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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17010 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Taking a piss.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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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