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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28917 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so. For example, I made this comment a couple days ago about how everyone was just flat super poor back in 1900, and we're literally at least 10x richer now. I had likewise told the following story in the old place, in context of wealth to afford vast quantities of food (and how that may interplay with societal obesity):

Even coming from Canada, my wife was shocked by how cheap food is here in America. Historically, it just was not this way. We are one generation removed from stories like, "In the fall, dad made his semi-annual trip to the market in the city and brought back some quantity of 50lb bags of flour and 5lb chunks of lard, having a huge smile on his face, saying, 'We're gonna eat reaaaal good this winter!'" (I don't actually remember the exact quantity he said, but it was a low number, and we can easily scale by a small multiplier.) Like, this was a level of abundance in preparation for the winter that they were not used to (obviously, this was not their entire supply of food for the whole winter; they had some other food stored, but it is indicative that it was, cost-wise, an absolute treat). I checked a nearby grocery store's website; 50/5lbs would cost me $26.85. Like, pocket change. (Even if the multiplier was 5x, that's like nothing.) I probably have that much in random cash sitting around in my car. If I lost it or it was stolen, I'd be sad about a violation of my property, but literally wouldn't give a shit about the monetary value. This was a wonderful blessing of food abundance to some people in first-world countries not very long ago.

I didn't completely spell it out, but that was my wife's father's story when he was a child in Canada. (I also hedged on the number; my best memory was that it was precisely one 50lb bag and one 5lb chunk). That was not that long ago.

Yesterday, I read an obituary for a 95 year old who was born in a homestead dugout in New Mexico. Literally born in a hole in the ground.

Perspective on how utterly ridiculously quickly we went from basically universal poverty to nearly universal wealth is often lacking in many conversations where it could be quite beneficial. Sure, some in the capitalism/communism debates (or more generally the sources/causes of wealth and how it interacts with society's choices/governance), but also in obesity conversations (as mentioned) and even fertility conversations. Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!

I still don't properly know how exactly to craft an argument that comes to a clean conclusion, but I really feel like this historical perspective is seriously lacking in a country where the median age is under 40 and many folks no longer have communal contexts where they get exposed to at least a slice of history from their elders.

It doesn't matter how many iPhones or how much fried chicken you can afford if housing is unaffordable and most of "wealth" is actually just zero-sum status games anyways.

This obvious sign this is true is people complain about "income inequality" not "poverty"

See also the invention of the new phrase "food-insecure"

In the future, egalitarian causes will use newer phrases that describe the future ways that the relative-low-status are relatively low status. That means ignoring the number of spacecrafts that the average poor can fabricate.

It is all envy, all the way down

Yeah. Whenever this subject comes up, some people will bring up smartphones and touchscreens, how they didn't even exist, how much memory they process etc. It's just a nonsensical misdirection. In 1980, I'm pretty sure you could work as some well-off bigshot lawyer with one phone nr. and two rotary phones in your fancy office. Today if you're the lowliest subcontractor / gig worker / part-time employee wagecuck, you're still expected to have a smartphone and have one or two DM apps installed because you're expected to be available anytime, any place.

I liked the book Accelerando. At one point in it they are post scarcity. The Hello Kitty artificial intelligence introduction speech to newly created people says things like monster trucks are free. Only original art, human made fashion and weapons are not distributed by Hello Kitty. Snobbish and exclusive positional goods like new fashions are the only really hard to get things.

Great book, horrible ending. Which is about in-line with anything Charlie Stross writes.

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