Although that's true, it's important to acknowledge that you've shifted the conversation from time, which was the original topic, to merely having things in a world where most people have little flexibility in the amount they work anyway. Even if I hadn't bought that phone, I wouldn't necessarily have any more time to myself.
There are many ways our lives are better. See for example infant mortality. To be born mere sixty or eighty years earlier would mean for me personally to die at three months of age. All my time is extra time if you look at it from this perspective.
I don't think anyone disputes that such metrics are better than before; the issue is staying complacent with what we have in a world where we are seeing yet another wave of potential productivity gains being captured by people who can afford to use it to gain more time. Saying "Things are better than they've ever been, why complain?" feels like the wrong approach.
"Hey, at least I'm not dead." as the answer to "Why haven't we seen meaningful increases in free time for first world workers over the past three decades?" is a real head-scratcher.
I mean that we, as a society, had chosen more goods and higher standard of living instead of free time.
It's not an exclusive choice either. At least in Europe, the amount of free time grows with each generation. 37.5 hours per week, 5 weeks vacation and many bank holidays is a significant change from how much people worked in the fifties.
Yes, we can do better. But both our wealth and our free time are visibly improving.
Who is staying complacent? We don't have increases in free time because work is not zero sum; technology enabled more productive work to be done (human computers versus, well, electronic computers) but we still have a lot more work to do. We haven't even reached type 1 on the Kardashev scale, meaning that we have yet more to do.
AI will similarly increase out productivity but the work will still continue, because humans are an inexhaustible species, we always want to do more and more.
I disagree. Having that phone means I do not have to go to the grocery store, etc. having the TV means I don’t drive to the theater. My very nice smoker means that not only do I not drive 20 miles to the nearest good BBQ, but I get time for myself to cook.
Many of these advances in consumer goods absolutely create more time for relaxation and enjoyment.
I already had those eight hours (after work, before sleeping) to myself, and as much as I appreciate the fact that modern conveniences make it easier to squeeze as much as I can out of that time, the amount is still palty compared to eight or nine hour work days four or five days a week. The issue isn't so much that I can come home and get things done, it's why the vast majority of people think it makes any sense to slave away for eight hours under the watch of someone else because... that way I can buy my own smoker?
I disagree, technological progress and productivity do not seem to be so tightly linked.
If we woke tomorrow and started making all goods to be long-lived, nothing single-use, fixed up the designed-in obsolescence, open-sourced everything, then we'd release people and resources for a great focus on innovation whilst simultaneously cutting production levels.
Because we spend a whole heap of our productivity on making crap, basically separating people from money as effectively as we can fit as little development as we can get away with. Our financial system (UK, I'd say The West is all the same too) is tailored to make rich people richer, everything else is a by-product.
Yes, people would work less (and produce less waste). No, I don't have all the answers on how that would work out. Greed would probably cause it to fail.
>You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on?
Bread and circuses? I mean sure, some things are cheaper, but other things are also much, much more expensive. And maybe it's because I'm older now, but I don't think "flat screen TVs" are a good benchmark for overall wealth (I don't even own a TV).
Yet, things like healthcare, housing, childcare and education have exploded in price despite the gains of "productivity". The former are necessities to live and it's dubious that to argue that I've "gained" from productivity if you have traded the ability for me to own a home with an iPhone. The balance isn't there - and I think you have a political undercurrent of people waking up to this. What good is a flat screen TV, if I can't own a home? Have I really benefitted from productivity gains if the equation is so out of whack? Simple math tells me that while a 50in has gone from $9,000 to $1,000, a "starter home" has gone from $200,000 to $800,000. Telling me I've benefitted in this situation is to take me for a fool.
Don't conflate lack of wage growth to the underlying reasons for those costs exploding. Why have those exploded?
Housing: NIMBYism and lack of ability to build, mainly by strict government zoning and people who petition their local governments to not build more lest it devalue their house.
Healthcare: insurance companies trying to get away with as much as they can, while hospitals try to charge as much as they can, effectively creating a price bidding war with the consumer in the middle.
Childcare: More people working, lower supply of childcare services but demand goes up, thus price goes up.
Education: Government effectively making student debt undischargeable in a bid to get more people to get college degrees but this backfired. Administrator costs for colleges ballooning.
So, even if wages had kept up with productivity, if you don't solve the underlying reasons as to why these costs exploded, you'll have the same issues as before.
Anything the government subsidizes (healthcare, mortgages, education) has exploded in cost because it’s built on a foundation of moral hazard. In essence the policies, which try and mix central economic planning with free markets, are lining the pockets of banks (guaranteeing mortgages), university endowments and admins (giving anyone with a pulse tons of money to learn), and healthcare providers (Medicare and Medicaid demand saturating resources by paying under market for the highest risk people).
I’m not saying socialized or free market approaches are better than one another. But the approach we have taken is the worst of both.
You can’t just insure the sickest demographics - you need a distribution. Either make it universal or let the free market compete for it.
You can’t just give anyone a ton of cash to learn what they want. Either make it free for all or let the free market lend to students based on expected return.
You can’t just guarantee every mortgage which keeps interest rates artificially low. Either build social housing or let the free market set interest rates.
I agree wholeheartedly. The mixture might work in other regulated domains like finance, but for the above, it only hinders true growth and development for the tax payer.
I know that comparing averages is not always correct, but. Median home price around 1975 was $100K (give of take), median family income: $14K. Today the median family income in MA is $75K. The median home price in MA is around $550K. You were saying prices went up and you can't afford a home anymore? Then you couldn't afford it in 1975. Should we go back a couple of centuries? And yet we have TVs, Internet, smartphones etc.
Indeed, commenters here seem to be looking at housing as a fixed good with the same supply without considering that maybe the fact that housing is still expensive is that we aren't building more housing, not necessarily that our wages stagnated.
This is a red herring. The reality is that the benefits from all this productivity are distributed to a few billionaires, rather than everyone.
Imagine how different the world would look if the richest person's net worth was a few million, and wealth was distributed much more evenly. You don't even need to look at productivity for this.
It wouldn't look substantially different. Wealth is not cash, you can't just redistribute it. And even if you could, say, take the top 100 billionaires' wealth (let's say they collectively have 1 trillion USD in assets) and redistributed it, the US tax base itself contributes something on the order of 2 trillion a year. So, great, for one year you increased people's incomes by 33%, increasing inflation as well, mind you. Now the next year everyone who's rich and invests in larger projects would leave to a country that doesn't have wealth redistribution measures, and the US would basically turn into Cuba. We gain a lot more from investment innovation through technology, empirically, than we lose through wealth inequality. The current system we have is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.
I don't mean the US model of capitalism particularly, I just used its tax base calculation as an example (and either way, doesn't seem like you addressed the situation of what happens when you redistribute funds). I mean the modern system of free trade, regulated markets of supply and demand, comparative advantage, and so on, how most modern countries' economies function today. For example, India after opening up their markets in the 80s (having previously followed the communist Soviet model) has seen massive growth in terms of the wealth of their population.
Inflation occurs when the supply of money flowing in the economy grows. Bezos' wealth for example is tied up into Amazon, it's not liquid. But suddenly if you gave everyone and extra 10k a year from that money? They'll spend it, causing prices to increase. That's inflation. Not to mention converting Amazon stock to cash would cause the price to crater. The way to get around that would be to directly issue the stock to the government or to the people, as some countries do. However, again, people could simply sell the stock to use the money as cash, again causing inflation. Norway and Alaska have a decent model, a sovereign wealth fund that issues dividends to its populace, but again, it can cause inflation.
Oh, I don't disagree that the current system isn't bad, but, as you said, the Nordics have a much better take on it. Basically, aggressively taxing high incomes and having a strong social safety net seems to work very well.
On the other hand, Europe doesn't really have many companies on par with the US, likely because of the pro corporate policies in the US. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nike, etc. Many companies that people currently work at are US made and it appears that the ability for people to start businesses is what enables our continued GDP growth such that we can even have a good economy. Compare to something like Italy or Japan whose economies are flat, as well as not having new entrepreneurial growth.
Now one might say that worker comfort matters over companies being made, but at some point, there have to actually be companies to work at in the first place.
We wouldn't have the invention of ChatGPT I would imagine. The pooling of resources to create such a thing probably wouldn't of occurred, or not as soon.
All you’re saying (by implication), besides not discussing numbers (which can show widening gap), is that you believe capital and state are necessary and exclusively capable of a productive and innovative society, that populations are otherwise inherently lazy or impossibly conflicted. I don’t think modern anthro research agrees with this. Catch up on Graeber & Wengrow
> you believe capital and state are necessary and exclusively capable of a productive and innovative society, that populations are otherwise inherently lazy or impossibly conflicted.
Where did the parent say anything like this at all? I believe you're attacking a strawman.
You don’t have a smartphone, don’t use wireless networking and telecom, have no flat screen TV, don’t use the internet, and so on?
None of those things would exist if productivity was at the same level as the 1800’s.