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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

This is just empirically not true. Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity (with one relatively recent but currently very important caveat, the housing market).

Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.

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> Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity

All of my grandparents retired in their 50s with fat pensions and then lived into their late 80s without having ever stepped foot on a college campus.

You can do that today. But there was a no episode in history where that would have bene the norm or more likely than it is today. Anecdotes are just that.

Where?

The only place I can think of giving pensions at that age anymore is the military. And you aren’t getting a fat pension without being an officer which requires a degree

A bigger caveat is that measuring improvement by 'prosperity' is both vague (are you using GDP, GDP/capita or GDP/capita of the lowest 10%) and arbitrary (perhaps a better measure is the life expectancy of the poorest 10%).

That does not seem like a caveat at all, given that the improvement is completely obvious for all of these.

> Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.

Everyone I grew up with or met via work that is my age or younger has 1-3 more degrees than their parents and grandparents and are significantly worse off when it comes to standard life milestones like buying a home or ever having children.

We are not becoming relatively more prosperous as a people. We have more bread and circuses and less roofs over our heads on average

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