Comment by aebtebeten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aebtebeten | Hacker News Reader

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a) As he titled the paper "possibilities" then the "predicted" vocabulary is clickbait; has anyone explored if it's possible to buy a 1930s basket on 15 hours of 2020s labour?

b) From: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/cont...

> I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is.

Note the qualification "in progressive countries"; have we any?

c) I've heard that the ratio between the cost of nails and the price of lettuce is still more or less the same as it was in the 1770s; the big difference is that in the 2020s a "yeoman farmer" doesn't want to buy nails with their market goods, but wants to buy cars and smartphones.

d) Finally, on the parochial basis that my life revolves around informatics, we've vastly exceeded the 4-8 times Keynes actually predicted.

His future is here — it's just not evenly distributed.

Lagniappe: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1729266273-20241018.png

> c) I've heard that the ratio between the cost of nails and the price of lettuce is still more or less the same as it was in the 1770s.

This feels like it can’t be correct.

Nails were expensive and difficult to obtain in the American colonies, so that abandoned houses were sometimes deliberately burned down to allow recovery of used nails from the ashes. This became such a problem in Virginia that a law was created to stop people from burning their houses when they moved. [0]

And nails were a significant expense in Thoreau’s cabin in _Walden_, c.a. 1850s

Maybe lettuce was a lot more expensive back then than I realize, though. I assume that produce is close to “free”, since you can grow it yourself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nail_(fastener)

Prior to the invention of refrigerated train cars, fresh lettuce wasn't available at any price in certain parts of the country outside of harvest season.

Great point, I wasn't thinking of that.

So, especially in the northern cities, maybe the lettuce:nails ratio held true.

That makes it feel like a trick question, though. I wonder what the situation looked like for hardy vegetables like potatoes, onions, corn, squash.

c) and d) could interact better if we replace smartphones with erm, ASICs, as yeomen farmers who nerd out on postindustrial commodities number in the ... thousands (it's hard to snare them even on HN/reddit?)

(Of course an even better substitution would be purity level 9-n quartz sand but such farmers number in the zero to one)

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