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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

> Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?

It's here, you're living in it, most likely. You just have to lower your wants to the standards of whenever that prediction was made.

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Not possible because you don't set the prices or structure for obtaining goods and shelter

It's not like there's unclaimed habitable territory that anyone can just go be subsistence farmers on - someone has laid claim to that land and it's not you

So, no this isn't an option either as you're forced to interact with the rest of the world that demands your input

A few hundred years ago, you would've lived in a shed with 6 people on 10sqm. I'm sure you can get that kind of accommodation today for very little money.

If you want 2023-level housing, you'll need to put in 2023-level work, unfortunately.

But that's not true fir the class that extracted the majority of productivity gains. Why doesn't this apply to them!

It's true for them, too. A rich guy's life in 1800 sucks compared to the average person's life in 2023. There's a reason why there's no rush to emulate the Amish, and they're not even that extreme.

No, it's some intentional decision of a suburban family in Kansas to not go be Amish. That's not how societies work.

And no, life is worse for millions of people around the world than it was in 1800 if for not other reason

This idea that things MUST be better just isn't supported with data. All the "data" about how great the world is is bad statistics - it's looking at averages only, not the distribution.

You can't point to the richest areas and claim "look see how great things are?"

Find the most destitute among us and see how they fare

> And no, life is worse for millions of people around the world than it was in 1800 if for not other reason

Yeah, but not for the same people. Life in 1800 in NYC was worse than life in NYC in 2023 for the average inhabitant. Life in some places on earth today are worse than life in NYC in 1800 was, but that's not the question.

> Find the most destitute among us and see how they fare

Better. They're faring better. The data is in, and they do.

>The data is in, and they do.

Show me this data cause as far as I know it doesn't exist

How do you square that rationalization with the fact that you could buy a house on a high school diploma and a factory job back then? :p (With a pension! Everyone had those back then. What even is a pension? I don't know. It's something like "the company keeps paying you when you stop working", I think, but it sounds dope.)

I think if you compare then vs now in absolute terms, you'll find that the house wouldn't be considered adequate today, the insulation was bad, the plumbing questionable and electricity wasn't there (depending on when you compare to, but it needs to be sufficiently far away, few people said in the 80ies that nobody would work by 2020).

Quality today is generally much better and "average" isn't the same. I read a piece one some woman who lived around 200 years ago and she traveled to a city ~100km away, which was a noteworthy biographical event back then. That's a distance some people do daily on their way to work these days. Travel to a different continent? You'd be exceptional if you did so once in your life, today that's available to most people in the West to do once a year (granted, it won't be the luxury version, it'll be like my trip to NYC 25 years ago where we stayed in a hotel that was being renovated, the elevator was out once and we had to climb 12 floors but it was super affordable).

People did pilgrimages this is a little exaggerated

Is this actually true though? Suppose you want to own a house and a car, not to mention be able to send your kids to university. That was affordable 50 years ago, and the only one of those things which has gotten better is the car.

Fifty years ago was still in the post World War 2 economic boom. If you want that again, all you need is another devastating world war that kills tens of millions and wrecks every other economy except that of the United States.

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