Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
brettscott.substack.com
brettscott.substack.com
A woman can choose to decouple having sex with getting pregnant.
A person can choose to live hundreds of miles away from their family yet still visit them every weekend.
A person can choose to move to a new country, halfway around the world, and still have their parents be able to see and converse with the grandchildren every night.
I can choose to talk to a person who speaks another language and have a computer translate for us.
On a more serious note:
I can choose to have my tooth decay treated without experiencing horrific pain.
A compound fracture is not an automatic sentence of death or lifelong severe disability.
We will find ourselves using iphones across millions of people to identify "the right choices" over millions of lives - behavioural empidemology
> Libertarian paternalism is similar to asymmetric paternalism, which refers to policies designed to help people who behave irrationally and so are not advancing their own interests, while interfering only minimally with people who behave rationally.
I think that the article posted is people acting rationally based on the incentives and markets in their life. Though it sounds like that’s not the same conclusion you came to. Maybe you can say more.
> interfering only minimally with people who behave rationally.
The problem I have with this is most bad actors are quite rational, and the most successful not only play within the rules, they shape them (regulatory capture).
The position is that many people do _not_ act rationally. So the argument is make the choices that are best for most the default, but at the same time don't force that choice, for those that would pick an alternative.
It does set up an incentive to influence that choice, but often that is the case we already have today. Making the choice of a default explicitly part of how both public and private services are delivered, including both the data-driven analysis of better outcomes and the UX work expose the default seems to be worth it. The alternative is a choice still getting made, but getting made either arbitrarily or with more nefarious influence.
It's like, you can choose to sign up for adverts on facebook and youtube but they should be off by default (ok maybe that's my paternalism).
I have mentored people who made the most of my time contribution, and people who fucked off and wasted my time. My time is non renewable, every hour spent is an hour gone forever, and I want to provide as much value as possible with the time I have left (hence my position).
(btw hackernews is a waste of all our time)
"Too Much to Do, Not Enough Time"
Today, older generations of folks often marvel at (both the positives and negatives of) the way that younger generations depend on connectivity, made possible by their phones, to navigate their lives. My major prediction for the future is that my generation, once we're old, will marvel at (the positives and negatives of) the number and magnitude of decisions that younger generations will let their technology make for them. When to leave the house; what's on the grocery list; what colleges to apply to; where to buy a house; who to pursue a relationship with - people will be guided to answers to these questions the way that our maps apps guide us to our destinations today, and many people will simply follow those guides without thinking about it too much.
The effects on broader society could be interesting. If everyone knows about some secluded beach that's cheap and great, that would quickly change... I wonder if we'll see a "smoothing out" of everything so that the big outlier advantages and disadvantages will go away, because everything is known by everyone('s LLM).
I hope the future doesn't look like the lovechild of Brave New World and Flowers for Algernon, but I have a feeling that it may...
If capitalism keeps taking the time gains from technology advancements and adding more work into that time instead of giving it back to us, we simply won't have much time to think. That creates a great environment for high-pressure sales tactics.
The only reason people rely on technology for 'order' is because they have been cut off from mapping out the Truth.
It is only through technology that you can destroy/disrupt so much past value in a short period of time and call it progress.
It is deeply sad to watch many thousands of bright lives wasted on maintaining wealth for the status quo. Getting camels through needle eyes, is only a small part of life.
Oh how true. I've spent much of my life as a technologist and occasionally I've been at its cutting edge. Yet there are few tech things that have truly improved my life. Most modern tech simply adds irrecoverable overhead to one's life—and one's life speeds up just through maintaining it.
Some tech has had great potential to offer advantages but has fallen short in delivery though greed, lack of agreement on standards, planned obsolescence and indifference and abuse from users. Combined, synergies have rendered much tech disappointing and very suboptimal.
I look at the many thousands of irrecoverable hours I've wasted on trying to make computers do what they're supposed to do and make software like Windows just simply work as expected—which it could have easily done if it were not for the greed and intransigence of Microsoft. And nowadays printers have evil intent thanks to the proprietary actions of Canon, Epson and others. These monstrous contraptions are so only because manufacturers spend so much time and effort at optimizing their profit, and it's users who foot the expence. Similarly, technology is too often used to abuse and inconvenience people. The article's photo of the Transport for London card only sign with the caption “You can use any shade of payment, as long as its digital" is nothing other than an abuse of technology, it's the sort of brazen technocratic instruction that would make me want to jump the barrier and say 'fuck you'.
Yes, it's deeply sad to see wealth misused, especially so by the powerful.
It's also terribly sad to read the words of younger generations and to know there's no way of putting wisdom onto young shoulders. It's through no fault of their own that imparting experience and wisdom to them is akin to explaining color to someone who's been blind from birth. Unfortunately, it's a terrible tragedy of the human condition that knowledge of this kind can only be bought with time.
Is the sad thing reality itself, or is the sad thing that one can envision a better reality which will never materialize?
It's a complex matter and there's no way I could provide a comprehensive summary here (and my history is very rusty), but some things stand out. At the height of the Industrial Revolution (say around 150 years ago) not all but a large percentage of capitalists were very proud of the products that their companies produced, for the era their quality was excellent and they lasted. Work conditions were pretty rotten but workers nevertheless turned out good high quality products and their guilds encouraged and maintained high standards of craft and workmanship.
Now look back over the last 40—50 years and see how this has changed, production now favors profit over quality and product is essentially a means to an end.
Yes, that's a pretty simplistic summary and no doubt historians will be shouting 'gross oversimplification' but I'll provide an illustration anyway. Not far from where I live there's a two-track railway viaduct built going on 150 years ago that's still in use. It's in two sections separated by land in the middle and in total it's over several miles long, and it's built entirely of standard bricks. The ground it traverses is mostly parklands so is easy to get up close and in parts one's able to stand under its arches. Over the years I've walked its entire length many times. What struck me years ago was the remarkable condition of the brickwork in that I could see there were no cracks anywhere and that included the mortar which is still in excellent condition, that's remarkable given that there must be millions of bricks. So I set myself a challenge of finding any cracks every time I walk there and to date I've found none.
Now between the viaduct and my home there's been new low-rise developments in the last 30 years, new semi-detached, two-storey and similar which I walk past on my way to the parklands. Almost every one of these new dwellings has cracked brickwork and some of the brick fences have vertical cracks that don't zigzag along the mortar but rather have sheered completely through the bricks from top to bottom.
What I've described here isn't an uncommon scenario, I've seen similar instances elsewhere. The question is why were Victorian bricklayers consistently able to build brick structures that remain faultless after 150 years whereas today's builders seemingly can't or won't. I'm not going to attempt to answer that except to say it's more than just capitalism at work, it's also has to do with changed ethics, different worldviews and changes in the movement of capital (and that's just hardly scratching the surface).
(Incidentally, I've always taken an interest in how things were built. Several decades ago, before bans were in place to stop people walking over it (it's very dangerous), I spent many hours studying the masonry on the Roman Ponte du Gard viaduct. They say it was built mostly by slaves nevertheless the workmanship is just impeccable, I was simply awestruck by their craftsmanship.)
> A woman can choose to decouple having sex with getting pregnant.
Minor point: Unless that act is criminalized or mad illegal or otherwise inaccessible.
I think you’re right that many technologies do provide choice. My interpretation is that when the choice is “live easier” or “go faster” it’s not really a choice.
> Minor point: Unless that act is criminalized or mad illegal or otherwise inaccessible.
Who is trying to make condoms illegal?
>On New Year's Eve 1930, the Roman Catholic Church officially banned any "artificial" means of birth control. Condoms, diaphragms and cervical caps were defined as artificial, since they blocked the natural journey of sperm during intercourse.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-ca...
Romania Decree 770 Happened in 1967 and is the stuff of nightmares.
> > Minor point: Unless that act is criminalized or mad illegal or otherwise inaccessible
> Who is trying to make condoms illegal?
It would seem fairly obvious to me that the original poster of that comment was referring to either abortions or the morning after pill, not condoms. A condom would be a man choosing to decouple sex with having a baby, and I suppose an argument could be made that it's both partners' choice (by proxy of the consent from the woman.) And I suppose another argument could be made that there are condoms that women wear, but those generally seem to not be recommended compared to the male-worn variety.
Not that this is an important distinction. I just thought it a stretch that they were talking about condoms and you took it there.
I was actually confused because if we're talking technological advancement, then abortions don't count. They're ancient.
I wish this was hyperbole. It is unfortunately very “normal” Texas politics.
The larger point I was trying to make is that technology alone doesn’t dictate our choices and behaviors. Laurence Lessig (Code 2.0) points out four main areas: legal, market, norms, and architecture (technology or code falls into this one). Even if a technology makes something possible (architecture) people can prevent its adoption via other mechanisms. In this case, by using the law and trying to sway public opinion (norms).
Its coded into our brains.
We are, according to the argument, not seeing a just portion of the gains technology brings.
but who paid for and took risk to create those gains? Why should the gains be "just" (aka, shared equally i presume), if the cost of said gains (such as the R&D cost, the risk, etc) wasn't also shared equally?
Even admitting that entrepreneurs and investors should get more of the gains[0], that's only gains on the particular thing a given enterprise brought. But even those people, at the same time, are short-charged by all the other tech being brought to market. There's a lot of ratcheting going on here, key aspect highlighted by GP:
> we're strongly pushed to the technological option because last-year's default is now significantly more expensive
This is the nature of markets and society as dynamic systems: they adjust to change, incorporate and fixate and eventually become dependent on any new capacity. And since we're not in Star Trek economy just yet[1], the cheapest things are the ones we're doing at scale. If a simple thing is displaced by complex one, over time that simple thing becomes more expensive and less available, until it's all but gone.
--
[0] - I have some issue with them getting it exponentially more, indefinitely, way after it paid back the risk - it doesn't seem fair. For extreme examples, see Disney, or various estates, (ab)using copyright to maintain passive income from works of art decades after their authors died.
[1] - With replicators and energy too cheap to meter, turning almost all physical problems into "print this document" problems, eliminating supply chains behind almost everything.
How does that change the social dynamics of mating? Is increasing promiscuity a good thing?
> A person can choose to live hundreds of miles away from their family yet still visit them every weekend.
> A person can choose to move to a new country, halfway around the world, and still have their parents be > able to see and converse with the grandchildren every night.
Why did this person choose to move physically away from their tribe? To slave away at a job they don't care about? Would they have chosen to move away if the tech to communicate long distance didn't exist?
> I can choose to talk to a person who speaks another language and have a computer translate for us.
Is it good to use translation tech as a crutch and not emotionally immerse yourself in the culture?
> I can choose to have my tooth decay treated without experiencing horrific pain.
Why do you have a poor diet? Why do you consume so much sugar? Why don't you brush and floss?
> A compound fracture is not an automatic sentence of death or lifelong severe disability.
Do you take more risks because you know that a fracture won't end you since medicine can heal you?
It seems to me that technology is often used as a band-aid solution. Or it enables certain types of behaviors that when proliferated on a societal level can have drastic consequences.
An individual can independently choose to brush, floss, engage in less risky behaviors, have a good diet, maintain a health weight, etc. It's not hard.
But when talking about society as a whole, that breaks down. Society is going to have a percentage of people who don't brush and floss. Who aren't managing their diet and weight. Who are taking risks beyond what you find acceptable.
When talking about society as a whole, it's a dead end to just say, "well people should just be better". It doesn't work that way, and it certainly doesn't fix anything. Society will always have people who have a lot of sex. Making it safer is better. Society will always have people who have teeth issues. Not having them die or be in massive pain is better. Society will always have people who can't maintain a healthy weight. Making it easier is better.
Tool use is fundamental to any meaningful society and that's technology.
But who bears the cost of this betterment? I certainly don't want to be responsible for paying a cost for someone else's bad choice, esp. if the bad choice gave them an advantage or "profit".
That's why all individual choices should have individual consequences, and only under some circumstances where there's a prisoner's dilemma should there be a method/regulation to enforce cooperation.
We all do, of course.
> I certainly don't want to be responsible for paying a cost for someone else's bad choice
Then, in some cases, you'd prefer them dead/permanently disabled/permanently in pain/etc. Which, I guess is a position to have, but not one I'd like to take. It sounds like I'm exaggerating here but I'm not.
Remember, the theory in the posts above is that technology makes people more likely to take more risky behaviors. And I'm arguing that there will always be a significant percentage of the population that engages in risky behaviors (for whatever your definition of risky is), and we should have technology to help.
> esp. if the bad choice gave them an advantage or "profit".
Not everything is black and white. We are allowed to pick and choose here and limit this from happening. Most examples we've been talking about involve an individual having to use some communal system, like a healthcare system. That isn't an "advantage" or "profit" that the individual is abusing.
Maybe I'm one of that percentage, but I wouldn't describe these things as not hard.
But the problem GP highlights is that of a ratchet - those changes start as choices, but then become requirements. Key example:
>> A person can choose to move to a new country, halfway around the world, and still have their parents be
>> able to see and converse with the grandchildren every night.
> Why did this person choose to move physically away from their tribe? To slave away at a job they don't care about? Would they have chosen to move away if the tech to communicate long distance didn't exist?
That's the ratchet in action. Progress in transportation at first enabled people to pursue new opportunities, new living arrangements. But as more and more people did that, everyone started relying on others being able to travel long distances fast. It became a social expectation, and a professional expectation, and that's how in a few decades, we went from cars being generally-available, to car culture, urban sprawl, hour+-long commutes, and constant gridlock. Problems we can't extricate ourselves from now.
The same mechanism is at play with every new invention. Even the humble clock is something you need to have, because you need to sync with people in time to minute precision, because everyone else has a clock and expects this too. Same with phones and bank accounts. Smartphones, Internet, credit/debit cards are just finishing this process too - arguably this is held back by the governments, who need to service everyone, including the elderly, but wait a few more decades for those elderly to die, and we'll see governments closing physical offices and removing in-person processes to cut costs, at which point smartphones (or their future equivalents) and Internet will become necessities.
Another, more controversial example: all the efforts to make women equally able to pursue careers and have equal pay - they started as clearly beneficial, offering choice to people who did not have it before. But couple decades down the line, the market adjusted to the workforce effectively doubling, and now single-income households are increasingly impossible. And so, at first, women could choose to work, but today, they have to. There is no choice anymore. This becomes a huge problem when children are in the mix, as in an average family, neither parent can become a stay-at-home one. Instead, children get sent to daycares and kindergartens, which of course cost money, further locking both parents into their jobs, and because child care facilities are group spaces, kids constantly get sick, creating huge logistics hassle for parents...
This is not to criticize women's right movements here - only to point out that the choice won was temporary, and the society/economy forcing a two-income model creates a whole set of other problems we're still figuring out how to deal with. Hopefully one of these days we'll figure out how to have equality while supporting either of the partners to be the stay-at-home one.
The "on average" in the sentence above is key - those whose surplus of money was less than X end up worse off.
You used to be able to login with IRS credentials, but now it's a hard requirement to use ID.me credentials. So I created an account and had to verify my identity. The automated verification failed, so I waited 20 minutes on the phone to talk to one of the representatives. There was a checkbox to consent to having the meeting recorded. I opted out but the submit was disabled. Even before this, they took a 3d scan of my face. None of this seems like choice and options.
By the way, ID.me is a private company. They're even squatting on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13831921&
As far as I know login.gov is a viable solution, already in use at the SSA, that is government-run aka doesn't require users to kowtow to an EULA, capricious arbitration, etc. The problem is there was apparently interagency squabbling that messed up the original deployment schedule. So it's not available. I do hope that changes because the current situation, of mandatory id.me seems pretty terrible.
> It never gets easier you just get faster – Greg LeMond
In my HCI class we read about a paper talking about the tech that was supposed to save everyone from so much toil: the washing machine. It explored how we originally thought home appliance innovations would bring us leisure. Instead they’ve brought us more time to spend working. I wish I had the paper name at hand.
I think the quote and observation go hand in hand. Anything that could be used to provide ease, can equally be used to buttress performance and when humans have to choose between the two…the systems aren’t set up to reward those that choose the route of joy.
While I definitely enjoy programming more than I enjoy hand washing my own clothes. I wish I had less stress and more ease in my life.
Yeah! I had this insight when I started running. There's a hill on the Harlem side of the Central Park loop that used to kill me (I'd start my run at Columbus Circle so by the time I got to the hill, I was already exhausted -and- there was a bunch more to go!) I used to think "man once I get good at running, I am gonna eat this hill for breakfast" and then I realized you never get to a place where you love/don't notice it, it just becomes something you end up doing at a higher pace or as part of a longer run, etc.
More recently, I realized that my Peloton rides "feel" about the same as they did 2 years ago when I started. I still sometimes feel "rusty", sometimes out of breath, etc. What changes is that the mileage/output I produce for a given amount of "feeling" has gone up a lot.
Maybe broadly, I don't feel like I am working much harder now that I have a ton of work responsibility vs when I had smaller scope. Or now that I am a husband/dad vs when I was a single guy/dating. Life feels about the same level of difficulty, but there's a lot more being accomplished.
The positive thing is recognizing how much more is being accomplished. The "other" thing is recognizing how much MORE can be accomplished if I reprioritize/focus/etc.
Notably, it doesn't _have_ to be that way. If you were running with a set destination, the hill would become easier over time. If we were paid based on our productivity, we could work less and enjoy the same lifestyle.
Then you say:
//If we were paid based on our productivity
We are paid for our productivity in the grand scheme of things. To make this obvious, many things that would have taken hours/days for a worker to do 200 years ago may be done in seconds with today's tooling. So if you want to live like people did 200 years ago, you can do that with minimum work (in fact, in the west you have a much better life unemployed today than a worker would have 200 years ago). But the reality is, you want the improvements of safety, quality of life, etc that have occurred in that time too. Because you want your life to be "better."
Pretty dubious claim. You really think that running and health are related in an even remotely linear fashion? It's likely doing it at all puts you way, way up the effort/benefit curve. Constantly pushing yourself for "better" eventually just becomes a waste of time you could put into something else.
There’s diminishing marginal returns from exercise. So there’s probably a sweet spot of how much you want to do it. Same with work. And for many people, same with spending time with friends and family.
There’s an implicit belief in a lot of this thread that more is better and that happiness is down the road of doing more things. That’s stupid and wrong for almost all of us. And ironically, your career, health and relationships all suffer if you push too hard and don’t let them breathe. The real joys are found sitting watching the sunset, with a good meal with the people we love. It doesn’t get better than that.
Capitalism is one such system, but it’s not the only system. What you’re describing is possible, and people do it, but to do it they have to have systems that support it.
It’s not quite as easy as as it is in War Games to “not play the game”.
If you want more people opting into ease and joy you first identify the barriers (which I’m attempting to do) then you find ways around them or replacements. I don’t have answers, but at minimum I wish that “faster”, “easier”, or “more convienent” would stop being used as proxies for “more joy” or “more ease”.
> Every day it gets a little easier… But you gotta do it every day — that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.
I strangely feel these totally contradictory pieces of advice are somehow both true.
Though “easier” might not mean the in-the-moment-act (of exercise) but rather the ability to start an action and follow through with it. That consistency makes it easier, but consistency is also hard.
In the show though I think it’s more a metaphor for getting clean and putting your life back together.
For most people, it seem we are psychologically disposed to use the improvement for more.
I also feel it applies to my programming as well. I still get frustrated and annoyed and tripped up, but I can write more high quality code quicker now than I could ten years ago.
But generally that means I take on more tasks or harder problems, rather than call it a day at noon every day (though I do genuinely feel there’s a diminishing return and something like a four day work week might actually improve knowledge work output).
Is it? Are you spending more time with your loved ones? Have more time to enjoy nature? Spend more time on hobbies? Get out of bed later, take more time for breakfast, have fewer or shorter working days?
Compared to people a century ago, the answer is probably "yes!". Tech has made most people's lives more comfortable.
But compared to say, 20..30y ago? Maybe. Much recent progress has been funneled into producing an ever-increasing stream of movies, gadgets, kitchen appliances, bigger cars & houses, nicer clothes, roads, shopping malls, etc, etc.
Do we need those things to be happy? No. Do they make our lives easier? Sometimes. But also more complex to manage at the same time.
Capitalism's marketing machine has become extremely good at selling us things. In many cases, things we really don't need, don't improve our lives, perhaps not even wanted.
So a lot of that "accomplished more" is producing things of questionable utility. While under-estimating what we lose in exchange.
But hey: profit! (well... for some people)
There are a few obvious factors for that - eg my dad didn't get to work from home while many people nowadays get to do that at least a few times a week if not every day. Video conferencing basically removed the need for work trips for me although I sometimes chose to do them. I have way more flexibility (eg taking a few hours mid day for a family thing) that previous generations style of work never had. And even on days I am traveling, I can FaceTime with the kids for bedtime which is a game changer vs just not being there.
The famous song about a father not having time for his kids, Cat's in the Cradle, is from 1977. Clearly that sentiment existed then big time.
Technology does make my life easier.
One aspect that I think does make life worse today is that families and friends tend to be distributed across larger distances -- too large to decide spontaneously to share a beer in a pub. It is more healthy and convenient to live close to the people you love to spend time with. But I am not sure this is technology's fault.
I'll forever take a slightly lower salary for a solid work-life balance. The mental health benefits, and overall happiness, are worth infinitely more than a little more cash.
outside of happy hours or whatever social thing we've both chosen to be at
It's literally never been a problem. I'll come in to the office, respond to messages received afterhours and nobody cares that it took me until my shift to get back to them.
I know plenty of other people who also don't have that pressure. Careful with your snark next time.
It will probably surprise many that even married couples who both work full time spend on average 2.9 to 3.6 hours per day on leisure and sports (vs 5.1 to 6.1 hours on work and 1.4 to 0.9 hours on child care). https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a7-1519.htm
You haven't even been explicit about it but the only presupposition that makes a point for you is that x(1) is, "of course", less time than now, by virtue of the fact that we spend some hours a day doing sport & leisure.
Which, btw, is demonstrably false. Almost all anthropological evidence/studies point towards us having much less time now in human evolution, only losing to the near-fascist peak of capitalism in the 19th century due to the unchecked boom in power from the industrialists. But without that one outlier, we "have to" spend more time working now than ever before. We objectively have less leisure time.
If we're going by the pop anthropologist's definition work as time spent hunting and gathering, I work about 2 hours a week, far less than anyone from the stone age. If setting up your tent or carrying water from a stream counts as "leisure", then it's only fair to count the work that pays for my rent and city water as "leisure."
The changing-baseline effect is an artifact of a particular market competition. Housing prices went up as two-earner households increased faster than the housing supply. (i.e., women's entry into the workplace wasn't primarily a technological change) By contrast, secretary, illustrator and translator are hardly careers any more.
What technology (communications, computers, transportation) did was to make it possible for few people to effectively control many people and a lot of resources, without much of a tax for bureaucracy (coordination costs). Sometimes that's been good, sometimes not.
Today the driving feature of being busy stems from lacking pace control at work. Professionals used to be distinguished by owning their own standards and controlling the pace of work. Now even doctors and lawyers work in hierarchies with production processes. The only freedom today lies in being off the critical path (but still necessary), or using technology to go directly to consumers. Or just having resources.
You must be American.
The paper asks the question (that you asserted). Essentially: divorced from creator or user intent, can an artifact (or technology) influence how it is used (its politics)?
They make very compelling arguments that, yes, the mere existence of a technology (regardless of how people chose to use it) shapes and influences us.
So while you might be technically correct, that it’s up to the individual: the larger system (and by extension the technology) does in fact influence us.
It’s like the saying that the law applies equally because it prohibits both paupers and princes from stealing bread. It’s technically true, but it (intentionally, to prove a point) misses the point: that the system is set up so no prince would need to steal bread.
In Code 2.0 (Laurence Lessig, creator of the Creative Commons) makes a point to say that a variety of things influence our behavior: markets, norms, laws, and architecture.
New technology falls under “architecture” in this categorization. Technology will exert itself on your behavior and give you new choices, but those choices cannot be divorced from the other legs: laws, norms, and markets.
In the past clothing was very expensive and people didn't own many outfits unless they were extremely rich. Advances in technology have both changed our access to clothing and also its maintenance.
Further, nobody has much free time today, despite technology doing most of the things that we used to spend our time on. Instead of technology giving everyone free time, everyone just had to work more in order to get the same lifestyle.
Edit: though yes, quality of life is better in many ways.
Even the full-time employed spend on average 3.27 hours per day on leisure and sports on weekdays and 5.94 hours per day on weekends and holidays[2].
Checking the same survey from 20 years ago[3], average work has decreased a bit (was 3.69 hours per day) and average leisure and sports increased a bit (was 5.11 hours per day).
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm
This doesn't sound believable to me. This sounds like a luxurious lifestyle for America at any point.
As an example, the Dodge Coronet was $2k in 1950, and median annual income was $3300, so that's 60%. A 2023 Honda Civic is $23k, and median annual income is $57k, so that's 40%. So that's actually better today, especially because the Civic is a far better car than the Coronet.
I think this is lifestyle inflation.
Moreover, Dodge was a mid-level marque in 1950. The proper comparison would be the Plymouth Deluxe, Chrysler’s entry-level full-size car, which had an base price of $1,386 [2], which comes out to 42% of income.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N [2]: https://www.jdpower.com/cars/1950/plymouth/deluxe/2-door-cou...
Let's do the math:
- 2023: 16450/40480 is 40.6%
- 1950: 1386/3315 is 41.8%
Even if it were 42% to 57% that's nowhere near 2 cars comfortably then and not now. And that's not even counting that the Kia Rio is a futuristic marvel compared to the older vehicle.
This other business about the cars being more affordable seems like a total fiction.
0: https://www.kbb.com/kia/rio/
1: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1952/demographi...
If you mean a disposable fast fashion material wealth like Zara, sure; things have never been better.
Yet every indicator of spiritual well being is in the gutter. Suicide, drug use, alienation, the feeling of belonging.
We have BS jobs, to earn money to buy BS we dont need, to read BS on the internet, to ignore our kids.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG [3] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/us-time-spent-wi...
Many more people in the 50s were not actively looking for work.
There is a segment of society that has checked out. They wont form families. They wont realize themselves. They wont create bonds of love with others.
They survive living off the good will parents, grandparents or the state. Mind you, I consider these people are victims.
On the other hand, people who are trying to form families, form bonds, find it much harder to afford basic things their parents could afford despite selling double the amount of hours to the labor market than their families did two, or three generations ago.
The malaise is deeply relatable, and we ignore the warning signs constantly.
Not everybody believes the same things and it's about damn time the outliers stood up and asserted their will.
The majority cannot consume and suck the life out of competing beliefs forever.
The hubris in the hive mind attitudes and the complete homogenity of consciousness in popular culture, is lethally bad for social cohesion.
It is mandatory to have private beliefs supported and related online. These excluding technological policies sold to the public on dogwhistle references to domestic terrorism has to end.
Obviously no-one is going to do it, there's too much wealth to secure and good times to be milked. The majority has let these men down and we call them victims, as if that helps broken morale and isolated truths....
He's a mooch, parasitical to his parents and contributing nothing to the human experience.
He's also a victim because, partially, he's fallen into this state of despair because society's attitude towards checking out has become too lenient and soft to keep most these boys (and it is mostly boys) in line.
In fact, he's not even courageously stepping out of the head. No one judges him, no one really cares what he does.
A beatnik in the fifties might haves been an interesting person to talk to. Today, he's just a bum.
You don't fall into despair, despair doesnt make you a victim, you choose to despair. Kiekergaard's Sickness unto death, describes it well enough for your average pot smoker.
Your incredibly white-bread judgements, I should have seen coming!
All the more reason to continue to diverge paths. You simply don't have a clue what is going on with 'the youth'.
I guess that old science idea is still true, progress happens one generation at a time.
The irony of the deepest survelliance the world has ever seen and people are no wiser.
I'm Catholic. I believe I'm responsible for every ill in the world through my most grievous sinning, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. So its my fault.
More seriously, I think we agree? Fundamentally, we have a society that is (was) too rich and therefore too soft making a whole cohort of (mostly white [1]) boys into Peter Pans.
You'll have to explain me the white bread comment though.
[1] Inner urban cities aren't exactly peachy places to grow up in. For all their problems, inner city youths have being brought up to be a helpless wimp isn't one of them.
I need to make absolutely clear and dig it into your heart (if necessary), is that the home-grown meanings inside your white boy's mind, are novel, worthwhile and capable of change.
There is something going on, and not only is that truth an easy motivator/harness, but the top down image that these boys are just hippes, bums and losers, is a missed opportunity (to say the least).
White bread, a colloquial term for something excessively plain/uninteresting/stale/ect.
You're not wrong about the Peter Pans, ect... I'd want to see our Fathers find and leverage the growing meaning in our sons.
I'd really like to see on what basis you're writing this when many other things point to either the opposite or the numbers being equal.
>because society's attitude towards checking out has become too lenient and soft to keep most these boys
Society has been actively shaming and demonizing men for decades now, trying to get them to accept working through what feels like an untraversable valley. A valley which was in many ways easier to traverse before. Society took away the incentives, and now tries to replace it with punishments. What do you propose that won't cause severe animosity in a group historically known to destroy societies when pushed to the edge?
The extremes aside, this is the reality behind most 'boys' checking out. Men are biologically wired to try and excel if they see opportunities. They aren't seeing them anymore.
But I agree with you! I empathize with these boys who have laid their lives to waste. As I mentioned, I don't (entirely) blame them for growing up in a society where manly nature is scorned and called toxic.
"Mostly boys[...] "
Look at stats on higher education. The stats that show girls equalling boys are partially by more girls signing up, but it's also explained by boys' enrollments collapsing.
I have three kids, two girls and a boy. Im worried sick for them. Will my girls find a quality [1] husband (much harder today than before)? Will my boy fall into the traps newly laid out for him?
[1] I don't mean fancy degrees. The man could be a moron as long as he's caring, hard working, honorable and trustworthy. But a smart ass who watches porn and plays video games all day? Hard pass.
On the other hand, so much work that does occur these days is incredibly frivolous and debatable if it adds social value at all. Let's take Video games for example. It is now a larger industry than movie or music combined. And the stereotypical drop-out is the "lives in parents basement playing video games" dude. But if that is a waste of life and mooching, shouldn't we also turn our eyes to the people/companies making these games? If playing game is a waste of life, what does that say about those making them? But these people are never spoken about in such terms.
The same logic can apply to music industry, movie industry, sports industry, tourism industry, etc.
That's why i was so impressed by the Flappy Bird creator. When he realized how destructive his game was, he walked away from it.
This is nasty language however you put it and you're certainly talking in a way that makes me think that you DO think you are "better" than this person. But you should be careful, I know plenty of "achieving people" who gave their parents or society this or that and ended up with kids with troubles who under your definition "live as parasitical mooches contributing nothing to the human experience".
Would you like people casting those kind of comments at your own kids in future when they don't know a thing about the struggles they may have been through? Because I'm sorry but claiming you empathise with someone and then calling them a "parasitical mooch" out the other side of your mouth makes me think you don't truly empathise with them at all.
Trust me, I am acutely aware of what they are, how and why they have fallen and the despair they feel. Its a despair of worthlessness which is tragic because we are all images of the Devine and therefore infinitely precious.
Even today, I walk along their footsteps but for the grace of God.
But we get nowhere pussyfooting with vocabulary.
I can honestly only assume you are trolling me at this point if you're bouncing between calling people "Devine" (do you mean "Divine"?) and parasites and thinking you have anything worthwhile to say.
Despite our constitution, we can still collapse into ruin. Some of us become cruel. Some of is slothful. Sone of us keep it together.
For those of us prone to slothfulness, the end game is becoming parasitical (ie eating off of the work of others without helping out).
Its not that hard to see that a person may be infinitely valuable and still be a problem. Its the basis of our Western jurisprudence!
At least the housewife's chores are varied and don't (typically) last all day.
A Zen master has his pupils clean the lawn by picking up each leaf by hand, not by using a rake.
If however your washing machine breaks and you need to wash by hand AND do all the other hundreds of tasks filling up your time it will probably feel like a massive waste of time.
They also had fewer clothes because they weren't mass produced.
Honestly, I half do this already because half of my clothes are dry cleaning optional but cold water mechanical wash compatible while being dryer incompatible.
One professor I knew never took his tenure seriously. He was always out doing fun things. When I asked him why he never seemed worried about it he answered: "why would I be worried? If they don't give me tenure I'll get back to go back to <home country> and become a shepherd again!"
He got his tenure. Turns out he was very productive compared to his pampered colleagues.
After working as a bartender at a high end dockside restaurant during my younger years, I believe that the upper class and leisure class is larger than ever before. That automation spare time has been converted into massive wealth that will keep the political and business elite rich for generations to come.
SPOILERS, kinda: It talks about time thieves, that convince people to save time by offering devices that do things more efficiently. All this does is making society more sterile as people forgo time-wasting activities (such as socializing, art and recreation) to save more time, which is then stolen by these time-thieves.
I often think about this book, which feels very prescient, especially being written in 1973! I haven't ready it in a while but remember it being a beautiful and engaging read for any age.
While there are certainly downsides to digital payments (or at least the current implementations of them) such as dependency on the banking system and surveillance there can be no doubt that electronic payments are more convenient.
The problem with cash is that there are two separate steps which need to performed in separate geographical locations: 1) Getting the cash (from an ATM or a bank) 2) Spending it
What people want to do is #2 but with cash they also have to spend time travelling to some place to do #1. You can optimise this by carrying large amounts of cash to reduce the frequency and time spent doing #1 but that has obvious downsides (like risk of theft)
Using electronic payments doesn't force anyone to "go faster" it just spares them from having to do "busy work".
So, electronic payments are of course more convenient... but they do indeed force us to go faster. They speed up transactions, reduce queues, and eliminate the need for cash.
I'm happy I can buy stuff online, but that in turns also makes me consume more.
You're speaking of some of cash issues... but have you thought about impacts on the the homeless of a 100% cashless society?
They only free us from doing stuff like going to an ATM to get cash (which means getting in my car where I live). I can choose how to spend that time, maybe I want to spend it going for a relaxing walk around my village (which has no ATM).
Buying online doesn't have to make you consume more - it remains up to you how much you choose to consume.
A 100% cashless society is off topic. I'm not saying we should be 100% cashless but I would like to see electronic payments accepted everywhere (not necessarilly exclusively) - the author mentions Germany which is a real pain with some places only taking cash.
So you've gotten everything backwards.
What are you talking about? I've never received a paycheck in actual cash in my entire life, only checks and then deposits when they became the norm.
I'm talking about before digital payments. Deposits are digital payments and the problem of having to find an ATM to get your money is something that happened in the transition period after digital payments became the norm. In the time when everybody where getting paychecks, they were probably not difficult to cash?
I didn't really think about paychecks, because that system was/is very regional.
> In the time when everybody where getting paychecks, they were probably not difficult to cash?
It was a trip to the bank. Then add in another trip to the bank weekly or on any major purchase, usually.
Wouldn't want to go back. I'm personally happy I have that 30-40 minutes a week to do my other hobbies or sleep in.
But all this was already in a time with digital salary payments to your bank account, had it all been cash there wouldn't have been a problem for anyone. Or if you want to go even further back in time, when people had a credit book that they used when making purchases.
Honestly I don't understand why people accepted the humiliation of having their salary put in a bank account where they couldn't easily access it, or getting a check you had to go and cash. A lot of busy work for no benefit to anybody.
Flying somewhere is easier than walking there, not just faster.
Sure, I can write more, and travel more places, and they can wind up taking just as much work (or at least time). On the other hand, if I have one thing I want to write (my life work, say), then the computer makes my life both easier and faster.
A true labor saving invention would be clothing that stays clean without requiring washing.
The point is that the majority of people make the choice not to leverage the time saved in additional pursuits but to cram more things into their week.
I certainly personally feel a little more frazzled than I believe I did at a time when the Internet was only accessible at big corporations and universities and when phones were (for most people) connected to wires in their houses and the only thing a watch could do was tell time and set alarms.
This is not (at least for me) a criticism of technology or innovation. I happen to be unreasonably obsessed with both. It does raise the traditional question of "what is a good life" and how can we be thoughtful about how we engage with technology to ensure that we replace drudgery with joy - not just more tasks, things and obligations.
Before washing machines they didn't really have any choice but to wash their own clothes (except for a few very rich that had servants to do it).
The same is true of many things - a huge proportion of the population used to be involved in subsistence activities just to grow food, and raise animals for food. Of course we still have to eat but a far smaller proportion of the population is now required to do those things enabling society to persue other things (science, technology, arts, ...)
This is why you rarely hear about people moving from higher income to lower income countries. It's much rarer to meet someone who moved from the US to the EU than the other way around, and really rare outside of the big hitters (I'm the only resident American I know living in non-Helsinki Finland after 2 years here). Most people just don't want to pay the hidden price of a less frenzied life.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/th...
Sure, you can argue that it makes it faster by finding a more optimal route, but you could have had an optimal route without GPS too, it was just harder.
In general you will still get there at around the same time, but it will have been easier on the brain to do it.
A GPS needs to be augmented with additional data to deal with topology it can't directly sense.
JS Bach is one famous example of a person who walked hundreds of miles all over Europe to visit people and find work. There were many other (non-famous) people who did the same. Lots of travelling merchants, for example. They may have had draught animals to carry their wares or pull wagons full of goods but they often did the walking on their own feet to move themselves.
What do people need to travel 300 miles for today, that they didn't need to travel 300 miles for in 1750?
I think it’s at least worthwhile to pay mindfulness to the situation, and consider if the path we’re on ends in self destruction. Because most of the west is not setup to pump the brakes.
The thesis is asinine.
Do you think it was easy for families of the past to see half of their children die from what are now preventable causes?
We build the same things cheaper, more generically and long, long after they were first discovered.
Electric cars were conceived in the 20s, Fusion in the late 1800s, face recognition in the 20s, ML in the 80s, ect.
Cars used to be a variety of iconic shapes and designs, now they are one homogenized platform.
Houses used to have a variety of rich architectural styles. Now all new builds have the same rendered concrete, flat walled, sharp edges, soviet style.
The internet has automated away our consciousness and conscience, people forgo long term memory of skills for rapid-response look-ups of trivial facts and submit to an endless cycle of similar concepts regurgitated.
Truly educational literature has been replaced with an ocean of devouring forms to fill out. Finding literature and written (let's be honest, typed up or generated) content that gives not takes, to the reader is getting rarer statisticaly.
Cinema is being replaced with lesser quality home theatres.
Dating has been replaced with a 'meat market' app.
Duty, heirarchy, order, meaning have all been drained out and people are wasting time on devices designed to mirror their consumption.
Computing and software has been subtly manipulated to force users to think as the software provider does, and to waste their time brutally, if they do not.
Agent Smith is more relatable everyday. It really became the machines' society when they did the thinking for us.
It is deeply sad to watch people waste conceptual power, like a dog returning to it's sick.
> Cars used to be a variety of iconic shapes and designs, now they are one homogenized platform.
I don't see this. They're pretty diverse in form now, from the "star trek shuttlecraft" look of people carriers and boxy form of the Hummer and similar SUVs, the low-slung form of road sports cars, the cute bubble that is the Microlino, etc.
> Houses used to have a variety of rich architectural styles. Now all new builds have the same rendered concrete, flat walled, sharp edges, soviet style.
I'm in East Berlin, so I get to see soviet style up close a lot. Surprisingly, this is often a better look than the Brutalist style in the UK in the same era: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.5158104,13.4533347,3a,75y,27... (of course, this may just be "the bad ones got taken down, or remodelled, or looked so bad those bits of the city are places nobody has reason to go to — which are all things I suspect of making the past seem rosier than it was).
Importantly though, it's also not at all like the modern stuff going up in former parking lots etc.; and when I wander the older parts of the city and suburbs I see many repetitions of the older styles.
Also I think you may have edited the order without checking the dates, fusion was first demonstrated in 1930s not late 1800s[0], electric cars were 1820s which I guess is still "20s", etc.
[0] we were still arguing about if atoms existed until Einstein's brownian motion paper in 1905, and didn't have E=mc^2 to suggest there was any point to fusion even to those who accepted the atomic model until his other, more famous, 1905 paper… but even that wasn't enough as we didn't know about the mass difference until (IIRC) 1920.
I suppose you might have meant "radioactivity" in general? That was Becquerel and the Curies in 1896. (Sounds like a good name for a band…)
This hit really hard, as I am trying to de-google and to some extent de-amazon. It worms itself into your life to a point where it becomes extremely difficult not to use, and it's extremely helpless feeling.
You could say the same about plumbing, which it is hard to imagine life without. At least with plumbing you don't have to deal so much with literal worms worming themselves into your body.
“We invented a knife and now things got fucking complicated! We have to deal with NEW OPTIONS like to cut the meal or to cut each other.”
:)