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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

If you're ever been to a third world country then you'd see how this is completely untrue. The dotcom boom has revolutionized the way of life for people in countries like India.

Even for the average person in America, the ability to do so many activities online that would have taken hours otherwise (eg. shopping, research, DMV/government activities, etc). The fact that we see negative consequences of this like social network polarization or brainrot doesn't negate the positives that have been brought about.

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I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.

For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and admin faster. But…

Shopping: used to be fun. You’d go with friends or family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you’d be aware of other peoples’ personal space, see their family dynamics. Queuing for event tickets brought you shoulder to shoulder with the crowd before the event began… Today, we do all this at home; strangers (and communities) are separated from us by glass, cables and satalites, rather than by air and shouting distance. I argue that this time saving is reducing our ability to socialise.

Research: this is definitely accelerated, and probably mostly for the better. But… some kinds of research were mingled with the “shopping” socialisation described above.

Admin: the happy path is now faster and functioning bureaucracy is smoother in the digital realm. But, it’s the edge cases which are now more painful. Elderly people struggle with digital tech and prefer face to face. Everyone is more open to more subtle and challenging threats (identity theft, fraud); we all have to learn complex and layered mitigation strategies. Also: digital systems are very fragile: they leak private data, they’re open to wider attack surfaces, they need more training and are harder to intuit without that training; they’re ripe for capture by monopolists (Google, Palantir).

The time and cost savings of all these are not felt by the users, or even the admins of these systems. The savings are felt only by the owners of the systems.

Technologgy has saved billions of person-hours individual costs, in travel, in physical work. Yet, wemre working longer, using fewer ranges of motions, are less fit, less able to tolerste others’ differences and the wealth gap is widening.

Yes, this is true. There used to be a lot of local book stores, for example. Amazon optimized that away, while ruining social fabric.

RIP literacy in America. We hardly knew ye.

Independent book stores are booming in quantity since the initial Internet crash.

Be careful about making narratives that don’t line up with industry data.

There’s a lot of brick and mortar retail going on. It just doesn’t look like the overbuilt mall infrastructure of the 1970s-1980s.

Two decades ago, in the Bay Area we used to have a lot of books stores, specialized, chains, children's, grade school, college slugbooks, etc. Places like Fry's had a coffee and a book store inside. The population grew, number of book stores went down to near zero.

Recall that the arXiv was established in 1991, many years before the dotcom bubble. Many scientists still use arXiv prominently for research.

> I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.

"Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.

Setting aside time, is money not downstream from quality of life? Meaning, in a better world one might not need to care as much about money? I believe that time and quality of life are congruent - good quality of life means control over one’s own time.

Costs (time/money) are metrics to help analyse your situation/progress. They are not quality of life.

If you had a huge pile of money but still lived in a shack in a slum, you’d still have a terrible quality of life.

If you argument were true, and people are saving time (or money) due to these new systems, why is the wealth gap widening?

It seems the crux is that we needed X people to produce goods, and we had Y demand.

Now we need X*0.75 people to do meet Y demand.

However, those savings are partially piped to consumers, and partially piped to owners.

There is only so much marginal propensity to spend that rich people have, so that additional wealth is not resulting in an increase in demand, at least commensurate enough to absorb the 25% who are unemployed or underemployed.

Ideally that money would be getting ploughed back into making new firms, or creating new work, but the work being created requires people with PHDs, and a few specific skills, which means that entire fields of people are not in the work force.

However all that money has to go somewhere, and so asset classes are rising in value, because there is no where else for it to go.

> partially piped to consumers, and partially piped to owners.

Or, the returns on capital exceed the rate of economic growth (r > g), if you like Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century.

One of the central points is about how productivity and growth gains increasingly accrue to capital rather than labor, leading to capital accumulation and asset inflation.

Yep, that’s the source of the point. The effort is in finding a way to make it easy to convey. Communication of an idea is almost as critical as its verification now.

I just need to read it one of these days. I keep reading parts of it but never sitting down with it.

Oh hell, don’t make me feel bad. I’ve got a meager capacity to trudge through major papers. I cheer you on.

You're in luck! A couple years ago he released an "abridged version" of sorts. A Brief History of Inequality is the name. Much more accessible than the 700 pages of Capital in the 21st Century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/97806742...

> Now we need X0.75 people to do meet Y demand.*

This is how GDP/person has increased 30x the last 250 years.

What always happens is that the no longer needed X*0.25 people find new useful things to do and we end up 33% richer.

"we end up."

It's actually, "they end up" and the 33% gains you're talking about aren't realized en masse until all the coal miners have black lung. It's really quite the, "dealy" as Homer Simpson would say. See, "Charles Dickens" or, "William Blake" for more. #grease

With telecom, we benefited from skipping generations. I got into a telecom management program because in 2001-ish, I was passed by on a village street by a farmer bicycling while talking on his cellphone. Mind you my family could not afford cellphone call rates at the time.

In fact, the technology was introduced out here assuming corporate / elite users. The market reality became such that telcos were forced kicking and screaming to open up networks to everybody. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (back then) mandated rural <> urban parity of sorts. This eventually forced telcos to share infrastructure costs (share towers etc.) The total call and data volumes are eye-watering, but low-yield (low ARPU). I could go on and on but it's just batshit crazy.

Now UPI has layered on top of that---once again, benefiting from Reserve Bank of India's mandate for zero-fee transactions, and participating via a formal data interchange protocol and format.

Speaking from India, having lived here all my life, and occasionally travelled abroad (USAmerica, S.E. Asia).

We, as a society and democracy, are also feeling the harsh, harsh hand of "Code is Law", and increasingly centralised control of communication utilities (which the telecoms are). The left hand of darkness comes with a lot of darkness, sadly.

Which brings me to the moniker of "third world".

This place is insane, my friend --- first, second, third, and fourth worlds all smashing into each others' faces all the time. In so many ways, we are more first world here than many western countries. I first visited USAmerica in 2015, and I could almost smell an empire in decline. Walking across twitter headquarters in downtown SF of all the places, avoiding needles and syringes strewn on the sidewalk, and avoiding the completely smashed guy just barely standing there, right there in the middle of it all.

That was insane.

That kind of extreme poverty juxtaposed to extreme wealth, and all of the social ills that come along with it, have always been a fixture of the American experience. I don’t think it’s a good barometer or whether the USA is in decline when there has long been pockets of urban decay, massive inequality, drug use etc. Jump back to any point in American history and you’ll find something similar if not much, much worse. Even in SF of all places, back in the wild west era gold rush or in the 1970s… America has always held that contradiction.

Yeah, I sort of recounted a stark memory. That juxtaposition was a bit too much.

However, it wasn't just that, and the feeling has only solidified in three further visits. It isn't rational, very much a nose thing, coming from an ordinary software programmer (definitely not an economist, sociologist, think tank).

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