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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

In many cases, quality is being driven down by automation that’s drastically cheaper and produces results that are deemed “good enough”.

Some of this is inevitable as new products and services move from being high end to mass-market, and it’s perhaps a bit chicken-and-egg to determine whether we accept this because we most people never really cared about quality that much anyway or because we just learn to accept what we’re given.

But it feels like there could be a world where automation still reduces costs while still maintaining a high level of quality, even if it’s not quite as cheap as it is now.

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I once found some old price catalogues (early 20c) for shoes etc. and estimated the items there are barely any cheaper today in real terms. Now obviously that's partly because we have cheaper substitutes today, so we've lost economies of scale when building things the old-fashioned way and the modern equivalent has to be made bespoke... but it's still pretty alarming given we should be ~10x richer.

But consider an example which can't be blamed on that. My city (Melbourne) has a big century-old tram network. The network used to cover the city, now it covers only the inner city because it hasn't ever been expanded. We can't expand it because it's too expensive. Why could we afford to cover the whole city a century ago when we were 10x poorer? With increasing density it should be even more affordable to build mass-transit.

Obviously people blame the latter example on declining state capacity, but I'm not sure state capacity is doing any worse than Google capacity or General Electric capacity.

I often wonder the same thing. My conclusion has been that automobile infrastructure swallowed the budget.

Definitely this is what was happening mid-century (when indeed everyone else was ripping out their tram networks entirely).

But I think if you look at modern light-rail projects there really has been such insane cost-inflation it wouldn't be worth covering the city with trams even with a much bigger budget. Also because such a large fraction of the price is admin etc., it creates a bias towards more expensive infra (heavy rail) because the paperwork overhead is similar either way so you get more bang for your buck.

Melbourne specifically is cooked by the rate of growth, and declining tax revenue per capita.

When we funded the majority of the big infrastructure pushes our rate of growth was lower, and gdppc (and revenue/PC) was exploding. This generally ended with the start of big multicultural Australia policy in the late 60's.

So in comparison, the amount of infrastructure we need to build is greater per capita, as it has to try to cover the future population predictions, it needs to be done over less years as well.

Then we can get into the migration policy that's causing a decline in gdppc.

Since the beginning of Australia as a colony it has been: more people=more labour=more production capacity=more wealth.

So did we just run out of useful things to do with people? Or did we concentrate the wealth away from the masses and blame the same immigration that created Australia in the first place?

No, we really did not have a history like that remotely. It's a bit alarming to see a historical fact states so completely incorrectly.

We had a hugely restrictive immigration policy, (have a look at the rate of growth over time) followed by multiple wars that meaningfully reduced the population... We were winning the Malthusian game, just by having lots of resources per person available.

The policies you have probably heard called "white Australia" were more accurately understood as immigration restriction policy. If you read anything published at the time, there was only slightly less animosity for white english migration as the rest of the world. This was the era of communism and workers rights, and the workers absolutely understood that their labour was being devalued.

What declined is will, which is a function of testosterone (down about 50% since 1970).

> What declined is will, which is a function of testosterone

That's a really interesting claim. Do you have any sources that explain this further?

Thanks. I spent a few minutes reflecting on this and googling papers.

Turns out that "will" is a vague concept and doesn't have great neurological or animal models.

However, we can use some reasonable proxies!

I would argue that "libido" is the most obvious one. I recently heard a multimillionaire admit (with some embarrassment) that "we really do all this to get girls."

( I assume "libido is a function of testosterone" requires no citation ;)

Testosterone directly affects dopamine levels, dopamine sensitivity, and willingness to engage in competitive behavior:

https://www.edenclinic.co.uk/post/testosterone-and-the-brain

Another factor is "goal-directed behavior", which is mediated indirectly by "increased sense of agency"

> these results further imply that through an embodied SoA, testosterone can ultimately modulate higher-order experiences of social power and goal-directed behaviour.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Effect-of-Testoste...

At the societal level there is a fascinating (and deeply disturbing) book by J. D. Unwin, who studied thousands of civilizations:

>The book concluded with the theory that as societies develop, they become more sexually liberal, accelerating the social entropy of the society, thereby diminishing its "creative" and "expansive" energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_Culture

Notably, conscientiousness and executive function are not enhanced by testosterone. However, deficiency is associated with fatigue, depression, brain fog etc. So it supports "will" by supporting overall health, and a population-wide ~50% decline does not sound healthy to me.

I would say it is because of the Baumol effect.

Construction is not massively more efficient today compared to a century ago, while salaries have massively increased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

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