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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

This pretty clearly isn't true. You could simply work fewer hours and live a 1920s lifestyle, if that's what you want. You won't have good healthcare (neither did people in 1920), you probably won't go to college (just like most people in 1920), you won't be able to buy lots of fancy and complicated consumer goods (exactly like people in 1920), you won't own a laptop (just like every single human being in 1920), or live in an apartment with AC (like almost everyone in 1920), and you won't drive a car (like the average person in 1920), or own a lot of nice clothes (like most people in 1920) and so on and so on.

This option is available to you and to everyone else, but hardly anybody chooses it. People pursue full-time employment because of all the enormous benefits, but absolutely nobody is making you do it.

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Continued here (instead of editing the comment above).

The obvious retort here is that the cost of healthcare, education, and housing have all increased dramatically, so even if you’re willing to forego modern toys and conveniences, you still have to work full-time to stay afloat. I think even this is not true. First of all, it’s worth thinking about what people spent their money on 100 years ago. Here’s a typical budget (by share of consumption) for an urban family in 1917:

  Food ............................... 41.1 
  Housing ............................ 26.8 
  Transportation ..................... 3.1 
  Clothing ........................... 17.6 
  Health care ........................ 4.7 
  Other .............................. 6.7

Source (Table 3): https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/05/art3full.pdf

The first thing you’ll notice is that healthcare and education are not major line items (but food and clothing, both of which are drastically cheaper and more widely available today, are). I think you can basically toss them out. Just by virtue of having access to a modern emergency room you’re miles ahead of anybody living in 1917. As for general health insurance and higher education, you can simply forego them — just as almost everyone did in 1917. If you get seriously ill or injured, you can go to an emergency room and they'll treat you to a standard of care that didn't even exist 100 years ago. And you're opting out, remember, so what do you need a college degree for? That's just another spoke on the hamster wheel we're trying to avoid.

So, housing remains and it’s obviously a bigger factor. A big obstacle here is that you can’t save money by downsizing to a tiny unit, living in an SRO, occupying crowded tenements, or foregoing modern conveniences like hot water and indoor plumbing -- all commonplace in 1920 -- because those options have in the meantime been made illegal. So the government has taken those options from you. For this to work you’re going to have to live in a relatively undesirable region and probably with roommates, if you want to be anywhere near a major city. But this is not impossible, if you're truly convinced that the alternative is unacceptably exploitative.

This is not even close to reality in the US. Zoning laws and various regulations mean that attempting to live like it is 1920 will eventually get you locked up in jail and your property condemned after you are fined to death. Assuming you can afford any property as our government has allowed corporate and foreign interests as well as excessive immigration to inflate property well past the ability of the average 1920 man to afford.

I addressed this in a comment adjacent to yours and I think it's a good point, but I don't think it's sufficient to explain why most people don't accept a 1920 standard of living in exchange for doing less work. I'd like to see most of those regulations repealed, but I have a hard time believing the result would be a bunch of full-time workers cutting back their hours to live more simply. What people would do, instead, is consume all the resulting productivity gains as quickly as they could.

That's not how it works at all.

Say a machine gets installed at work that increases productivity by 20%. In a sane system, you could now work 20% less for the same output, a vast improvement in quality of life.

In reality, you might lose your job. Or if you keep it, you'll work the same hours as before. You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity. Meanwhile, cost of living keeps rising.

You probably can't do every job at 20% speed and expect to keep it. If you're a middle manager at a giant corporation, for example, there is no 1-day-per-week option. It's all or nothing. But that's not all jobs. Any freelance work, obviously, fits the bill. As does restaurant work. (In fact, I know a fair number of people who are (at varying levels of awareness) actively enacting this work-less-and-live-on-less strategy, by hopping along a never-ending string of part-time bartending and server positions.)

The great thing about trying to live like it's 1917 in 2022 is that you still have access to all this 2022 technology to make it happen. A software engineer could pretty clearly choose to do the equivalent of 1-day-per-week's worth of work throughout the year by taking on freelance/consulting projects. Most software engineers don't do this for the simple fact that they'd rather work more and make more.

> You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity.

that's because the source of that productivity wasnt you - it was the invention and capital investment in that machine (which you happen to drive).

In a system which redistributes wealth, you'd get some returns (such as better public services). Under the current system of capitalism, there's not that much redistribution.

You're missing an important part of the equation. That 1920s lifestyle includes lower population density outside of the big cities, food that is organic by default, etc etc. You can't just look at the downsides.

nah, you would end up in jail and most of the supply chain that was there for what you call a "1920's lifestyle" is not there anymore. We criticize this way of living because we are stuck in it.

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