being productive. A good prediction here would have touched on what careers in more "creative" production might look like.
I wonder if Einstein, Dirac, et al. would have thought in the early 1930s that the measurement problem would remain unresolved and that there would still not be a consistent theory for QM and GR almost a century later.
I'm currently doing software engineering but when I retire I'll dedicate all my free time for this. If at least 1% of the population follow this route someone will come up with a solution eventually.
Imaging exploring the near galaxies with a probe that is capable of displaying real time video of whatever is out there :)
Does anyone know of a proper prediction of the internet? And I don't mean predicting handheld devices or wireless networking. Predicting the decentralized communication part that makes distance irellevant and upgrades point to point communication to group.
And its consequence that it's very easy now to find a group that shares your biases :)
Edit. Oh oops. Read the summary for Gutenberg Galaxy on wikipedia. Turns out i MUST reread.
That revolution was more about the speed that information travels than who has access to it.
[0]https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/01/14/online-shopping-in...
Nor the computer, personal or otherwise; nor robotics. It's funny to see how he could predict, sometimes with surprising accuracy, the trajectory of development of technologies that were already in place, but could not fathom what had not yet been discovered and thus had not yet entered the public discourse.
1975 though, so quite recent.
I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922? Space travel and obviously the internet & computers come to mind. Antibiotics, DNA? Anything else?
VR still blows the minds of everyone I show it to. I can't imagine what kind of reaction someone from 1922 would give.
Space travel was also present in many fiction works, the best known being several novels of Jules Verne and of H. G. Wells.
Antibiotics were a huge progress, but the concept would not have been a surprise for anyone, because searching for substances that one would ingest to kill the parasites causing various diseases was already a well understood method in medicine, e.g. like using quinine against the protozoan that causes malaria or organo-arsenic compounds against the bacteria that cause syphilis.
Even if already in antiquity some have supposed that many diseases are caused by very small invisible parasites, only during the 19th century the causes for most common infectious diseases have been identified. So also in this domain the differences between 1922 and 1822 are much larger than between 1922 and 2022.
By 1922, genetics was much better understood than in 1822 even if it was not known yet that it is based on information encoded in the molecules of nucleic acids.
I cannot find any domain of science and technology where the difference between 1922 and 1822 is not much larger than between 2022 and 1922.
On the other hand, in 1922 there was still a very large part of the human population whose life had not been affected yet by the progresses of the 19th century, e.g. who had never used a telephone, an automobile or a train, much less an airplane or a computing machine or a washing machine.
The main difference between 1922 and 2022 is that all the technologies that in 1922 existed only in extremely expensive devices or in experimental devices now exist in cheap devices that are used by most people and such devices have sizes and energy consumptions that are many orders of magnitude less than what could have been done with the technologies from 100 years ago.
The main progress during the last 100 years has been in practical engineering, with much less progress in basic science.
> The main progress during the last 100 years has been in practical engineering, with much less progress in basic science.
I actually think the situation is entirely reversed.
The progress from 1822 to 1922 was largely engineering. The industrial revolution cause a violent and visceral change in the way that people experienced everyday life.
Take genetics. In 1922 we didn't know that DNA existed. Or, we kind of has a vague sense. Since then, we: discovered the structure of DNA, sequenced the first human genome, and now for less than a month's wages & a vial of spit you can get a whole genome fastq. And that's just genetic sequencing. We have also learned a mind-boggling amount about how DNA interacts with other biological processes. And that's just genetics. Proteins. Neuroscience. The vascular system. The list goes on and on. Just in life sciences.
And the (bio)engineering implications of that vast amount of scientific discovery are immense. More impactful but not as visceral as a railroad or an airplane.
Scientifically, the progress from 1922 to 2022 is incredible compared to the progress from 1822 to 1922, but the engineering progress of 1822 to 1922 was much more visceral. Not even more significant in terms of lived experience. Just more visceral.
She can sell those candles on Etsy instead of standing around a train station all day. She will not, however, understand the enormous amount of change that took place in order to make that possible. It will give her a practical understanding of what those changes brought about, though.
1. One of the banks of vending machines found in the train station where she used to work.
2. A high school classroom, as the alternative to her life of child labor.
You might also show her Spotify, Netflix, and take her on a two week flight around the world. But I feel that a machine which does her old job and a bookish life for working class youth would be the most likely to blow her mind.
The article also highlights some shortcomings of the 1922 zeitgeist as there does not seem to be much thought about the positive or negative environmental impacts of technology, other than on air quality, or any talk on climate change.
Resource exhaustion of oil he got more right than club of Rome even in 1972.
Similarly, the environmental impact of coal, when it was the dominant method of heating a home, was not in some decades-off global warming, it was in things like the London Fog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog), a pretty horrific environmental situation. Moving to non-coal methods of heating the home (which he mentions) is a big environmental improvement.
Haha, so wrong. All I see is power lines everywhere, and I can't unsee them. SO ugly.
My read on this has always been that the US has above-ground cables mostly because it wasn't bombed to hell at any point after the discovery that it's nice to bury power cables.
Honestly the aesthetic aspect alone should be enough. We care about the aesthetics of everything else around us and a lot of it is also fairly well regulated. Wires are absolutely hideous and it's perfectly feasible to bury them in most cases
I was surprised on my recent road trip across US that you've got wires in urban/suburban neighborhoods - even the richer ones like Palo Alto.
So my question would be: Is this a case of selection bias (survival bias)?
Did we cherry picked one accurate prediction (at the right time) out of many different predictions made about the future?
Overall, yeah, there were tons. That doesn't detract from how accurate this particular piece was.
If there was two dozen “What life will be like in 100 years” articles published per year in decently sized newspapers we will have 240 such articles to choose from this decade. Surely we would only see the most accurate of these predictions, and that is survival bias.
Of course, maybe there was not a large variance between predictions, or everyone is accurate to a similar level of degree. In that case some other method of selecting which old predictions we read will be at play, perhaps based on which publications were better archived or random chance.
I think this author should be given credit for the accuracy. He can't control what everyone else is writing and how accurate or inaccurate they were. He can only control his own predictions, and they were very good.
"The problem is mainly one of artificial heating and ventilation to enable the aeronauts to survive."
And indeed, ventilation is the primary concern among air passengers in 2022.
A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW Mary A. Ford
O mighty human brotherhood! why fiercely war and strive,
While God's great world has ample space for everything alive?
Broad fields uncultured and unclaimed, are waiting for the plow
Of progress that shall make them bloom, a hundred years from now.
Why should we try so earnestly in life's short, narrow span,
On golden stairs to climb so high above our brother man?
Why blindly at an earthly shrine in slavish homage bow?
Our gold will rust, ourselves be dust, a hundred years from now.
Why prize so much the world's applause? Why dread so much its blame?
A fleeting echo is its voice of censure or of fame;
The praise that thrills the heart, the scorn that dyes with shame the brow,
Will be a long-forgotten dream, a hundred years from now.
O patient hearts, that meekly bear your weary load of wrong!
O earnest hearts, that bravely dare, and, striving, grow more strong!
Press on till perfect peace is won; you'll never dream of how
You struggled o'er life's thorny road, a hundred years from now.
Grand, lofty souls, who live and toil that freedom, right, and truth
Alone may rule the universe, for you is endless youth!
When 'mid the blest with God you rest, the grateful land shall bow
Above your clay in reverent love, a hundred years from now.
Source: https://www.locserendipity.com/full/platformpiece00hawn_djvu... (written in 1922)
Doordash. Uber. Grubhub. TaskRabbit. All require an underclass. Is this progress?
(https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...)
"Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.
This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing—those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.
But here’s the interesting thing—if he then went back to 1750 and got jealous that we got to see his reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, he’d take the time machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500, bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked by a lot of things—but he wouldn’t die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him, because while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different than 1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shit about space and physics, he’d be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism fad, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1750—transportation, communication, etc.—definitely wouldn’t make him die."
But that such incremental advancement is more representative of progress than disruptive changes. I feel the short term disruptive development post WWII has clouded our perception of long term technical progress due to recency bias. I suppose that is why most of the Sci-fi predictions post 1960 feels wildly inaccurate about the current decade than predictions from 100 years ago.
Total, and even max quality? Not so clear.
In number of articles/ books that are above a given quality bar? I wouldn't bet on 1922.
Funny how among reasonable predictions this one is almost completely wrong, only 3/9 guessed right.
The name 'spanish flu' itself also stems from the fact that most countries involved in the war didn't want to talk too much about the Flu, while Spain retained neutrality and didn't have incentives to keep it in the dark - this could also be a reason that people were putting the aftermath of the pandemic in the same bucket as the outcome of the Great War imo.
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic
https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=...
Totally not beer!
I then came to horrifying realisation that 1977 (when Judge Dredd first appeared) is only 55 years after the article, and now 45 years behind us(!!!). More or less halfway. Totally reasonable for them to have read this article, and still been far enough away from now to assume that this will still happen. This could easily have been the inspiration for Blocks.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/world/gallery/science-fiction...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreams_Our_Stuff_Is_Made...
Not that outlandish. My shower glass is covered in high tech hydrophobic substance which keeps it clean, but I have to replace it every couple of years. My kid's high chair is covered in easily washable rubber surface that I can literally peel off after a meal, rinse, and replace.
So overall, practical idea that is partially applied.
https://y2kaestheticinstitute.tumblr.com/post/143836250779/v...
Not to mention "a great liberalism of mind and the freedom to say anything"....
Nailed it.
Consider how difficult it would be to predict how the world will look in 2122. I don’t think I’d be this close to the mark.
Well... About that...
https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=...
https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=...
The relationship between a man and a maid is a core characteristic of a society.
The complexity of changing such relationships is attested to by TFA, and yet, in many places, over a hundred years, we see (hard fought) change.
A hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, the downfalls of Dominic Strauss-Kahn, Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvey Weinstein were inconceivable.
So was #MeToo.
But there’s as much tech in the hash tag as there is in the x-ray, or more if you just count the investment dollars.
Technology and social relations define and redefine each other in long epicycles.
Hah, he basically predicted Ikea!
Who has written something similar about the next 100 years?
Preferably with as much positivity and wisdom as this gentleman had.
Thinking about today, where the topic of the day is distributed trustless computing and so on, it's easy to imagine now the cat's out of the bag that in 100 years, old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete, knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention). It could be so pervasive it wouldn't garner a second's thought in the mind of a 2122 individual. Information is just there, always, forever, and always cross-checked for correctness. Duh. (not saying this is even an ideal future, or likely, but it's a trend that's easily extrapolated)
But if that did come to pass, how does that change the fabric of society in 2122? Does the relationship between society and the products it demands and produces change significantly? Does the status-quo stay more or less the same between the workers and the organisers? Do we find a way to deal with cultural differences globally or adopt the "metaverse" and slowly fragment into virtual islands of relative ideological same-ness? These are much harder things to predict, just how in 1922 the idea of not having servants at home to do the bidding of the family matriarch seemed so far-fetched that even an imagined hundred years of progress couldn't fully erase the notion; what concepts do we see as being so firmly entrenched in our culture(s) today that no upheaval of technology could convince us they'd also be on the way out, if not obsolete, in 100 years.
I love seeing these old predictions as much for what they got right as for what they missed. I showed my 12 year old daughter this article and we had a light-hearted conversation about it but she said something that struck me; "society probably won't even be here in 100 years" - I hope that isn't true, it's not something I've directly taught her to believe, but we're surrounded on all fronts by media filled with dire predictions of humanity's collapse and self-destruction on a daily basis, so I'm going to have to work to instil some hope. I am heartened slightly as historically it seems we're really bad at predicting how society as a whole will change long-term, so I do hope we're wrong on the old boiled frogs / status-quo inertia analogies, and that our species makes some giant leaps in terms of collective environmental and social responsibility in the next 100 years.
Nothing really profound I know just a dad pondering his kids futures, fingers crossed we figure some things out.
No one in my circles talks about those things. Even the vast majority of crypto investors don't give a shit about "distributed" or "trustless" or "computing".
The topics of the day are:
1. climate change
2. automation (especially logistics and war)
3. the tension between nationalism and globalization (both with respect to communication, commodity extraction, manufacturing, knowledge production, ...).
Flip the ordering of 1 and 3 if you'd like.
> old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete
I can't think of a single less exciting thing to say about the future.
The average person uses a notary perhaps a few times in their life.
The average bank provides the average person with a nearly flawless UX. Anything that replaces a bank will look like a digital bank account and behave like a digital bank account and probably also be regulated like a digital bank account. For almost all people, this is literally equivalent to staying "by 2122 the IBM COBOL mainframes powering banks will have been replaced with Java running on commodity hardware". Even if it's true... who cares?
> knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention).
It's not 1999 anymore; we know how the WWW turned out.
Though culturally he was eerily correct re: State-as-family.
That's not particularly surprising as it was one of the key philosophies of the age: the Russian revolution was only a few years old (and didn't spring from nowhere) while some of the competing philosophies, like anarchism and bimetallism, had burned out.
'p========r^ SECTION SEVEN CL By W. L. George THERE is a good old rule which bids us never prophesy unless we know, but, all the same, when one cannot prophesy one may guess, especially if one is sure of being out of the way when the reckoning comes. Therefore it is without anxiety, that I suggest a picture of this world a hundred years hence, and venture as my first guess thrt the world at that time would be remarkable to one of our ghosts, not so much because it was so different as because it was so similar. In the main the changes which we may expect must be brought about by science. It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same. From which the reader may conclude that I do not expect anything startling in the way of scientific discoverv. That is not the case; I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms. The-little girl at Grand Central is a blase child; to her these things are commonplace; the year 2022 would have to produce something very startling to interest her ghost. The sad thing about discovery is that it works toward its own extinction, and that the more- we discover the less there is left. % w It does not follow that, scientifically, the year 2022 should fail to be amazing. I suspect that commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace. The passenger steamer will survive on the coasts. but it will have disappeared on the main routes, and will have been replaced by flying convoys, which should cover the distance between London and New York in about twelve hours. As I am anxious that the reader should not look upon me as a visionary, I would point out that in an airplane collision which happened recently a British passenger plane was traveling at 180 miles an hour, which speed would have brought it across the Atlantic in eighteen hours. It is therefore quite conceivable that America may become separated from Europe by only eight hours. The problem is mainly one of artificial heating and ventilation to enable the aeronauts to survive. The same cause will affect the railroads, which at that time will probably have ceased to carry passengers except for suburban traffic. Railroads may continue to handle freight, but it may be that even this will be taken from them by road traffic, because the automobile does not have to carry the enormous overhead charges of tracks. Certainly food, mails and all light goods will be taken over from the railroads by road trucks. As for the horse, it will probably no longer be bred In white countries. The people of the year 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky: it Is practically certain that wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system long before the century is done. Possibly, too, power may travel through the air when means are found to prevent enormous voltages being suddenly discharged in the wrong place. Coal will not be exhausted, but our reserves will be seriously depleted, and so will those of oil. One of the world dangers a century hence will be a shortage of fuel, but It is likely that by that time a ureal ueai 01 power win ue ooiHineo irom tides, from the sun, probably from radium and other forms of radial energy, while It may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed. If It is true that matter Is kept together by forces known as electrons. It Is possible that we shall know how to dls< ?perse matter so as to release the electron as a force. This force would last as long as matter, thefofore as long as the earth itself. I The movies will be more attractive, as long before 2022 they will have been re* i THE I P ma
V ' placed by the kinephone, which now exists only in the laboratory. That is the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and spaak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only not need to know how to smile but also how to talk. Hna mttrVif AvianH i ? A ? fi ? i i ?1 vr nn tKa V/UO "HftUt V<AtVUU 1UUC nunc 1J uu tuo number of inventions which ought to exist and will exist, but the reader can think of them for himself, and it is more interesting to ask ourselves what will be the appearance of our cities a hundred years hence. To my mind they will offer a mixed outlook, because mankind never tears anything down completely to build up something else; it erects the new while retaining the old; thus, many buildings now standing will be preserved. It is conceivable that the Capitol at Washington, many of the universities and churches will be standing a hundred yearB hence, and that they will, almost unaltered, be preserved by tradition. Also, many private dwellings will survive and will be inhabited by Individual families. I think that they will have passed through the cooperative stage, which may be expected fifty or sixty years nence, wnen ine servant pruoiem nas oecome completely unmanageable and when private dwellings organize themselves to engage staffs to cook, clean, and mend for the groups. That cooperative stage will be the last kick of the private mistress who wants to retain in her household some sort of slave. In 2022 she will have been bent by circumstances, but sh'e will have recovered her private dwelling, being served for seven hours a day by an orderly. The woman who becomes an orderly will be as well paid as If she were a stenographer, will wear her own clothes, be called "Miss," belong to her trade union and work under union rulea. Naturally the work of the household, which is being reduced day by day, will in 2022 be a great deal lighter. I believe that most of the cleaning required to-day in a house will have been done away with. In the first place, through the disappearance of coal in all places where electricity is not made there will be no more smoke, perhaps not even that of tobacco. In the second place I have a vision of walls, furniture and hangings made of more or less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or taping along the edges. Thus, instead of \ VEW YO GAZINE NEW YORK, SUNDAY, Witt^L bB
scrubbing Its floors, t^e year 2022 will unscrew the brass edges or unstitch the tapes and peel off the dirty surface of the floor or curtains. Then I every year a new floor board will be J laid. One may hope that standard B chairs, tables, carpets, will be peeled in the same way. SB Similar reforms apply to cooking, a ^B great deal of which will survive ^B among old fashioned people, but a SB great deal more of which will prob- ^B ably be avoided by the use of syn- ^fl thetic foods. It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a H complete meal may be taken in the m shape of four pills. This is not en- ^ tirely visionary; I am convinced that corned ^eef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will ?roll by their side. But at that time few private dwellings will be built: in their stenH will rise the community dwellings, where the majority of mankind will be living. They will probably be located in garden Bpaces and rise to forty or fifty floors, housing easily four or five thousand families. This is not exaggerated, since in one New York hotel to-day three thousand people sleep i every night. It would mean also that each ( block would have a local authority of its < own. I imagine these dwellings as afford- 1 ing one room to each adult of the family | and one room for common use. Such cook- l ing as then exists will be conducted by the < local authority of the block, which will also i undertake laundry, mending, cleaning and will provide a complete nursery for the i children of the tenants. i Perhaps at that time we shall have at- j tained a dream which I often nurse, name- 1 ly, the city roofed with glass. That city < would be a complete unit, with accommoda- | Hons for houses, offices, factories and open j spaces, all this carefully allocated. The | root would completely do away with < weather and would maintain an even tern- ; perature to be fixed by the taste of the ( period. Artificial ventilation would sup- ] press wind. As for the open spaces, if the temperature were warm they would ex- l hibit a continual show of flowers, which < would be emancipated from wlifter and i summer; In other words, winter would not t come however long the descendants of Mr. l Hutchinson might wait. t The family would still exist, even though ] it is not doing very well to-day. It Is in- , conceivable that some sort of feeling be* r RK HE] SECTl MAY 7, 1922. nT/*A T<^ jo 1
,cF ' w^f^i JBPpl|p^^jMi W. L. GEORGE, the distinguished British autt tween parents and children should not persist, though I am of course unable to tell what that feeling will be. I Imagine that the link will be thinner than it Is to-day, because the child is likely to be taken over by the State, not only schooled but fed and ?lad, and at the end of Its training placed In a post suitable to Its abilities. This may be affected by birth control, which In 2022 will be legal all over the world. There will be stages: the first results of birth control will be to reduce the birth rate; then the State will step in. as it loes in France, and make it worth peo pie's while to have more children; then the State will discover that it has made things too easy and that people are having children recklessly; finally some sort of balince will establish Itself between the State lemand for children and the national supply. Largely the condition of the family will le governed by the position of woman, be -ause woman is the family, while man is nerely Its supporter. It is practically cer ;ain that In 2022 nearly all women will lave discarded the idea that they are prlnarily "makers of men." Most fit women *111 then he following an individual career. Ml positions will he open to them and a ;reat many women will have risen high, rhe year 2022 will probably see a large RALD I [ n J11Z 38 th 8U
y number of women in Con^ - a press, a great many on the judicial bench, many m . in civil service posts and is perhaps some in the mi President's Cabinet. But it is unlikely that ^ women will have an ^ achieved equality with T1 i.|" men. Cautious feminists At EsS Bk such as myself realize ^f | that things go slowly and ^ that a brief hundred tf,i r years win noi wipe out im the effects on women of m< 30,000 years of slavery. rr1 ar Women will work, partly m( heeausc they want to and partly because they will so be able to. Thus women w' tin will pay their share in the upkeep of home and t)o family. The above sug- bu gestion of community no buildings, where all the household work will be u' ca; done by professionals, will liberate the average trj wife and enable her out of her wages to pay her ^ share of the household work which she dis- nr1 likes. an Marriage will still exist much as it is Ati to-day, for mankind has an Inveterate taste faf for the institution, but divorce will prob- nn ag ably be as easy everywhere as it Is in Nevada. In view, however, of the lm- Hti proved position of woman and her earning Th power, she will not only cease to be entitled to alimony, but she will be expected, ^ after the divorce, to pay her share of the thl maintenance of her children. or As regards the politics of 2022, I should lsr expect the form of the State to be much / th< the same. A few rearrangements may a8 have taken pla^e on the lines of self-de- or termination; for ?Instance, Austria may Bu have united with Germany, the South pu American republics may have federated, pil Ac., but I do not believe that there will be 1 i a superstate. There will still be republics an and monarchies; possibly, In 2022, the It Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian tin kings may have fallen, but for a variety of tal reasons, either lack of advancement or oci inni titu riiim nii'iup, we may export silll vir to And kings in Sweden, .lugo-Slavia, gw Greece, Rumania and Great Britain. on On the inside, these States may have kli slightly changed, for th9ro prevails a ten- an dency to socialization which has nothing to do with socialism. Most of the Euro- tht pean governments are unconsciously na- dif tionalizing a number of industries, and a l TWELVE PAGES
t i ti wJ Is will go on. One may therefore preme that in 2022 most States will have tionalized railways, telegraphs, teleones, canals, docks, water supply, gas \ ' any) and electricity. Other industries 11 exist much as they do to-day, but it likely that the State will be inclined to ntrol them, to limit their profits, and to bitrate between them and the workers, e find a hint of this in America in the ti-trust acts; a hundred years hence e tendency will be much stronger. It is >rth noting as an international factor at b/that time purely national Industries 11 almost have disappeared, and that the >rk of the world will be in the hands of ntrolled combines governing the supply a commodity from China to Peru. Unfortunately these international relains through trade are not likely to have ected political conditions. There will ill be war. The wars of that period may a little less frequent than they are toy, and be limited by arrangements such the Pacific agreement, the agreement tween Canada and the United States of rierica to leave their frontier unfortified, ., but it will still be there. I suspect at those wars to come will be made horle beyond my conception by new poison ses, inextinguishable flames and light>of smoke clouds. In those wars the airane bomb will seem as out of date as is clay tne hatchet. War may ultimately sappear, but this lies beyond the limits this article and even beyond those of f mind. \s regards the United States in particu, it is likely that the country will have me to a complete settlement, with a popition of about 240,000,000. The idea of rth and South, East and West, will have noet disappeared; by that time the Amerin race will have taken so definite a form it immigration will not affect it. The nfirican from Key West and the Amerin from Seattle will be much the same nd of mic. That is to say as regards race, but I feel at mentally the American of 2022 will ve enormously changed. He is to-day e most enterprising creature in the orld, and is driven by a continual urge to se, to make money. That is because the odern American lives in a country that only partly developed, and where imense wealth still lies ready for him to ke. In 2022 that will be as finished as s to-day in England. American wealth 11 then he eithe.- developed or known, d all of it will belong to somebody, lere will he no more opportunity in nerica than there is in England to-day. lose Americans will know that it is actically certain that they will die much the same position as the one in which ey were born. Those Americans will erefore be less enterprising and much ire pleasure loving. They will have belled against long hours: the chances e that in 2022 few people will work >re than seven hours a day, if as much. The effect of this, which I am sure unds regrettable to many of my readers 11. in my opinion, be good. It was essen1 that the American race should be cable of intense labor and intense ambin if it was to develop its vast country, t one result has been haste, overwork, ise, all of which is bad for the nerves. 2022 America will have made her forae and will he enjoying it as well as she n. I think that she will be a happier counr than she is to-day. The appeal of alth will be less because wealth II be difficult to attain, so those aericans to come will be producing in t and literature infinitely more than they e producing to-day. To-day, in fiction, ? aerlca leads the world by sincerity, tli and fearlessness, hut the American vel of significance is a novel of revolt alnst the thralls of money, of convenn anrl of puritanism. In 2022 Ameriran srature will be a literature of culture, e battle will he over and the muzzle There will be no more things one n't say, and things one can't think No ubt there will be In 2022 people who nk as they would have thought in 1022, even a little earlier, but a great liberaln of mind will prevail, rt is not my business to corgrat ilat" > future, and I have no desire to do so. It Is impossible to say a thing Is good bad; all one can say is that it exists, it in case some of my readers feel relsion when they contemplate my lunch Is or my nationalized railroads, to those vould say that they are perhaps unduly xious. The world takes care of Itself; has been doing so for hundreds of cen ries nnri is still spinning; tne worm win te care of Itsplf In 2022: that Is Its chlpf r-upatlon. Morp than that. I fppl conlcpd that though thp world may Iosp icps, It will dpvolop othpr grarps, that the wholp. and as timp goes on. man id grows more intelligent, more amiable d more honpst. rhp fnturp will bp difficult: what dops it mattpr? So was thp past difficult: flcultlps did not prevent Its turning into tolerable preser^.
It reads like a high-school assignment in which "100 years from now" is entirely used as a narrative device and the author with his literary skill set kind of seemed bored with it and wants to just get over with.
He basically mirrows the sentiment of his time by extrapolating - with hardly any spin of his own - the low hanging fruits: new rays, wireless technology, movies with sound & color, ease of housework (compressed papier mache: Ikea?), community dwellings, "servant problem", everything you need in a pill, city roofed with glass (his own spin?) ...
His view that 1822 (Jefferson) is more dissimilar to 1922 than 2022 will be to 1922 (for a little girl) is weirdly off. He does not go into detail as to why and in which fundamental ways.
"The more we discover the less is left" seems even more absurd and goes contrary to the open-endedness of the scientific inquiry (which he praised beforehand): "the more we discover the more questions arise".
Finally when turning to political issues his narrating device serves only to illuminate his own (political/societal) views: emanicaption of women (from 20.000 years of slavery), tendency for socializations (not socialism!), (unconscious) nationalizing of important industries, "Anti-Trust Acts" in which the State limits profits and arbitrages between industries and workers, international trade in the hands of "controlled combines" (globalization) as a pacifying force, political conditions (nations) as a driver for war. Well, as a witness to WWI, WWII surely had to be "horrible beyond my conception".
The potential of America to immense wealth ("most enterprising creature") away from a euro-centric (and partly his feminist views) are imho his most refreshing views.
As a necessary flattery for the reader he goes on to predict an american flowering in literature and arts ("infinitely more than they are producing today" sounds more like an insult by an Englishman ;)).
And by ending with "there will be no more things one can't say and things one can't think" and "a great liberalism of mind will prevail" I can only reply 100 years later with Goethe's 200 years old Wahlverwandschaften[1] and one prominent slogan of Occupy Wall Street: "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
("Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein")
[0]http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS19260408.2.125...
[1]http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Goethe,+Johann+Wolfgang/Roma...
I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be
amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the
present day in relation to a hundred years ago.
A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson
much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise
the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station.
Have in mind that he's referring to the 100 yr period that brought us cars, airplanes, railroads, telephones, light bulbs, electricity, electromagnetism, relativity, evolution, etc.
The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but from a visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 is more alike 1922 than 1922 was alike 1822.
Lolwat? Handheld devices that have the power to process millions of calculations a sec, to record Ultra HD videos, to establish a video conference instantaniously with anyone in the whole world.
Thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly. Space missions that are already flying past the limits of our galaxy.
Bio-mechanical organs, giving the crippled back the ability to walk, the blind the ability to see, the deaf to hear.
Welp, I do think that technological progress has been growing at a logarithmic rate, and it's probably keep growing at that pace...
I think the one point in which the author was super correct is, when he says that the progress will be made on technology, rather than the "emotion that arises between a man and a maid" - as I understand it, emotional intelligence - , which will remain stagnant.
These are a different in quality more so than a different in kind. In 1922 you could already talk to someone 100s of miles away via the telephone. In 1822 you couldn't. And getting there was going to take weeks. So you basically couldn't talk to people long distance unless you were rich or important.
> Thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly. Space missions that are already flying past the limits of our galaxy.
Means rather than an end here. Google Maps is neat and convenient, but again, you _could_ use paper maps for much of what people use google maps for. And large paper mapping schemes (e.g. ordnance survey maps in countries of the british empire) were carried out in the 19th century and WW1. Communications could also be done, albeit more expensively. Space missions are still currently in the scientific curiosity stage, rather than impacting people's lives, but who knows maybe commercial near earth space missions end up being the one people get to to talk about for 2022-2122.
> Bio-mechanical organs, giving the crippled back the ability to walk, the blind the ability to see, the deaf to hear.
These are technically more accomplished achievements for sure, but I'm not sure they have the same sort of societal impacts as initiatives against cholera and tubercolosis of the late 19th century. Vaccination is probably the 20th century achievement to call out here.
Sometimes the difference in quality is smaller. Communication by mail could have a cadence reminiscent of email, for example:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24089/victorian-mail-del...
Evidently its debatable which century saw more change, from sailboats to Titanic, or gunpowder rockets to Apollo... certainly there have always been cynics and dreamers...
edit: GPS would be pretty shocking to either, I expect
Video conferencing worldwide? If you draw attention to it, I suspect it would’ve surprised 1922 people that anyone richer than a literal subsistence farmer would also have a device of their own for the other end of the call, but the existence of the technology itself would not be surprising.
For visible changes between 1922 and 2022? New materials, new lighting, new fashion, drones, the public acceptability of same-sex relationships, race relations (in particular attitudes to those of pre-Colombian, African, and Chinese descent), and possibly also visible might be the absence of disfiguring illnesses that we have now vaccinated against.
But those are likely less than the changes from 1822 to 1922.
(The Blue Marble, or the photos of astronauts walking on the moon… I don’t know if those would’ve been shocking or not. Jules Verne died in 1905).
1822 was a horse-drawn, gas-lit world that was in many ways the same as it had been for millennia. 1922 was a world where rapid transportation (planes , trains, and automobiles),recorded images and sounds, electric light, radio broadcasts and instantaneous intercontinental communication.
"Quantity has a quality all its own"
-Joseph Stalin
Saying the fax let us move information long distance is like saying global trade was around in the middle ages because Macro Polo. The quantity difference is so big it becomes a qualitative difference.
I can arrange to have an arbitrary industrial doodad show up on my doorstep from literally the other side of the world while taking a shit. I can stream 1080p to/from damn near anywhere on the planet. In 30sec I can get answers to specific technical questions that would have taken hours for the president of the US to get an answer to in 1990. The list goes on. Communication and information are just so much more abundant than they were even 75yr ago.
And the quote was about "surprise". I don't think it'd be a complete shock to see that the world got more connected, ordering became easier, deliveries became faster. In 1822 the railroad was very much still in its early stages; the Erie Canal had just been completed, the Pony Express and the telegraph were still almost 40 years away.
Put differently, a lot of "0 to 1" stuff had happened by 1922.
How much of that 0-1 is stuff that existed in some niche or experimental capacity prior to 1822 but simply became possible at scale?
We had writing for millennia but the printing press changed the world.
We've had steel for millennia but the Bessemer process changed the world.
We've always been able to send information long distances but digital communications changed the world.
You can always pick whatever specific innovations you want as the 0-1 transition point but it's the widespread availability of something that changes the world.
To order something from Amazon from your toilet, you need
- indoor plumbing
- computing
- electricity
- industrialized mass production
- global connectivity
- global transportation network
Someone in 1922 could imagine a telephone in a bathroom that could be used to contact a Sears-like company to order a mass-produced product and have it delivered from a faraway place.
In 1822 you barely have the idea of industrialization and electricity, let alone anything else. "Write a letter from your cesspit to have a product from St. Louis delivered to New York, but your letter is instantly delivered instead of taking six weeks, production is faster and cheaper than your local craftsman (it's not being made to order!), and instead of taking six weeks to ship it, it takes two days (2022) or a week(?) (1922)." It's not just that the same kind of thing is happening at a grander scale, it requires a fundamental reorientation of how you'd think about consuming products.
So yeah, Amazon's scale in 2022 is astronomically greater than Sears's in 1922 and that is significant, but they share way more fundamentals than 1822 and 1922 did.
Many others, like humanoid robots (that can do actual stuff like independently clean a home), general AI, actual real space travel (where people live on different planets or giant space wheels), flying cars, replicators, fusion energy, self driving cars (those are near though), brain uploads, nanobots, curing many diseases, etc... didn't happen and won't any time soon, and of course some are physically impossible like FTL travel, teleportation, time travel, ...
It's at least nice to have seen one science fiction fantasy come true so far :)
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...
In fact, gas light was bleeding edge tech in 1822 - confined to a few parts of cities like London and Baltimore. The New York City gas company was only chartered in 1823. Chicago didn't get gas light until 1850.
Whale oil was still a significant source of illumination right through the 19th century, especially in the US.
I think the author was largely correct.
However, they wouldn’t exactly be incomprehensible to someone from the early 1900’s, since they already had the telegraph, telephony, and fax machines which could send pictures over a long distance came very soon after this article was written.
Whereas I think a person from the early 1800’s would genuinely struggle with understanding the modern world.
The last 100 years have been about doing things in large quantities in a cheaper, faster way. Of course there has been great progress (the era of the PC/Internet by far the most important one) but the rate is significantly lower.
What people may mean is that a jump from 10^5 to 10^6 can feel bigger than a jump from 10^6 to 10^7? And that we are more surprised by large things than by some small piece of 'magical paper' which can completely change its display at will.