How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.
The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.
And for that, I agree with you, it’s self-selected to take the suffering jounrey
"if you're someone who benefits from this arrangement, to be able to tell yourself that a brute numerical fact".
I think this is the root of your confusion. Humans have long demonstrated the pattern of gathering in groups to survive. These groups usually worked out a way to pool resources to increase the chances of living a comfortable life.
"(if you profit off others labour, there must be those whose labour is profited off of)"
Security markets are open to everyone. There are no restrictions on who can participate. Many companies compensate workers with stock, or other retirement plans that provide ways to buy securities.
What you're describing is slavery. Our current systems are trying to move from slavery to at will labor. I find your comment out of touch with our current circumstances.
Our current timeline is no different and the security markets is the idea we manifested to create co-operation. Now certainly our timeline is FUBARed. If I wasn't so numb I would weeping everyday at the news but the world is still co-operating. Hard to believe but it could always be worse.
"just so happens to by divine coincidence to go hand in hand with the profiteers just happening to have some nebulous quality that morally justifies the whole arrangement."
What nebulous quality? Agency is well defined and a term of art in psychology.
>>” to scale your wealth with other people's labor”
Or you can scale your labor with openly available AI?
I was raised in the art world by a multi-generational art family. None were wildly successful all managed to make enough for a good life. Farmers, bakers, masseuses, carpenters,... all work with their hands generally only artist can take rubbish and turn it into big money. The criticism of the art world you put forward is very one-dimensional.
I'm also an artist, primarily a printmaker. I've made my living otherwise, though my work sells at a modest pace.
I know many artists in galleries but only a few earn enough to pay their bills. Artists who do earn a living are good self-promoters of their work or build reputation through family connections to patrons. The shy ones remain unknown. Hardly a "criticism of the art world" just a summation of decades-long observation.
For every artist turning rubbish into big money there are many who only turn rubbish into garbage. Perhaps my comments are "one-dimensional", but so is implying that turning rubbish into big money is easy to achieve.
Making a living at art is a big sacrifice. Maybe I should have said earn a living rather than big money. The big money comment was focused on stock market returns which was really my point.
It’s hard to make big money using just one’s hands outside of the stock market.
My judgement may have been skewed by families like the Calder. Alexander Calder was a third generation artist.
My families success was much closer to middle class. The big advantage they had was time To focus on their curiosities.
It’s true that being embedded in any societal effort will increase the odds of success for the young raised in the environment.
I never mentioned the simplicity of earning only that it was possible. I have observed this being done. It was not fast or easy but is possible.
My uncle always had good reviews but his pieces were never purchased by the art world. His work was purchased or rented by the science museum world.
I’m glad you are able to sell some prints. The most important thing is creating.
The challenge of selling art is tough. Earning a living leveraging one’s artistic training is easier then the gallery path.
My uncle worked his whole life and never sold a piece to the art world. Society did find values in his objects. One has to take success even if the form is unexpected.
I went to art school and studied industrial design a career I wanted since puberty.
He died last year.
Thank you for the clarification. You're right artistic success usually requires enduring arduous effort. Art, well, visual art, is making something out of very little. Hard to explain why the value of art is quirky. The word "value" is ambiguous, has multiple meanings.
I think paintings, prints, etc., are approximate expressions of an artist's visual imagination. Material value of painted canvas is negligible, price can be assigned by dealers and other players. Real value is individual, created when a viewer strongly resonates with an artistic expression. OTOH market/art-world value is mutable. I've often remarked that it won't be decided which of the art created today is "good" until 50 years after we're all gone.
> The most important thing is creating.
It's true, motivation to make art is more than selling art. A very successful artist in his sixties told me he feels a need to create art whether it sells or not. I've donated prints to schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. It's gratifying to know my work will be around long after I've passed on. That's more important to me than money.
I visited your uncle's website. His kinetics are superb, entertaining but also expressing visually complex, 4 (or more) dimensional ideas. Translating to concrete form is an admirable accomplishment.
BTW I think industrial design is underappreciated. Shape, color, etc., of utilitarian objects has to be determined by at least one real person. Some of these objects are endowed with subtle beauty. Working with beautiful things makes the labor less burdensome.
If you're using "scale your labour" to mean "scale your output". Well, two cases: your selling your labour as an employee, or your output directly. Either way: the market won't value them above their cost of substitution, which is just the cost of substitution of your original, non AI labour, plus the cost of the AI (an ever cheaper commodity).
Could capital owners try to capture it all? I'm sure. But it's not a natural result of the technology, it's just whether we choose to allow it or not.
Unless the capability to create high productivity enabling AI is in the hands of every person, or the control of the centralized means of that AI production is with a representative government (as opposed to capital-controlled government), it is a natural result of current AI technology for capital to capture all the productivity gains.
> it's just whether we choose to allow it or not.
It will probably some combination of the above. Capital will still have disproportionate but not absolute control over the technology, but popular discontent and anger, hopefully channeled through electoral process and not violent revolution, will force sharing the productivity gains with broader population.
The capability is definitely there, the agency or education probably isn't. Those are both personal and infrastructure choices. None of those are tech issues.
Most people predict Citizens United will cause some kind of upheaval eventually. Maybe AI will be the thing that finally causes it, but if you ban that, it'll just be something else, proving my point its not a natural result of the technology but more a matter of all that is happened so far.
Then no, it's not possible for the average worker, largely because the advance of technology raised the bar on labor, requiring more (and increasingly expensive) education, all while that 60s worker and their generation, caught in a Reaganite zeal, pulled up the ladder behind them in housing and destroyed public goods.
Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_104.10.a...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...
And I want to understand if there’s any chance to do it the same way with salaried work, not with clever investment over decades, or winning the lottery, or getting an inheritance. Which are all valid ways to have a lot of wealth but don’t tell me the value of salaried work in the US today.
If you want much more than he had, you're going to need to pay much more for it. Bit of an obvious one.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my computer, but as the GP indicated the rest of society expect very different things from you today – more equipment, more education, etc. Those things aren’t just increased living standards, they are increased job requirements.
So we've moved from a world where it was impossible to afford all that stuff and a 7 person family to a world where ... still can't be done. People have raised their standards to the point where they can't afford 5 children, savings and a lifestyle that they think is reasonable. Not much of a mystery there to interrogate. There has never been a generation that could afford the lifestyle they want and it appears there still isn't.
The current world has different technology and economics
In order to match the same lifestyle of the past you would have to be subject to the economic and technological structure of the past
Which you can emulate and it is objectively cheaper but you choose
This is literally the operational principle of the Amish and mennonite communities
My post, and the GP post I'm agreeing with, are saying that most of those aren't optional "lifestyle upgrades" that you choose instead of 5 children and 5 homes. Much of it, like education and technology, are requirements for getting and holding a normal job.
It's true that society has changed, but we are allowed to lament some of those changes without turning Amish. For example, I don't think that our technology and education is the main driver behind not being able to afford children and houses. Part of it is incompetent management of the housing market -- as someone once said, a house can be affordable or a good investment, but not both. Another part is that median income per person has not grown proportionally to GDP per capita since the 1960s, leading to a more extreme accumulation of wealth at the top, which is in turn entirely down to politics (e.g. an overcomplex tax code with plenty of loopholes).
If you're outside the US (like myself), the graphs arguably look a bit better, but there's still a lack of housing due to increased regulations on construction -- how energy efficient new houses should be, where you are allowed to build them, which old houses you are allowed to destroy to make room for new ones (for historical reasons), etc. In addition to the welfare states becoming less efficient over time, leading to less real income with less benefits from the state. (Which are not much better than inefficient monopolies in less socialist countries, to be fair.)
</end of political rant>
Whether or not you agree with that philosophy or not living by yourself in a tent in the forest is absolutely an option
“My post, and the GP post I'm agreeing with, are saying that most of those aren't optional "lifestyle upgrades"”
My disagreement is that they are optional, like everything else in life
You aren’t willing to take the tradeoff of not having indoor plumbing or whatever but the claim that using modern technologies and living according to capitalism isn’t an option is incorrect
Ultimately that’s a choice among infinite options
The challenge is that this is a hard argument to make to most people because they aren’t aware of the hedonic treadmill
I could easily afford the life my grandfather had in 1950, but I wouldn’t have a fuel injected motor, vaccines, a laptop or a job in computing.
My air would be full of lead and my drinking water would be cloudy and smell like sulphur.
That life is possible in San Angelo Tx today on ~15,000 a year, the equivalent of his salary in 1950
Just pretend like it’s 1950 and use the tools and build the community you need to do it like they did back then
No fair using nail guns
How do you get this "reliable, but not spectacular" income in one of these places? What are these places?