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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Coal miners in 1890s appalachia had healthier and more active social lives than american white collar workers. This does not have anything to do with economics.

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I am not saying you are wrong but from what I understood that alcoholism and depression were quite prevalent in those times. Do you have sources for what you are saying?

An undiagnosed alcoholic (IMHO) I used to know,

would happily spend 6 hours any evening, drinking with anyone, gossiping about completely useless things.

They could be doing this with complete strangers whom they would never meet again,

they could even be doing this with someone visiting to let them know that they were going to sue them (actually happened at least once).

They thought they were very "social".

Yeah, if this is what "sociality" means, please spare me its gifts.

Aside from the drinking, what is wrong with the social activity you just mentioned? Or was your point that they only used it as an excuse to drink? Cause it would have surely been easier & cheaper to just drink at home on their own.

It's hollow and doesn't lead to any kind of friendship or bond. You might as well walk around blazed out of your mind and saying hello to everyone you pass on the street. It feels friendly but no connections are made.

I don't think leading to long term connections (although a big bonus) is a requirement for socialization to be positive. The alternative we discuss in this context is to being home alone.

But then, what is really the difference between chatting with a person on the street without a connection, vs an LLM without a connection? I guess I've had enough of the former to value it not much differently.

Whenever I visit a “chatty” country like the US or UK I enjoy the small talk and casual chit-chat and really miss it in grumpy and silent Central Europe :)

I was just using coal miners in Appalachia as a widely known example of poor people. I’m not familiar with those specific folks, but from personal experience, fisherman in Oregon, immigrant service workers in Queens, and farmers in Bangladesh have active social lives. My aunt and uncle live in Canadian high-rise housing projects and they have multiple large gatherings every week.

Well, considering both depression and alcoholism are quite prevalent today, I think we can just ignore that aspect.

People are seriously fucking delusional.

The wonderful life of a coal miner in 1890 lol. It is just a completely insane idea.

OP knows their lives were miserable. Their point is that despite being more miserable their lives were worse in every way.

Take some take to think before casually dismissing others.

My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh with no electricity, no telephones, little modern medicine. He remembers his childhood as a happy one, even though one in every four kids died before age 5. He’s materially better off in every way here in the U.S. But as to the specific point being discussed here, he had a richer social life with more and more frequent contact with friends and family than most americans I know.

The 1890s were the launching point for widespread unionization among coal miners in places like my home-state of Kentucky. Company towns were increasingly common, and major motivations for unionization were to combat things like being paid in company skrip or letting neighborhood kids ("breaker boys" as young as 8) work in the mines. Their social lives--from their neighborhood, to their social "clubs", to the literal currency they were able to use--were entirely defined by their job and the company they worked for.

Tough to use them as proof that this "doesn't have anything to do with economics" when their entire social life was defined by the economics of coal mining.

I'd wager those coal miners spent a lot less (relatively) on housing and had cheap venues to socialize.

Real per capita disposable income has been on a steady upward trend for decades:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0

Unless socialization activities like bars or athletics are major outliers, it seems likely that in income-relative terms, the average American has much cheaper access to social activities.

(Unrelated, but if you squint at that chart you can see why Trump got elected, almost & then actually reelected.)

That graph starts 70 years after the aforementioned coal miner scenario...

And yes, in the 1800s housing was comparatively cheap because land was close to free and you built your own home. Same goes for booze and venues to drink it because you made your own and there was zero regulation.

Today everyone is being choked by the relatively high cost of real estate (inflation looks ok because we have cheap durable goods like electronics). The death of 3rd spaces is well documented.

When do you think that trend reversed and per capita disposable income was declining prior to the current rise?

Oh, I missed that you didn't use a number divided by expenses because I just assumed you'd use a relevant number. And "real" income isn't great because again, tons of durable goods are incredibly cheap these days, but real estate/food and drink isn't.

Absolute numbers are completely worthless because of the price level of the goods we're talking about in the first place. They could make a dollar a week and it's fine if a drink costs a penny and housing is free, for the purposes of this discussion.

Price level aka inflation of real estate and drinks/food is literally the most relevant number here.

Edit - I did some napkin maths. A beer in 1890 was about 3 times cheaper than today relative to income, assuming Google's numbers are somewhat accurate.

Also, anecdotally, food and drink in North America are expensive. We have a second home in Czech Republic, and beer is about 4-5x cheaper there than in Canada, while incomes are only about 30% less, and for young people the gap is even less.

Economics drives longer working hours - don't American averages exceed Japan now?

Americans, and almost everyone else, work 33% less than they did in 1900: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever

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