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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18158 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Consider the following thought experiment, courtesy of Scott Summer

If the official government (PCE) inflation figures are correct, my daughter should be indifferent between earning $100,000 today and $12,500 back in 1959. But I don’t even know whether she’d prefer $100,000 today or $100,000 in 1959! She might ask me for some additional information, to make a more informed choice. “So Dad, how much did it cost back in 1959 to have DoorDash deliver a poke bowl to my apartment?” Who’s going to tell her there were no iPhones to order food on, no DoorDash to deliver the food, and no poke bowls even if a restaurant were willing to deliver food.

Your $100,000 salary back then would have meant you were rich, which means you could have called a restaurant with your rotary phone to see if it was open, and then gotten in your “luxury” Cadillac with its plastic seats (a car which in Wisconsin would rust out in 4 or 5 years from road salt) and drive to a “supper club” where you could order bland steak, potatoes and veggies. Or you could stay home and watch I Love Lucy on your little B&W TV set with a fuzzy picture. So which will it be? Do you want $100,000 in 1959 or $100,000 today?

I think this is a good counterpart to the AGI questions below. There is a massive conceptual gap in defining welfare across vastly different levels of technological mastery.

It also highlights that some of the analysis misses the largest factor here -- that AGI (if it happens, sadly not if it doesn't pan out) will greatly increase the quality and personalization of a large set of goods & services. If that does happen, it will dwarf the distributional aspects.

The lack of smart phones is only the tip of the iceberg of what makes the 1950s dreadful. There is a lot more tech which has made live more bearable since these days. Medicine is a big one, dying of something which we could cure in 2025 will severely impact your QoL. Social techs are another, unless his daughter wants to be a tradwife, I think it highly unlikely that raised on SJP (like everyone is, to some degree), she will appreciate the roles which 1959 can offer to her. For me personally, even the idea of going back to an age where indoor smoking in public buildings was normal would be a hard no. The ability to own property in a somewhat desirable location without being a millionaire would be nice, though.

Unlike in South Park, there is no immigration to the past or future or exchange of goods with other times in the real world. Inflation is typically tied to a basket of reference consumer goods, and there is certainly some leeway in what you consider equivalent.

On reflection, I think that the utility of having 12.5$ in 1959 is dwarfed by the requirement of having to live in that time. Another consideration would be to simply ask "would you rather have invested 12.5k$ in 1959 or 100k$ in 2025?" That one is not even worth debating, because the stock market has increased 60fold since then.

Yeah, the quality question is really quite a wrench in the idea of comparing inflation adjusted GDP.

Or maybe the other way around, if you want to truly compute inflation there’s no principle way to do so that it counts for the difference in quality. Who knows how much healthcare has inflated in real dollars, in terms of like for like treatment.

Not to negate the premise, but I neither own a TV nor have ever used any food delivery service. I also used Uber Eats years ago when on a business trip. Instead my coworker and I walked a couple very cold miles to a pub. We made the right choice.

According to my grandfather food was good in the 50s, reached a real low point around the 70s and has improved since then. One man's opinion. But, "food in the 50s was bad" is not obviously true. Especially for our hypothetical very rich person.

Scott Summer (Sumner?) is making a valid point here, but this is like the least convincing way he could put it if he wants to persuade the MAGA right, which I presume is what he's trying to do. They'll tend to read this argument as "You'd be 8 times richer but think of all the processed goyslop and TikToks you'd miss out on!!!"

I certainly prefer living in 2025 to 1959 all things considered, but I'm something of a futurist. I wish I could live in 2125.

Right? This is the sort of argument that makes economists look like crazy people. Or rather, like ivory tower academics who have no idea what the real world is like. It's almost like a strawman version of an economist, where the only thing he cares about is maximizing GDP and ignores anything else.

There's plenty of other things you could point to in the 1950s that would horrify a modern person though. For example, most of their jobs were terrible, and families were cramming 4+ kids into a tiny home, with kids sharing rooms in bunk beds. Also very limited heat or AC, and you'd waste a lot of time on menial household chores if you weren't rich enough to afford servants.

and families were cramming 4+ kids into a tiny home, with kids sharing rooms in bunk beds.

What's wrong with that? Plenty of kids still share rooms and they don't really mind bunk beds.

I dont think its like, objectively morally wrong or anything. I just think most people find it uncomfortable and would prefer not to live that way. At least past the age of, like, 6.

I think his point actually is that the increase in quality of various goods is difficult to account for in the inflation, statistics, and so adjusted GDP is an underestimate of the increase in human welfare.

That’s very far from actually saying GDP is accurate

As usual, he's "not even wrong" -- a 1959 Cadillac totally had leather seats, and cost like $10k -- if you made 100k/a, you could buy one for cash. (and it would be fucking awesome-even now a like-new 1959 Cadillac is much more awesome than a new Mercedes or something!)

You would not live in Wisconsin -- you might have a hunting lodge there or something though. But if for some reason your hirelings failed to keep the car clean and it got rusty, you would buy another one! In fact you would probably get a new one on more like a yearly basis, because your company would be providing it for free.

You would certainly not be ordering in and watching Lucy -- you would be going out and having fun smoking, drinking and fucking your secretary. (see Mad Men)

If Zoomers would rather have Candy Crush and a poke bowl, it says more about them than about the 1950s.

and it would be fucking awesome-even now a like-new 1959 Cadillac is much more awesome than a new Mercedes or something!

What do you know about classic cars? They're like motorcycles - cool, but objectively bad:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-cSsuJQiL3A&list=PLoTU9_iCGa6i_C38pwQyg0pBGoov76NNv&index=1

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dXdpi08fmHI&t=32

(and I love motorcycles!)

When I was a kid in the 90s we got take out now and then; as an adult (making much more than 100k), I can’t afford such luxury. Who are all these people door dashing, and also finding it an indispensable example of modern convenience?

You can door dash with SNAP benefits. The whole ecosystem is confusing for anyone in the upper middle class end.

If you can't afford occasional takeout on a salary of >>$100K, you either have a family of 6+ or have very poor budgeting discipline.

You can afford occasional delivery but not on any regularity. Doordashing a single mediocre meal in a high col area literally costs more than $30.

Which to be fair is a doordash problem. If you use your legs you can afford to live on dominos and wendys exclusively even on a moderate wage.

Well, yes, the overhead of hiring a taxi for a single meal is significantly higher than hiring a taxi for six meals for your family.

I can get an entire large pepeloni pizza delivered from dominos for under $20, including tax and tip. And dominos delivers on time. Doordash and Uber eats are just giga enshittified and I can't comprehend why people put up with it.

Because pizza every night gets kind of boring?

I do have a family of 6+. I’m not literally unable to afford it, but it is a very unjustifiable expense against the other things that go into budget. And I’m talking specifically delivery, not takeout

Fair enough then.

To have a 100000$ salary (more than 1M yearly in today money) during the sexual revolution, after the pill and before aids and obesity epidemic ... yeah take away the iphone and doordash.

The rich 1959 guy wouldn't necessarily be driving to a restaurant. He could also afford to keep a personal cook or housekeeper. Or, you know, just have a servant to do all the regular housework while his fancy wife did the cooking.

I think a lot of these "would you rather" comparisons across time are hard to compare, because we've basically substituted capital for labor. So would you rather have a human do stuff for you, or a machine? I've never had servants so i can't really say, it seems like it would be awesome in some ways but also really awkward in other ways

Anyway, "I Love Lucy" was a great show and driving a brand new Cadillac to the local supper club sounds awesome, so I don't know what he's talking about there.

Most humans in 1960 couldn’t make better coffee than the robot that makes it at the mall for me right now.

Ironically im currently living in an airbnb with no coffee maker, so all i can have is crappy instant coffee. But i guess its nice i can stay in an airbnb and not uh.... a boarding house? Whatever the 1950s equivalent would be.

How far are you from a Starbucks?

Premium mediocre!

But coffeemaking technology, winemaking, etc, have not changed that much. You might not have your aeropress, but a sufficiently motivated person (not very much!) could very easily make great pourover or even cappucino in the 50s, use a garden or farmer friend to supply great ingredients for classical french cooking, etc. Camping gear, miuntain bikes, etc, might not be as light or as good as today, but many natural areas were potentially much better in the 50s.

Environmental quality in the fifties was generally poor. Especially in the east, improved management and environmental consciousness has cleaned up a lot- there's no flaming rivers anymore.

Both camping and espresso are key hobbies of mine, and I can’t state anymore emphatically how wrong this is. Espresso technology is worlds ahead. Camping too.

And yes it was possible (if you lived far enough south) to get fresh food, it wasn’t the norm and it wasn’t nearly as accessible.

Third wave coffee didn’t even happen until the last two decades.

That Hideous Strength, written in 1945, has a section in which a character, brought from the 400s-500s AD, discourses on how he cannot tell whether moderns are rich or poor. On the side of "rich:" all the wonders of the modern day. On the side of "poor:" "but you have no servants!" (Repeated in many ways.)

Even fourteen years before 1959, the decline of the prevalence of domestic staff was well-observed.

But a six figure salary in the fifties was the equivalent of making over a million dollars a year today, most of those people have full time domestic servants. That's a very high salary.

According to the original post, making $100,000 in 1959 would be the equivalent of making $800,000/year today, which probably does not mean you have full time domestic servants, today. I think you probably could have had them in 1959 with that sort of salary, though taxes were pretty bad then so it would depend on how effectively the rich person could shelter his income.

Quoth Agatha Christie: “I never thought I would be so rich that I could afford a car, and so poor that I could not afford a maid.”

Interesting. I should really get around to reading that series one of these days. I remember starting it as a kid and being very confused that it wasn't like the Narnia books.

I think a lot of these "would you rather" comparisons across time are hard to compare, because we've basically substituted capital for labor. So would you rather have a human do stuff for you, or a machine? I've never had servants so i can't really say, it seems like it would be awesome in some ways but also really awkward in other ways

I agree, but I think there are other factors in play. Whether it's 2025 or 1959, money allows you to avoid having to be around riff-raff, for lack of a better word.

driving a brand new Cadillac to the local supper club sounds awesome,

I agree, provided that the supper club (1) has decent food, entertainment, and service; and (2) allows guests to enjoy themselves in peace and quiet.

One can analogize the situation to that of airport lounges.

Is the airport lounge open to anyone with the right rewards credit card? In that case, it's pretty much guaranteed to be noisy, crowded, full of screaming children running around, present difficulty in find an open seat, have poor quality food that's been sitting for hours under a heat lamp, and require a lengthy wait just to get in. In other words, the airport lounge kind of defeats the point of having an airport lounge in the first place.

On the other hand, is the airport lounge highly exclusive and limited to people with first class tickets on certain airlines? In that case, it's much more likely to be comfortable, quiet, to have plenty of space and no wait, to have plenty of fresh tasty food, etc. In other words, to actually serve as a relaxing getaway from the noise and chaos of an airport.

I was just reading that Emirates Airlines is introducing a setup where there is a separate jetbridge from the first class lounge to the plane itself. Which sounds pretty great to me. I remember the last time I flew, a man tried to cut me in the boarding line so that he could get ahead of his boarding group and get on the plane sooner. Encounters like that are stressful and unpleasant and having money lets you reduce those types of experiences in life.

Emirates Airlines

Emirates passengers are mostly third worlders and other dregs from around the world. It's such a chasm between the haves and have nots that it makes sense that they have to build completely separate infrastructure for the rich. It's like those apartment buildings that have a separate entrance in the back for the poors living in subsidized housing.

Anyways if you live in a civilized high trust society the majority of people will line up in an orderly fashion and there are only a handful of line cutters.

P.S. don't fly Emirates unless you're rich. Absolute dogshit experience unless you're in rich class. I'd rather fly united airlanes in basic economy for life than ever have to deal with Emirates bullshit ever again.

Emirates has changed greatly as Dubai became more popular as a hub. My experience of flying it semi-regularly in economy ~10 years ago was that the flights were always deserted, so I could get a great seat and sleep lying across a row, and that the Irish flight attendants would give you vast quantities of whiskey with comments like "well, they won't be drinking it."

For those interested in trying rich class, Emirates has both personal and business credit cards in the US with $99 annual fees. Sign up for both of them, spend to the bonus, and you'll have enough miles for a business class ticket or a cheap first class ticket. If you'd like to avoid Dubai, for some reason (the first class lounge is as wildly luxurious as you would expect), they also fly NYC to Athens and Milan, or CDMX-Barcelona.

He could also afford to keep a personal cook or housekeeper. Or, you know, just have a servant to do all the regular housework while his fancy wife did the cooking.

Yeah, looking at the Brady Bunch sit-com from 1970s. Mike Brady is an architect living in a suburb of Los Angeles, with a new wife and a blended family of six kids. He has a full-time housekeeper. According to Google "The median annual salary for architects was $96,690 in 2023". So Mike would have been making less than that back in the 70s and was able to afford that lifestyle. The equivalent of 100 grand in 1959 would have been serious money. You could indeed afford to hire a cook/housekeeper and a maid and maybe even a gardener/maintenance guy.

TV shows are notorious for showing people with better housing than is actually possible, so this means nothing.

As for the 1959 restaurant, I am not convinced that the only restaurant meals available were bland meat and potatoes, even if pokebowls specifically didn't exist.

He seems to have picked a bad year for his "but you couldn't doordash a poke bowl" example, as some cursory Googling gives me the inbuilt AI answer:

In 1959, American restaurants were dominated by diners and drive-ins, which were popular for their casual, affordable atmosphere and classic American food. These establishments often featured chrome and vinyl decor, with a menu that included burgers, fries, milkshakes, and other comfort food staples.

So if we're talking the rise of fast food/takeaways, 1959 was the year, baby!

Fast-food restaurants became a big part of the 1950s culture due to many other new innovations. Fast food restaurants became very popular during the 1950s because families were busy and they needed a place where they could quickly pick up food; people also wanted to be able to get quick food that they could eat in front of their new TVs.

What was buzzing, cousin, during the bleak and barren year 1959? Well, a lot, it seems. That pot-shot about tiny black and white screens? It was the Internet of its day, Scott m'man, just as in 2091 the Scott Sumner of that day will be laughing it up about the people back in 2025 who never even got snail tentacles quantum replicated for their micro-nutritional tasting menus and they didn't even have neural-net brain implant entertainment centres!

During the 1950s, the television became a huge part of the lifestyle. By 1954, over two-thirds of Americans owned a television and this helped form a national culture. Television changed politics by allowing speeches and political advertisements to be televised; things such as civil rights movements, documentaries about Communism, and other big news were aired on television. Many "Wild West" shows also became popular including: Davy Crockett(mid 1950s), Rin Tin Tin(1954-1959), and Gunsmoke(1955-1975). Variety Shows became very common because most programs were televised live; variety shows included musical performances, comedy skits, and animal tricks that were all hosted by engaging host. Television during the 1950s changed the society by allowing families to gather around to watch a performance, for speeches to be heard around the country, for the first commercials to be televised, and forming a national culture.

Plastic seats in your car? Plastics were the wonder material of the future!

During the 1950s decade, cars and other vehicles became more popular due to the affordability and needs for them. After the war, people in the United States believed that roads needed to be better, so the government's money started to be spent rebuilding roads; after roads were made better, everyone wanted a car, and to go on road trips or even camping. In 1950-1951, hardtop convertibles became popular from manufacturers like Chevy and the Buick Motor Division. In 1953, cars were being made with plastic fiberglass or a magnesium body; wrap around windows and wire racing wheels were often seen on cars; in 1953, three cars had air-conditioning and 50% of cars had an automatic shift, and by the end of the 1950s, Americans loved sports cars. Towards the end of the 1950s, station wagons also became very popular for growing families. Automatic transmissions, power brakes, power steering, power adjusted front seats, power window lifts and air conditioning were starting to be used in cars, and by 1958, 80% of cars had automatic transmissions. Cars became longer, lower, wider, and faster; chrome became heavily popular on cars; many cars were designed to look like something from the future to satisfy the people's ideas of fantasy. More cars were being produced and purchased during the 1950s because the economy was booming and families were growing , and the popularity of these vehicles lead to a new way of life.

Women's clothing styles during the 1950s dramatically changed because of the new styles and trends (like rock n' roll), as well as the ability to purchase new fabrics (a lot of new clothing designs and colors were inspired by Asian clothing) because of the great economy.

Booming economy, growing families, mass communication, mass transport, new kinds of eating experiences, a gap between childhood and adult life where you have more leisure time, more money, and more options with popular culture becoming attuned to you rather than your parents (the rise of the teenager), the New Look in fashion for women, affordable modern luxury for the average person: so tell me, the equivalent of $100,000 in 1959 or the equivalent of $12,500 in 2025, which sounds better to you?

That pot-shot about tiny black and white screens?

These days we have big screens, but most people spend the majority of yheir time staring at tiny 5 inch ones. So maybe size doesn't really matter.

While the restaurant problerm is exaggerated, I'm not so sure about the fast foods. There were fast food restaurants in 1959, but a lot of the fast food types we have today didn't exist--the variety was less (I suppose the same also goes for the restaurants). Also, pokebowls are fast casual and that category of restaurant didn't exist in 1959 (never mind pokebowls specifically).

It may also be the case that hiring a maid was genuinely cheaper on a per-capita basis for some reason- maybe stricter gender roles pushing more women into domestic service.

Ermm, also, the whole racism thing. Surely it is not controversial to suggest that part of the reason for a well-to-do white family on TV's ability to have a maid is that this maid is almost always black.

Yeah. I thought that went without saying, but its worth spelling that out in case some people don't know.

This also led to ann odd situation where, for a while, relatively poor white people in the rural south could afford help that middle class whites in the northern suburbs wouldn't have.

It's simply inaccurate.

Humans are not today mere consumption machines, but they will be. And that's a bad thing.

I agree that the goods and services available would (and will) radically increase. But human agency will be lost: there will be no way to set out to hone your skills and world models against other agents, because there will be, in the foreground, AI that is strictly dominating on all fronts.

You can speculate that we could have games or human reserves that are AI-free, but these will be inherently decoupled from reality: we'll be learning a set of arbitrary, artificial rules (ones dictated by what's convenient for the owners of the system), and humans will have to opt into them.

This is all the worst aspects of our current system reaching their apotheosis. The future is everyone being made a welfare dependant, getting gold stars for winning gacha games. Caged monkeys whose brains are wildly overspecced for their lives.

While there were indeed far fewer choices and quality available in 1959, rich people today are not the ones ordering doordash. $100,000 would have meant you were rich, and it is indeed true that even the wealthy had less access to exotic luxuries. But sushi came to be seen as fit for human consumption in what, the late eighties? I remember my very conservative parents believing the concept('raw fish- eww') was a disgusting foreign custom imported alongside their cartoon porn(and that is what they thought anime was) and other bits of oriental savagery. In the fifties someone in that income band could have acquired very good food, it just would have been French or Italian(the average person did not eat very well, but as far as we know they just didn't value good food as much- something as simple as using whole milk in their mashed potatoes would have been a large improvement for what they actually ate and they didn't want to do it).

At $100,000 a year in 1959, one could hire either a personal assistant to go to the restaurant and pick up the food for you, or a cook to make the stuff.

Yeah but the conception of 'good food' is probably a bit different before modern internet, cooking education etcetera. Then again if you had 100k as a 1959 person you'd unlikely recognize the difference having not sufficiently punctured the leaky pot of your desires and could go buy half of New York City for the proverbial 500 beads.

And indeed, there were still people poor enough to want to be full time retainers. Poke, specifically, wasn't available at any price(if you wanted any sushi you would have had to fly in a chef from Japan, and suffer the judgement of your class peers for indulging in oriental savagery by eating raw fish). But you could have nice European cuisine of your choice cooked right in your mansion at that price point- albeit with considerably more seasonality in ingredients than we're used to today, produce wasn't available year round yet.

It’s not just the produce wasn’t available year-round, this was before they engineered the bitterness out of many of them

I goddamn will take $100,000 in 1959 where I can go out to eat in a restaurant and order steak, instead of 2025 where "hey, beef is getting so expensive, go vegan!" or what boggled my mind today when I read it "eat venison instead" (that has to be some 'let them eat cake' moment, except where cake is indeed less expensive than bread) and going out to eat in a restaurant will require a second mortgage.

Yes, we have a lot more luxuries today. We have a lot more choices. And if we can't afford those luxuries and choices, Mr. Summer?

The strength of the dollar was a lot more than it is presently today. It’s one of the problems with using GDP as a metric. China for instance is the leading national economy in the world in terms of PPP. It already overtook the US several years ago.

China for instance is the leading national economy in the world in terms of PPP.

PPP is absolutely, utterly useless when applied to total GDP (as opposed to per capita GDP). In fact I'm convinced the only reason to use it for total GDP is to be able to make misleading claims like this. There is zero useful information derived from the number because GDP is a measure of the total economic output of a country, while PPP adjusts things for cost of living in a country (which means the amount per capita is essential to getting any useful information from it). In fact, on /pol/ they're regularly called "Poor People Points" because they make shithole countries that have large populations look a bit less shitty. If we look at GDP per capita adjusted by PPP it's a completely different story:

China: $27k

India: $11k

US: $85k

Japan: $51k

South Korea: $52k

Singapore: $150k

Taiwan: $84k

Do we doubt that China is the largest industrial economy - capable of the highest amounts of production of useful items?

What does that have to do with, well, anything? This thread is about cost of living/quality of life in 1959 vs. now, not who manuactures the most. I omly brought up GDP at all because Tretiak was trying to make a point about cost of living in China vs. the US using GDP adjusted for PPP.

As an interesting thought experiment, consider GDP per capita denominated in any of the following:

  1. Square feet of median available residence (rental or purchase)
  2. iPhones: not that different from exchange rates, but drops to zero if you go back far enough.
  3. Minimum/average wage: how many hours of other people's labor can a median person purchase?
  4. Calories: subsistence farming, you say?
  5. Some other basket of desirable goods: airplane tickets? Kids toys?

Honestly, I think these same sorts of metrics relative to percentile income are the right way to answer OP's question. And notably (3) seems like a driver of lots of major changes: employing other people seems to have been much cheaper in the pre-mechanization era: the extra cost of elaborate hand-carved decorations for your cathedral over a bare-bones space of the same size might be closer before power cranes to lift stone blocks: the cost factor there seems much worse than it used to be.

But it's also not clear to me what percentile in the past employed staff directly. Even today, personal assistants are a thing, but the salary tier to justify one has probably risen too, and even though more people can buy iPhones, the number with "staff" is relatively constant.

Fuckin' A.

Adding to the chorus: in 1950s suburban Pennsylvania, you had a little can you put out and the Potato Chip Man came and filled it with fresh chips. The Milk Man brought you fresh milk. The butcher came around in a truck, as did the produce guy and the beer man.

Now there were flavors of potato chip that I can get that they couldn't. But I can't just get them fresh every day at my door at a reasonable price.

And this wasn't somebody with $100k in the bank, this was delivered to houses costing under $10k.

The sneering about watching "I Love Lucy" on your black and white TV. I grew up watching "I Love Lucy" on a black and white TV, and that wasn't in 1959! Today I couldn't tell you the last time I watched a TV show on TV since there's nothing I want to watch. 57 channels and nothing on, indeed.

(What I am watching are episodes from the late 90s to 2010s of an old pop archaeology show on Youtube, so don't laugh at old TV, mate!)

Talking about rotary phones like they went out with the dinosaurs. Some of us are dinosaurs, and we're still around! 😁

Time Team is a goddamn national treasure, though.

it will dwarf the distributional aspects

But if AGI happens, then ASI is right around the corner? If AI can produce excellent personalized media, surely it can make better AI? If ASI is in reach, all resources available will be tapped to reach it first.

Distribution is of utmost importance! The distribution of power will be wildly upset. AGI cannot be considered like any other technology in history, it's an actor rather than a tool or a method. AGI, by definition, means a mass-producible high-quality person-in-a-box equivalent. That alone is an unprecedented achievement. ASI is a mass-producible superhuman being. Better to think about summoning forth demons or djinns or faeries, it's vital to cleanse all economic preconceptions.

Economics assumes peaceful competition and the rule of law, unchanging and clear distinctions between capital and labour, a world where 'labour' can add value to the economy... It's not the right tool for the job.

I think the question seems ignorant of what actually produces quality of life, happiness, meaning in life and so on. It's not the temporary pleasures of tasty junk food, quickly delivered, that actually makes you value being alive. Sure, you can keep pushing that button like a Skinner rat, but if you have any sort of human level consciousness you'll also sense the emptiness and fleeting nature of that life. What use is sense pleasure if you don't have meaningful social connections, wisdom, skillful living? It has some use, or else people wouldn't bother, but it's not the food that brings you from a 5/10 life satisfaction self-report to something higher.

Human beings start seriously malfunctioning if all their wants are satisfied immediately and with little effort. There are many things we need that we have no evolved drive to seek out, because those things simply were inevitable consequences of living in a world of danger and scarcity. We evolved drives to get the things that were scarce in the ancestral environment, not the things that just happened anyway. Modernity is more or less blind to those things we need but don't want, and so those things are sacrificed and destroyed to get more and more of what we want. This is not healthy. It's resulting in perhaps the most significant die off of bloodlines since the great plagues. Future humans will not be like past humans by the time it shakes out. The only way out is through.

What are some of these things we need but don't feel a want for?

A) Taking a piss

Unless it’s on someone I don’t like. Then I want to.

B) Paying bills

Self-explanatory.

C) Doing homework.

Self-explanatory.

D) Going to work

Self-explanatory.

Infant mortality.

Challenging situations that force us to learn, adapt, and act on the world, with real consequences.

So which will it be? Do you want $100,000 in 1959 or $100,000 today?

$100,000 in 1959, please and thank you.

This probably comes off as unnecessarily cantankerous, but I fervently refuse to use DoorDash, UberEats, Hungry Panda or any other kind of food courier service since 1: I am annoyed by their """bikes""" on the footpaths all the time speeding by pedestrians at rates that may hurt someone if a collision occurred, and 2: I am steadfastly convinced that this refusal to actually go outside, touch grass and do things for the sake of pure "convenience" is part of what is wrong with people today. In similar fashion, I don't order anything online and don't drive either. I take the train and walk everywhere in the city. I do this even when working late and when it would be inconvenient to get food later in an early-morning city like Sydney.

When other people go out, they barely seem like they're even there. I'm not immune to this myself since the superstimulus is strong, but every single person on the subways and sidewalks is stuck on their phones, moving at the speed of a Roomba, and possessing almost zero awareness of the people around them. I walk an order of magnitude faster than them and want to slap them on the back of their heads sometimes. Everyone's caught up in their own world, they're so utterly atomised, it's increasingly rare to have any kind of spontaneous pleasant interaction with people when you're going out aside from what's strictly necessary; mostly I'm only capable of finding the kind of scripted, perfunctory interactions with a cashier or service industry worker that nobody wants. When there are spontaneous interactions, it's people asking me for help finding directions or carrying their bags for them (or other self-serving reasons for pursuing interaction), or some insane belligerent person who I don't want around me, it's always something inconvenient or abrasive and barely ever something that improves my day. The world around me feels empty even when it's not, most of the people I come across may as well be zombies, and it decreases my own motivation to actually engage with it. Nobody is actually interested in talking to other people. The sci-fi authors of yesteryear writing about themes like loss of humanity were right; their only problem was failing to make their stories sufficiently boring and insipid to mirror reality.

Things were not like this just a generation or two ago (depending on where you live, in many parts of Asia and particularly rural parts of the West you can still find the last remnants of a more social dynamic). While there are benefits to technological convenience and the current-day Industrial Society which I happily make use of myself and take for granted, such as TheMotte, with the exception of medical science I'm not convinced it has made people happier or more fulfilled on the whole - if anything, I lean the opposite. And I am definitely certain that for any average, reasonably healthy person it doesn't outweigh the benefits of owning all that excess wealth.

I'm much the same. half the reason I eat at restaurants is just to get out of the house and have a change of scenery where I can relax and experience the meal. Getting food delivered in a soggy Styrofoam container so that I can spend my meal staring at a screen is just dystopian. It's surreal to sit in a popular restaurant which is completely empty of anyone actually eating there, just an endless stream of delivery drivers coming in to pick up bags of plastic containers.

I fervently refuse to use DoorDash, UberEats, Hungry Panda or any other kind of food courier service

The only good food delivery experiences I've had have been with the traditional pizza and chinese. The one time my friend visits and orders uber eats, they of course fuck up the order quite badly. At the local fast food place, they have a sign that every delivery order must have a photo taken, because drivers keep stealing items. And of course the majority of places on these apps are popr quality ghost kitchens serving frozen slop.

I mean aside from the fact that it makes a already-pricey compared to home fast food meal cost as much as a nice sit down dinner, with drinks.

DoorDash

In the 1959, they didn't have a way to convert speculative investment driven by artificially low interest rates directly into 4th world immigration, so was life really even worth living?

They have easy app food delivery even in countries without mass immigration, and (get this) they also have it in countries with mass immigration where that immigration is temporary, limited, of economic value and NEVER leads to even the hope of any pathway to citizenship (like the gulf countries).

Is always funny getting the 'immigrants mean great food' argument when I've been in plenty of places without meaningful immigration and still the full multicultural restaurant experience being served by members of the local ethnicity.

I've found Tier 1 Chinese cities better than Australia for European cuisines more niche than Italian/Greek despite not really having any meaningful population. They've just got enough social exposure to know what's good and what to replicate.

Immigrants don’t mean great food (don’t they say Tokyo has some of the best French food in the world?). But most American restaurant food in 1959 would indeed by pretty bad compared to what we’re used to today!

As recently as the early 2000's, American restaurant food would have been pretty bad compared to what we're used to today. Much blander with fewer options and more generic ingredients.

Yeah, if immigration policies were different, the social effects of DoorDash would be different too.

DoorDash without immigration would perhaps be slightly more expensive (immigration has depressed prices for low wage labor, but welfare has increased them, and we don’t know what policy decisions were made in this alternate universe) without immigration. If the US just adopted a Gulf-style kafala system then prices would probably be the same, Americans could just be safe in the knowledge that everyone goes home at the end of their stint rather than getting the vote.

America is a democracy, so that would be an inherently unstable situation, some dogooder politician would immediately reneg and give them franchise to gain an extra voting block.

Edit: ask South Africans or Southern plantation owners how this "we can have infinite imported labor as long as they don’t have rights" works out.

"We wanted workers. We got people instead."

Comment about a """temporary""" guest worker program in the 1960s in which the temporary non-European workers tended to stay forever.

Singapore's a democracy (to a certain degree) and been pretty firm on keeping the foreign guestworker-classes away from Citizenship without a significant commitment over time or being significantly skilled.

Gulf States also do it. By American standards they are quite cruel to these workers. We lack the stomach for it.

Gulf States depend. Absolute bottom tier 'fungible' labor are treated badly (though still paid very well compared to places of origin) but anything skilled usually gets paid very well and treated reasonably aside from lack of any vehicle to citizenship.

Or the Zanj Rebellion Arabs. I hope I live to see the petro Islam oligarchs overthrown by their own greed.

Ignorant of the more social nature of life in the past, the consoomer thinks only of how to maximize dopamine with the least possible effort.

AGI will finally let us wirehead ourselves to death! Hooray! The singularity can't come soon enough!

You’ve been seeing that for years already with people’s unbelievably short attention spans. Instagram reels and YouTube shorts only accelerated that. The amount of people I can find who have read a book within the last year or have even sat their way through an audiobook is embarrassingly low.

Nothing wrong with that. They understand their historical role.

Consumers were required to create AGI. After AGI economy doesn't really need consumers to sustain itself.

You know what? You're right. It is a fitting conclusion.

If you made that much money in 1959, you would live in mansion, have a butler, private chef, and maids, and ride in a Rolls Royce driven by a chauffeur. If you insisted on delivery instead of eating a personally prepared there were restaurants that did delivery at that time, or you could send a servant to pick something up.

you could order bland steak, potatoes and veggies.

Food was good in 1959 (though I haven't personally tried it). Consumerism was was well on its way to making Americans fat with a great selection of hyperpalatable foods. Sure, ethnic foods wouldn't be a thing at a time, but America isn't the place you would get bland and boring food. Of course poke bowls didn't exist on earth at that time but personally I don't think it's a huge loss.

If you made that much money in 1959, you would live in mansion, have a butler, private chef, and maids, and ride in a Rolls Royce driven by a chauffeur.

I think it's also worth noting that in 1959, there were 60 million cars in the US compared with 300 million today. Also, I'm pretty confident that lower class people had much less access to their own automobiles. Granted, more streets and highways have been built since then, but I'm pretty confident that back then, driving entailed much fewer of the annoyances inherent in driving in the US in 2025.

As far as dining/restaurants/bars go, earning $100,000 in 1959 would get you access to places where you can eat in peace and quiet without screaming children and such. Of course nowadays, it's hard to avoid people speaking loudly on their cell phones, watching videos out loud, and so on.

Obviously there are pluses and minuses, but I think it's important to appreciate that in both 1959 and 2025, money buys you experiences that are exclusive. And exclusivity is a huge factor in the enjoyability of an experience. The nicest beaches, parks, restaurants, bars, resorts, concert venues, and so on are not nice if they are overcrowded and/or have too many undesirable people present.

Food was good in 1959 (though I haven't personally tried it).

Almost all modern gastronomy (I’m not just talking about Michelin starred fine dining, but like basic techniques) is downstream of French cooking, including the techniques a 21st century upper-middle tier restaurant in Indianapolis or Salt Lake City might use.

In 1959, what a normal PMC American today would consider “good [western] restaurant food” (again, with no pretensions to ‘fine dining’, just the kind of thing you get in the decent restaurant of a four star hotel), existed in maybe 20 restaurants in NYC and a dozen each in Los Angeles, DC and Chicago. A few others scattered around the country in various other cities, maybe a few in Boston, that kind of thing. The food that The Four Seasons in NYC, probably at that time the best restaurant in the country (and which itself only opened in 1959), was on a level below what you could find at thousands, probably tens of thousands, of restaurants across America today.

People vastly underestimate this.

You say, "no good restaurants", I say, "Ray Kroc hasn't even bought McDonald's from the McDonalds yet". If you're someone from 2025 earning 100 grand in 1959, you should be able to shape the culinary landscape of the US.

Granted, there was much less of what we nowadays consider seasoning, but I think (1) the French tradition as you say for fine dining, with the reaction against highly seasoned food that came in after mediaeval times and (2) how much of today's flavours are really "hot and spicy" as against a range of subtle, herbal, flavours? 'Nobody in 1959 was putting gochujang on their beans on toast!' Friend, I'm not doing that in 2025.

I see some American recipes online and it's just ingredient upon ingredient upon ingredient, to the point I go "but you can't taste the meat or the vegetable under all the flavouring!"

I have to refer to Tasting History and the origins of deep dish pizza. This is from the 1940s, is this fine dining by the standards of 1959? 😁

Airline food from 1954!

I see some American recipes online and it's just ingredient upon ingredient upon ingredient, to the point I go "but you can't taste the meat or the vegetable under all the flavouring!"

Yes, and? There's no law of nature that one thing ought to define the flavor of every dish. It's great to have dishes that highlight the flavor of one really great ingredient, like a seared ribeye or ahi tuna sashimi. It's also great that you can have dishes that layer many cheap ingredients into explosions of flavor, like Nashville style fried chicken, or chicken and sausage gumbo, or al pastor tacos.

Yeah, but do you really need cranberry-strawberry-lemon-acai flavor (natural and artificial) 44g of sugar per can glow-in-the-dark fluorescent colour drinks? At some point there's just too much going on to distinguish anything.

The food that The Four Seasons in NYC, probably at that time the best restaurant in the country (and which itself only opened in 1959), was on a level below what you could find at thousands, probably tens of thousands, of restaurants across America today.

What's this claim based on? Just curious.

It certainly matches my experience from as recently as the 1990s early 2000s. Small town restaurants were generally pretty bad, and the general quality of random suburban restaurants has increased pretty dramatically in the last fifteen-twenty years or so.

I don't totally understand why this would be the case. I think cooking is 90% knowing a recipe, so in theory all you should need is print technology to quickly spread quality cooking instruction, but in practice that didn't work. Even cooking TV shows couldn't do it. I've no idea why wide spread internet usage would be the game changer when those others failed, but it really matches the timeline based on my own experience. Maybe it was just Yelp.

It's not just knowing a recipe -- there is a bottleneck of skill (training of juniors can only really happen at a good restaurants, which requires skilled seniors, although culinary institutes cut some of that). There was also the lack of a nationwide supply chain of fresh ingredients. Heck, what like a third of the produce today is trucked from California's Central Valley, which wasn't even fully developed until after WWII. And even then there wasn't an interstate system to carry those trucks. There was also a lack of affluent customers until the automobile.

But yeah, the median gastro-pub burger is probably > 90th percentile in 1960. Even 95th.

Michelin (and later Yelp) did also help too, that's an important factor.

That's one thing. Perhaps the level of the average restaurant has gone up. Probably has. But the claim that the best restaurant in the country in the late 1950s would be surpassed by tens of thousands of restaurant today? I don't believe that can be true. I think the very best chefs knew what they were doing back then, and further back in time too. People have always been obsessed with food and tried to do skillful preparation, even if the highest knowledge didn't necessarily pass on down to the lower classes.

Culinary fashions have changed, at least. I've been to a few semi-fancy restaurants (usually catering to an older clientele) and felt "blast from the past" about some of the menu choices: tortilla chips weren't standard at Tex-Mex places in the 60s, relying on demi glace or hollandaise on an otherwise-bland entree, or tossing some steamed vegetables on the side. On the cheaper side, I've been to small-town diners that, while IMO fine, seem to be someone's home cooking scaled up and offered for guests without formal chef training. I get the sense from movies (not a great historical source) that this was pretty common in the past, but that the bar has mostly shifted upwards or gotten more specialized.

I think it's all bullshit.

It's basically saying people were too stupid to figure out cooking in the 19th century?

I don't believe that e.g. beef stew I might like to buy today in Prague is worse than a similar meal bought in 1885.

America in the fifties really was at a historically low ebb for good restaurant food, and good food in general- that much is true.

I can't speak to Prague in 1885, I can say that the food anywhere outside Philly and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania was significantly less varied and flavorful and lower effort in 2002 than it is today. I know this because I was there the whole time, and because restaurants are still open that haven't changed cooks or recipes in that time.

So Dad, how much did it cost back in 1959 to have DoorDash deliver a poke bowl to my apartment?

$2 in Santa Monica according to the movie I just saw. Restaurants all knew drivers and many had their own.

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