> It wasn't until the 1930s that new houses were built with indoor toilets and bathrooms as standard, says Zoe Hendon, head of museum collections at Middlesex University's Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture. "At that time, bathrooms were seen as a luxury."
- https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210407-how-the-bathroo...
If anything, that prediction was pessimistic — if you really want a 1930 lifestyle, you can probably do it with 5 hours a week.
Mocking responses like yours seem to keep missing how bad 1930 living conditions were: such a lifestyle is with one where the average person had no electricity and no indoor plumbing, no phone service, no internet, no TV: sure 5 hours per week is sufficient for that lifestyle.
(Also, according to this graph, just under half of USA households in 1930 owned land, likewise just under half owned a car: https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-rise-of-car-own...)
You want land commensurate with that lifestyle? Sure, OK. $20/h (IIRC, the average American is about $43/h) * 5h/week * 52 weeks in a year = $5200, here's three options in the US where you could buy that in a year, which is much faster than what you need to pay off a house today:
1. 0.17 Acres, IN: https://www.land.com/property/Michigan-City-Indiana-46360/12...
2. 0.66 Acres, AR: https://www.land.com/property/1001-Ash-Flat-Dr-Horseshoe-Ben...
3. 1.13 Acres, NV: https://www.land.com/property/Spring-Creek-Nevada-89815/2031...
What do you live in on this land? Again, I want to emphasise that the average person in 1930 lived in conditions that Westerners would no longer accept including no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no TV, no internet, no phone (mobile or landline).
We won't accept them today, but glorified garden sheds like this are what a lot of people called homes in 1930: https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861319/?vid=396861513
And even adding $15k for the house to $5k for the land gets a total of $20k — a four year cost for someone working 5h per week on half the US average hourly rate.
The current ratio of USA wages to house prices is $495,100 to $77,463/year, or 6.4 years.
A century later, communism, The Communist Manifesto, was the observation that in practice capitalism is, much like its various predecessors, yet another way for minorities to rule over the masses.
Unfortunately, the utopian attempts to replace capitalism with communism have thus far demonstrated exactly the same problems that capitalism has.
A century later, we got Nash game theory, formalising the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma, etc., — I suspect "the next big thing" will be based on this. (Scare quotes because it may already exist: communist thought had precursors before the Manifesto, and there was a big gap between the publication of the Manifesto and the Russian revolution).
Anything economic related is ruined on this board by what sound like ignorant 14 year old children on economics.
Anything economic related is ruined on this board by what sound like ignorant 14 year old children on economics. Ignorant 14 year old children with an axe to grind with daddy.