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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23322 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.

Consider the following thought experiment, courtesy of Scott Summer

His name is Scott Sumner, not to be confused with Larry Summers or any other economist with a similar name. I followed Scott before he moved his blog to substack blog between let's say 2010+ up until he switched to more politics. I really like Scott's economic analysis together with his pal Nick Rowe with his now defunct Worthwile Canadian Initiative.

Otherwise I agree with him on the point. Inflation is a good way to look at things short term - let's say 2023 vs 2024 with several caveats. But it is wholly inadequate measure comparing different time periods when basket of goods completely changed in their composition and quality.

There is a point to be made about technology and the comforts, others have pointed out the obvious ability to hire people for that much money back then.

Another slight problem is the status differential. A hundred K back in 1959 puts you in a different social status for the day than that amount would today. Yes, you could buy more and better shit with it, but what people often want to buy with their cash is status. Whether luxury cars, penthouse apartments, living in a trendy neighborhood of a major city, etc. A hundred K today you could keep your head above water on a suburban mortgage outside a third-tier city and be respectably middle class. A hundred K in 1959 is enough to live like a country squire or the upper middle class of a major city. Send your kid to Harvard and shit.

I'm guessing there might be more than a few people who would choose 1959.

Another slight problem is the status differential. A hundred K back in 1959 puts you in a different social status for the day than that amount would today.

No doubt on the relative status, but that's kind of the question -- how much would you really sacrifice for relative status.

Most Americans could retire abroad for a song. They don't, because relative status isn't all they care about.

Yet many do, and many more will do so temporarily on vacation or work trips. Given the difficulties and the pull of familiarity, family, culture etc., this is to my mind some evidence for the power of relative status.

There is a point to be made about technology and the comforts, others have pointed out the obvious ability to hire people for that much money back then

This is an old "problem", wittily described by a quote attributed to Agatha Christie

I couldn't imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car.

That's not how inflation works. Inflation has already taken that into consideration. $100k in 1959 would be the equivalent of $1.1 M today. If that's your annual salary, you could be hiring maids to drive to the grocery story and do your shopping for you, personal chefs to make whatever you want out of whatever recipe cookbooks you got for them, foreign or domestic, and delivery drivers to do your shopping while you sit in your home cinema.

Yes, you wouldn't have smartphones or modern medicine, but you'd have the best things available to anyone at the time. This is a bad thought experiment comparing middle class now to middle class 1950s. The entire point is that you would not be middle class, you would be rich. Why would a rich person have a little TV set with a fuzzy picture?

Yes, I would rather be rich now than rich then, if I could choose between $1.1 M now or $100k in 1959. But that's not what he said.

That's not how inflation works. Inflation has already taken that into consideration.

Not it does not. Inflation measures so called "basket of goods" and their price. The problem is, that goods and services inside the basket change a little bit from year to year, plus there are qualitative changes from decade to decade. For instance as of 2025, the price of internet access plan is part of basket of goods and services incorporated into inflation. There was nothing like that in let's say 1950. How could you possibly account for this? The same goes for qualitative change - TVs in 1950 are different from TV in 2025, just measuring the dollar price of TV does not provide the full account of change in quality baked in the price, these are not the same things.

By the way, there is a theoretical framework in economics around this, called Arrow-Debreou model specifically the subsect raleted to time, space, and uncertainty. To simplify - the "same" goods in different time and place are not the same goods. A bottle of oxygen in your local hardware store is completely different good from a bottle of oxygen near the peak of Mount Everest. The difference is so stark, that you cannot just average the price or something like that. This is a long known issue in econometrics.

Worth pointing out: although $1.1M is nothing to sneeze at, $100k in 1950s NYC would afford you a live-in maid, live-in cook, and a governess, along with a 10 room apartment on Park Ave and a house in the Hamptons. I don't think $1.1M would go that far today; I think you'd need maybe $3M or so for the same baseline luxury (though, the 1950s elite would have an even harder time buying an iPhone).

True, but that’s because 1960 was at the trough of a 150 year housing cycle. Maids and cooks weren’t actually much cheaper (the big pay rises for them happened between about 1915 and 1945, and mass immigration, especially illegal, means maids in NYC are still quite inexpensive) relatively, but prime real estate was probably 1/6th to 1/10th the price. In the 1950s you could buy gilded age mansions at a quarter of what they cost to make, in not-inflation-adjusted dollars, in the 1880s!

If you pay each employee a generous $100k/yr then you can easily do that with 1/3 of your money. I'm not able to easily verify prices, but AI suggests that the apartment or house would be somewhere around 30k-100k per month which... on the lower end would eat up a large chunk of your money, but is still in the right ballpark and order of magnitude, so you could probably afford one but not both.

Inflation is not uniform. And land in particular is especially resistant to technological improvement, so it makes sense that its relative price has increased much more (as population grows) than most other things. Meanwhile stuff like super fancy technology is much cheaper than the equivalent in the 1950s, and those all averaged together produce the effective inflation rate. So the modern version would give you have a smaller house but with fancier computers and smart technology, which is either better or worse depending on your preferences, but should average out to about the same.

Or, another way of thinking about it is that the $1.1M person is less rich today compared to everyone else than the $100k 1959 person would be, but in a world with cheaper and more plentiful goods and services their purchasing power is similar (greater among goods and services which have gotten much cheaper, but lesser among things that haven't because they're not actually as rich as the 1959 person)

If you pay each employee a generous $100k/yr then you can easily do that with 1/3 of your money.

2/3rds, because you lose almost 50% in taxes. 37% Federal + 6.85% NYS + 3.876% NYC.

$100K today would be $12.5K in 1959 (PCE wise).

Is that relevant?

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.

The problem is that (long-term) historically speaking the big human prosperity question of "can you reliably feed your family now and in the medium future" was the benchmark, occasionally missed entirely, and that has ceased to be relevant for quite a while now. So any other measure is in some sense 'unnatural' and artificial.

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 almost 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.

I'd much rather live in a time (past or future) where there's no shortage of safe, affordable, walkable all-White urban neighborhoods.

Nowadays it's "pick two".

I'd much rather live in a time (past or future) where there's no shortage of safe, affordable, walkable all-White urban neighborhoods.

I'm not sure any such time existed. You can get safe, affordable, all-White neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s (the new suburbs, many of which did not allow blacks), but mostly not walkable. Possibly the 1920s, but you know how that bubble ended.

A lot of the streetcar suburbs that developed in the 1890s-1920s would count, and they'd probably still qualify in the 1950s.

I wish I could live in 2125.

Well, not easy to say this when you have no knowledge whether 2125 will look like this or like this.

Same time, different places. The poor will be with us always. And there's always this as a possibility.

And not viewable in the UK for legal reasons, which is itself an example of another possible bad future.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine being asked "Oi oi oi, you got a licence for that, chum?" - forever.

Odd, since it's just a screenshot from one of the Fallout games showing the wrecked US Capitol, National Mall, and Washington Monument.

I think he replied to the wrong comment. The comment before yours is on Imgur, which has blocked the UKGBNI.

Correct.

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.

with kids sharing rooms in bunk beds

My childhood in the 90s. I didn't feel deprived.

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

For those of us who grew up in such conditions, going "My five year old and three year old have to share a room instead of having a room each? I'm living in slum conditions!" evokes a wry smile.

Not even close to what I wrote. But hey, if you want to relive your childhood, I'm sure you can find a retirement home with small rooms and a roommate to share.

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

Oh no, I'm going to pin you down on this, no wiggling out with "I never said that!" You said exactly that: "cramming 4+ kids with kids sharing rooms in bunk beds".

If we're going to stroll down Memory Lane, yeah I spent the first fifteen years of my life as one of four kids, two parents, and a bedridden grandmother in a house with (for the first seven years of my life) no running water. Yes, we shared bedrooms, the horror! No, we didn't have bunk beds, because bunk beds would have been a luxury item.

By modern standards where "you put your newborn baby into a room on its own and leave it abandoned there in the dark overnight, no that's normal childrearing, what do you mean that's abusive?", that is probably "oh, the humanity!" By 1959 standards, that would have been pretty okay.

I don't know how you grew up, but there are always worse things and better things whatever era you pick. Right now, there are people trying to cram kids into rooms where they are in emergency accommodation without a home of their own. So yeah, going on about "oh my god, kids in bunk beds, two or even more to a room" as the utmost in horrible awful living conditions? Not anywhere fucking close.

The point is that sharing a room is obviously worse than having your own room. The whole discussion was about things that are better now compared to the 1950s or vice versa. You're not adding anything to the discussion with your condescending boomer comments about "kids these days" or crying about your shitty childhood, it's totally irrelevant.

Oh, poor you. Having to resort to "shitty childhood", are we?

Presumably his childhood was not in the 1950s, and the point of mentioning it was to point out that things are not in fact better now, or at least recently now.

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.

My brothers and I shared rooms (2 per room) until they were 18 and went off to college. Only my sister had her own room until then.

that sounds uh... awkward. i mean. I'm glad that you're family was so close. you're probably happy in many ways, and I envy the close family relationship you have. but wasn't it uh... awkward...?

For social housing in Ireland, two siblings of opposite sex can share room until age ten. Two siblings of same sex, no specific age limit. Where overcrowding (and thus can apply for social housing under needs) happens is if you have to have two siblings of opposite sex room-sharing past age ten or occupancy past the square footage limits.

63.—A house shall for the purposes of this Act be deemed to be overcrowded at any time when the number of persons ordinarily sleeping in the house and the number of rooms therein either—

(a) are such that any two of those persons, being persons of ten years of age or more of opposite sexes and not being persons living together as husband and wife, must sleep in the same room, or

(b) are such that the free air space in any room used as a sleeping apartment, for any person is less than four hundred cubic feet (the height of the room, if it exceeds eight feet, being taken to be eight feet, for the purpose of calculating free air space),

and “overcrowding” shall be construed accordingly.

It's been ten years since I worked in the social housing department of our local council, but yeah: we used to smile when single mothers would make applications for "I need a three bedroom house because I have two kids and they need a room each". Not gonna happen, lady, if your kids are under the age of ten.

Link

The US's IPMC (International Property Maintenance Code) incorporates an equivalent of ¶ b, but not of ¶ a.

Every habitable room shall contain not less than 70 square feet, and every bedroom occupied by more than one person shall contain not less than 50 square feet of floor area for each occupant thereof.

Not at all? We each had our own beds, and we each had our own "half" of the room that we wouldn't go into (other than passing through on our way in/out of the room). Really nothing awkward at all. The brother I shared a room with was 5 years older than me so I had my own room from age 13 onward.

Yeah, this is one of those Universal Human Experience things; having post-puberty children of the same gender (and sometimes even opposite gender) sharing rooms is either unspeakably verbotten or absolutely normal, sometimes within the same social class just fifty miles away from each other.

It was kinda awkward for me and my brother, even (maybe especially) because neither of us had come out, but it's also just something you deal with and it's not that big a deal.

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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!)

You seem to have confused "safe and sensible" with "awesome" -- they are not the same thing at all!

As discussed last week in fact, life is quite a bit more awesome if you don't try to optimize everything for lowest possible risk -- including (maybe especially) around vehicular decisionmaking.

Again, I love motorcycles, which are more awesome and less safe and sensible than classic cars. I still wouldn't choose $100,000 in 1959 over $1,000,000 in 2025.

That... wasn't the question? I thought the scenario was $100k now vs $100k (which is like a million-ish now) in 1959 -- I make somewhat more than that already and it's pretty great, but if everybody else in my life were also transported back to 1959 I would swap at current salary without hesitation. Poke bowls? Come on man.

I'd also take $100,000 in 2025, over $100,000 in 1959.

Would you take $100k/a now and everything stays as normal, or $1M/a (now) and you can never touch a smartphone again? Nor have a poke-bowl of any kind.

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.

Or all your spare dollars are going into savings.

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.

We would have to bear the burden of carefully explaining to our chef and maid how to make good coffee.

How would you even know??!

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.

With that kind of money, you could afford to live fulltime in a nice 1950s hotel, certainly nicer than an Airbnb.

But if we are talking equivalency, yes, either a boarding house or a single room occupancy (e.g. Judy's apartment in Zootopia).

what does a 1950s hotel look like? I feel like, in some places it would be really good, and in other places it would be terrible. Just luck of the draw, maybe.

There wasn't a middle of the road option; there were cheap shitty motels and there were luxury hotels, with no real in between.

How far are you from a Starbucks?

Premium mediocre!

far enough that it's a pain in the ass to walk there before having coffee in the morning

Fair. For all the grumbling about them being everywhere.

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.

In the 1950s most people were making coffee with percolators, and there was no market for high-end coffee beans. Pourover Folgers is still Folgers.

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.

Mountain biking didn't start until the 1970s, and that was people racing old beach cruisers they called "clunkers" down fire roads in Marin County. There weren't any purpose-built mountain bikes until the 1980s, and these were rigid. You wouldn't get any kind of suspension until the very end of the decade, and it wasn't common until the 1990s.

Natural areas were decidedly not better in the 1950s. Especially in the East, most of what is now forest had been clear-cut prior to 1930 and there was still a lot of farmland. There was more forested area in the 1950s, but a lot of this was still in early successional stages. There was also a lot of unremediated contamination from mining and other activities. There were 44 state parks in Pennsylvania in 1956, compared to 124 today. I collect old outdoor books, and the equipment available was of a decidedly rudimentary nature. Pretty much everything aside from hunting and fishing was a specialized activity that wouldn't gain much traction until the 1970s. Whitewater, for instance, didn't really exist outside the Grand Canyon until 1964. Most first descents of whitewater streams in Pennsylvania and West Virginia were done in the late 1960s (I know some of the participants personally, although they all insist that these weren't first descents but very early descents). Back then, they found where to paddle based on looking at USGS topo maps for steams with sufficient gradient and didn't know what to expect when they got there; som traveled long distances to find streams that were unrunnable. Now anyone can go on American Whitewater and find stream information, including runnable levels.

The point of all of this is that even if some of this stuff was theoretically possible, the conceptual knowledge that allows us to enjoy it now simply didn't exist back then.

In the 1950s most people were making coffee with percolators, and there was no market for high-end coffee beans. Pourover Folgers is still Folgers.

By 1959 you can get decent coffee, at least in NYC; our rich man should be able to get it for home if he cares to. Some perhaps more available than today -- the Mocca (Yemen) of Mocca Java is not available today, for instance, and Puerto Rican coffee production has been falling for over a century.

Mountain biking is a loss, but road biking is doable; the modern two-derailler (though no indexing) road bike is available. Not sure if it's a max of 8 speeds or 10 in 1959. No Spandex kit for the rich cycling enthusiast, though.

Mountain biking is a loss, but road biking is doable; the modern two-derailler (though no indexing) road bike is available. Not sure if it's a max of 8 speeds or 10 in 1959. No Spandex kit for the rich cycling enthusiast, though.

It's a funny question, is your enjoyment of outdoor and fitness hobbies more about a) the competitive ordinal ranking or b) more about the social status or c) more about the raw level of accomplishment or d) more about the adventure of discovery? C will be higher today for nearly every hobbyist across nearly every hobby, A and D will be higher for nearly every hobbyist in nearly every hobby in 1959. B will be higher for most hobbyists in 1959 in that at the same level of talent you will be considered better and more interesting for doing less, but there are also a lot of hobbies that because they are less mainstream will just seem weird.

Road Biking is a good example. It existed back then, in more or less the exact form it does today, but everything was slower. Tour de France winner was about 25% slower in 1959, and we can figure that is mostly equipment and training improvement and population growth since the talent base hasn't changed all that much. The countries that dominated in the 1950s mostly dominate now, as opposed to Soccer or Baseball or Basketball where the talent base has internationalized and expanded significantly. So we can guess that a road biker today, transported back to 1959, would be quite a bit slower and/or commensurately less capable of doing long or difficult rides. But, at the same time, it's likely that your rank (formally or informally) in your town or whatever would be higher because fewer people biked recreationally. People would be more impressed at a party that you biked 100 miles because very few people did that, it would be real freak shit. Where cardio hobbies today are a lot more common, so today you're more likely to find a fellow cyclist at the party, but there's a good chance he's better than you.

Rock Climbing is another one. Today, equipment and access and practice are lightyears ahead of where they were in 1959, but in 1959 you could explore. @Rov_Scam talks about how whitewater access is better today, sure, and the same is true of rock climbing routes, but back then you could pioneer new routes. Getting a first ascent or charting new routes was possible if it was something you were into, where today it would require a lot more travel and/or a whole lot more talent. I climb a lot more today than I could have in 1959, and I climb a lot harder stuff today than I could in 1959, but still it seems like the stuff I could do in 1959 would be a hell of a lot cooler, because no one else would be doing it.

Is it more fun because I'm climbing higher grades or biking faster? Maybe, kinda. Or is it more fun to be the first person ever to climb something easier, or the best bicyclist in town? Which do you get more out of?

How about e) more about the fact that I find it pleasurable regardless of any of the other factors you mentioned? a is only relevant if you're doing it competitively, and most people aren't. I'm beter at skiing than any of my other hobbies, and I've never raced in my life beyond the extremely casual "race you to the bottom" on an easy run with your friends. b is completely irrelevant, because it only gives you social status with a select few people. The fact that I'm incredibly good at skiing means absolutely zero to people who don't ski because they'll never see me ski, and if they somehow did then the fact that I can go down a moderately difficult run would be as impressive to them as skiing Corbet's Couloir. The only social advantage to being good is that if you want to do it regularly, the kind of person who goes regularly is probably pretty good, and you'll have more fun if you can keep up, but this is still a pretty low bar that anyone can attain with enough practice. c is relevant to an extent, but there are some things I'm never going to be able to do and I'm cool with that. I mountain bike a lot and I can't jump to save my life, despite it being a fairly common skill, and an essential one for riding some lines, but I don't see a future where I'll be able to do it well and I have enough fun not doing it that I don't care if I can. Maybe I'll learn someday but maybe I won't. d can be fun, but I wouldn't consider it essential, and I greatly prefer a world where that's more of a possibility rather than something I have to rely on. I'd prefer easy, reliable access to every trip being a time-consuming slog that had good potential of being a total bust. There may be fewer first ascents or new routes, but for all the people who discovered them there was a lot of trial and error. Driving two hours, getting fully unloaded and set up, only to get a quarter of the way up and realize that the route isn't doable may be a fun adventure if you're doing it every once in a while, but I wouldn't want that to be the outcome of a significant number of trips I took.

If your goal is to actually be good at something relative to the current number of participants, there are plenty of unpopular activities that you can participate in where few enough people participate that you'll have a legitimate shot at being among the best with enough persistence. I'm not talking about obscure shit that nobody has heard of, either, but things that were popular enough at one time to have developed a mature ecosystem but that have faded from popularity. For instance, chess has been continuously popular for centuries, people teach it to kids at an early age, and people competing at the grandmaster level have skills that you never will. But bridge is significantly more difficult. Chess players don't believe me, but you can teach anyone to play chess poorly in under an hour; you need to take lessons and develop your game for months before you'll be able to play bridge with the same level of facility. Even computers can only play at a rudimentary level. Yet in the 1940s and 1950s it was America's most popular card game. A survey from the card manufacturers' trade association done in the 40s showed that 30% of men and nearly half of women played it. In the early 60s there was even a weekly half-hour television show where top players (often business leaders and distinguished politicians) would play each other with strategic analysis provided for the home player. Now, the number of people who know anything about it at all is much lower, and they're all dying off, but it has enough staying power that there are bridge clubs in most cities, international tournaments, daily newspaper columns, and the like. You'll probably never be able to defeat the top players in the game, but being the best bridge player in your town is a distinct possibility.

You may argue that since there's no longer any social status to being good at bridge that doesn't matter, but that's my point; there was no social status associated with being good at cycling, or rock climbing, or whatever, in the 1950s. These things come up periodically. In the 1970s backgammon was popular. In the 1980s there were racquetball places everywhere. Prior to the pandemic it was axe throwing and escape rooms. Since 2020 pickleball seems to be the current thing, though it doesn't require much skill so maybe it has more staying power. Disc golf is difficult enough that people will be mildly impressed if you're good at it but easy enough that you can actually be good at it with enough practice (unlike regular golf, which is impossible for most people). I'm sure there are still Parkour people out there.

But there's a friend of mine who is a much better mountain biker than I will ever be, and he's one of those people who can just pick up new skills easily despite the learning curve. We have another friend who is pretty good at a lot of things as well, but he's completely insufferable about it. He insists he's one of the top C1 canoeists on the East Coast. When we ride mountain bikes with some of his friends, he tells us that we'll be riding with some of the best in Pennsylvania. He refuses to ski at our local mountain because it isn't challenging enough, and unironically claims that whenever he skis in the East he's invariably the best person at the resort. I say "unironically" because this is a common joke on /r/skiing, i.e. people complaining about other skiers while insisting that they're the best person on the mountain. I found out about this on a ski trip with our friends that he couldn't attend, and I insisted that I was better than he was (which I genuinely believed) if only because I ski regularly and he hadn't in years. This led to my friends joking that I must be one of the top 3 skiers on the East Coast (which I am most assuredly not). As to my first friend, he told me once that if you're going to say that you're better than any other dedicated amateur (except maybe a total beginner), that you'd better be doing it for a living. And I'm inclined to agree with him.

The upshot of all of this is that the opportunities are much, much greater now than they were in 1959. I said in another post that if you were into the outdoors back then, hunting and fishing were pretty much it. Anything else was a niche activity that was expensive and difficult to learn. These things became more easily accessible beginning in the 1970s and have increased in popularity since then. Yes, it may have been easier to be among the best back when few people did the activity in question, but you wouldn't have had the conceptual knowledge to even think of doing it. There's probably something that exists now that will become popular in a decade that you can get on the bleeding edge of, but you won't, because unless you're in some niche group where you find out about it, or invent it yourself, you're not even going to think of doing it.

and unironically claims that whenever he skis in the East he's invariably the best person at the resort.

If you say it ironically, you don't get any gnar points -- does he also bang his poles together and scream "I'm going to rip the shit out of this" at the top of the run?

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Modern coffee culture appears in the west coast in the 1970's. Although espresso-based coffee drinks existed in the 1950's (Gaggia introduced the first commercial high-pressure espresso machine in 1947) your average rich American wouldn't have been able to find them without making a special trip to Little Italy.

Faster worldwide diffusion of good ideas is a big part of the progress we have made as a species since the 1950's.

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.

I'm not sure how common it is but it's something of a running joke among Indian immigrants at my company. That you go from having servants who do all the cooking, cleaning, etc to the United States where you have to do all of that yourself, even if lots of other amenities are available that aren't in India. "Yea the air isn't smoggy all the time, but I have to clean my own toilet!"

Just looked it up; cute passage:

Merlin and the Director were meanwhile talking in the Blue Room. The Director had put aside his robe and circlet and lay on his sofa. The Druid sat in a chair facing him, his legs uncrossed, his pale large hands motionless on his knees, looking to modern eyes like an old conventional carving of a king. He was still robed and beneath the robe, as Ransom knew, had surprisingly little clothing, for the warmth of the house was to him excessive and he found trousers uncomfortable. His loud demands for oil after his bath had involved some hurried shopping in the village which had finally produced, by Denniston's exertions, a tin of Brilliantine. Merlinus had used it freely so that his hair and beard glistened and the sweet sticky smell filled the room. That was why Mr. Bultitude had pawed so insistently at the door that he was finally admitted and now sat as near the magician as he could possibly get, his nostrils twitching. He had never smelled such an interesting man before.

"Sir," said Merlin, in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him, "I give you great thanks. I cannot, indeed, understand the way you live, and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it: a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone, with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh, but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there is warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit. Sir, I tell you these things because you have asked me. They are of no importance. Now that none hears us save the last of the seven bears of Logres, it is time that we should open counsels to each other."

Reminds me of this scene from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (published in 1859, but the scene takes place in 1780):

Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning’s chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.

Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.

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.

I suspect a family with kids with an income of $800k has a nanny, which would count as a full-time domestic servant under the rules used back in the day. In many cases the total hours of hired-in domestic services consumed by said family would be sufficient to support a full-time housekeeper if servants-as-a-service businesses were less widespread.

According to the original post, making $100,000 in 1959 would be the equivalent of making $800,000/year today

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

$1.12 million in today's money

The original post used not CPI but PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditures). When the Fed talks about an inflation target, it's PCE they mean. $100,000 in January 1959 is $839,400 in today's money by that index.

(The original post also said $100,000 now was $12,500 then, so it was clearly rounding to a factor of 8)

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 regulars in my social circle say London-Dubai is fine in economy because most of the passengers you don't want to be around are connecting between places that are not London. London-Dubai-New Delhi is a different matter.

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.

It's about the FOV ratio if we're being pedantic. Some napkin math suggests that a typical smartphone matches a 55"-ish TV in its angular size, so a small TV is going to be objectively worse unless you're seated very close.

And even with all the problems of modern streaming TV services, the 5 inch smartphone screen is color, plays at high resolution, lets you watch programs when you want (mostly), and has a huge variety compared to a 1950s TV. And you can afford to have one for several family members.

The original comment is "compare what we have now to what they didn't have back then", which is fair along one axis. But not along another, which is "now you too, Mr and Mrs Average Citizen, can have a TV set of your very own!" In 1959 people only had tiny screens for black and white TV? No, in 1959 ordinary people now had access to the cutting-edge modern technology of TV!

Imagine what VR fantasy tech will be invented in sixty years time. Is it fair to laugh at people in 2025 for not having the latest evolution of that tech, compared to whatever VR tech is around now?

If you are dumped back in 1959 from 2025, yes you are going to miss all the advantages we have now. But "oh goodness me, I can't doordash a poke bowl" is a stupid example to pick, since right now in 2025 I can't doordash a poke bowl since I don't live in the Big City where you can get this (and even if I could, I probably wouldn't).

If you have to live in 1959, having the 1959 equivalent of $100 grand is the way to do it.

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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).

If she really wanted a poke bowl in 1959, Sumner's daughter could have gone on vacation to Hawaii, but she probably wouldn't have enjoyed the native version on offer since the traditional dish underwent a lot of development and changes between "what the native Hawaiians ate", "what they ate after European contact expanded available ingredients", "what poke was like when it started getting popularised as a commercially available dish" and "what poke is like now, in the mainland versions and 99 other fancy varieties everyone has had a hand in mixing up".

As far as I can recall, McDonalds was takeout only in 1959, they didn't have tables inside the restaurant. And they didn't have pickles or onions for your burger.

McDonald's menus through the years video here.

Interesting to learn that for the Catholics, someone introduced the Filet O'Fish in competition with the Hula Burger (a slice of pineapple to replace beef for people not eating meat on Fridays).

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.

The maid on The Brady Bunch is white.

The maid in To Kill a Mockingbird published in 1960 about a fictionalized 1930s small town is black. Not sure how realistic either of these works of fiction are.

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).

It probably wouldn't have even been that, though. French food didn't become popular in the United States until Julia Child made it so, and even then a lot of her recipes are modified based on what was available to the typical American (good luck finding pancetta in 1962). If you want an idea of what fine dining looked like during the postwar era, here's a menu from The Brown Derby in Los Angeles from 1948. You can see that it's mostly basic meat and seafood dishes. Few Americans in 2025 would be willing to pay the equivalent of $30 for what amounts to a country-fried chicken breast with gravy and consider it fine dining.

When did it become possible to get good French or Italian food in major US cities that were not NYC? My father (born 1952) grew up in an upper-middle class family in London and says he was never aware of a time when you couldn't get decent French food if you could afford it.

Certainly Italian would have been available in Philadelphia and Baltimore also. Washington, D.C. would have had French and Italian.

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

Yeah but basic observational skills whilst traveling indicate that the gaps in per capita living standards don't really line up with raw GDP since so much of the surplus gets siphoned off into non-negotiables like real estate and paying for your fellow man's higher wages. PPP makes sense on that front.

I've spent decent time in the last four of that list and the typical quality of life seems pretty much identical across them. There's no way I can see the median Singaporean feeling 3x as rich as their Japanese or Korean counterparts. It may be the rural parts of the latter two countries are much larger and/or worse off than would be expected. Same for Taiwan being >1.5x.

Given that microstates like Monaco and Liechtenstein have similarly high PPP adjusted GDPs per capita, the rural-urban divide is likely the cause.

unless the rural parts of the latter two countries are much worse off than would be expected

I think that's the main hidden variable, yes. UK is actually ~$60k, and I can't see QoL as better in the UK than Japan, but it makes more sense if you ask about rural Japan vs rural England rather than comparing Tokyo vs London.

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.

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.

You said this^

Yes, and if you wanted to compare total manufacturing output of two countries you would do it without adjusting for PPP

If making an identical transmission in the US costs $1000 nominal and in China $500 nominal, why are you proposing you don't ned to adjust for PPP ?

More comments

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 actually had this decent-sized essay I was writing comparing neural-net AI to demon-summoning. Couldn't figure out how to start it, though, and when Yudkowsky published his Time article I felt like it wasn't necessary anymore (most of the motivation for doing it in the first place was that I perceived the main Rat leadership to not have the balls).

I will note that some people (e.g. Eliezer) predict that ASI will indeed drastically reduce socioeconomic inequality between humans. Just not in a good way.

In case alignment is as simple as the billionaires believe, I guess that the median AI billionaire will probably be willing to yield half a steradian of the light cone to the rest of us, which would still imply an enormous quality of life increase over our present state.

Even if things go well and the plebs do get scraps off the plate, how do we subdivide that amongst ourselves? X was an armed burglar, Y kicked puppies, Z posted mean things on the internet, ZA was a really nice guy, ZB is from a historically marginalized group... I think we're being too rosy-eyed about resource distribution. If we're carving up the lightcone, we can also reproduce fast, clone ourselves, use up superhuman amounts of resources. We might drop down to subsistence quickly (by immortal standards). What if the people born in simulation demand fleshbags share the wealth they're hogging with inefficient resource use?

We might have extremely toxic discourse like 'Alice worked 10 hours a day as a nurse and is poor as fuck, Bob bought bitcoin in the hopes of buying some child pornography and is a millionaire' except it's NVIDIA shares and scaled up immeasurably, such that Alice's whole bloodline is born into poverty for the rest of time because she took on student debt and never accumulated capital?

There are all kinds of resource-distribution problems that deserve consideration. I think that this is something we need to be thinking about beforehand. Most important of course is not letting psychopathic men/machines exterminate the rest of us but even the lesser problems of wealth distribution have already seen tens of millions butchered!

I think we need a strong consensus on distribution of power, to prevent a singleton.

If you want to avoid a singleton, the best advice I can give you is to go full Butlerian Jihad. Singletons are a strong attractor state for competition between AI in a way they're not between humans.

Trying to wage war against computing is like waging war against guns, you are sure to lose. Personally I don't see any way out of this mess besides a miracle. Our civilization really struggled with baby's first game theory of 'avoid mutually assured destruction.' We still haven't cracked down on gain of function viruses. What chance is there that we can manage superintelligence properly? Maybe actions right now will turn out to be vaguely helpful by some unknown method but my expectations are very low.

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.

Your case is that human beings will seriously malfunction without more frequent infant deaths?

Yes. Have you ever lived near a containment facility for the mentally retarded?

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

Isn't that what video games and entrepreneurship are for? Certainly, modern society is not very Darwinian with associated externalities in forms of ugliness and degeneration, but I'm sure that people have found plenty of first-world struggles to learn and adapt around.

Maybe I'm just misreading you. You're not saying that playing video games are actual challenging situations 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 fervently refuse to use DoorDash, UberEats, Hungry Panda or any other kind of food courier service

Count me in too. Why should I pay $30 for a Big Mac that will be cold when it arrives, which might not be for an hour?

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.

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.

There will sometimes be other diners there... mostly all staring at their screens.

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.

I don't know, I have fond memories of the foot-long hot dogs at Bob's Big Boy in 1974-75.

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.

Chinese restaurants were pretty widespread in the fifties, even in smaller cities (where else could Jews eat out on Christmas Day?). Of course it was thoroughly Americanized Chinese food.

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.

It's a lot.

Food culture is driven with real history.

Cantonese Chinese food has perilously declined, in my opinion. Mostly because the Cantonese tradition and kitchen skills are extremely difficult/timeconsuming to pick up and require both broad and deep knowledge. Entire skills and dishes are being lost at an alarming rate.

Northern Chinese is doing okay, there's more appreciation for it worldwide now. And sichuan spices have proliferated worldwide with interesting results.

Japanese food has continued to improve but suffers a little bit from the increasing (global?) demand not being correlated with availability of core ingredients. Also comparable is italian food, which has responded to going global by a vastly lower floor everywhere, although the ceiling has risen.

French food culture changes in waves every 20 or 30 years, usually as a response to the last wave.

American food culture is driven by immigrants. The "classic" American foods have relatively short histories and Americans are constantly looking to reinvent them for higher profit motive or success. They also get incredibly defensive and regional about the same foods, so there tends to be a lot of variation of what is technically the same food; there is much looser "canon" than there is with say, cuisines that adhere strongly to their history and culture and consider deviation to be near blasphemy.

A changing movement I've seen in my city is that shifting dining habits are driving food evolution - or devolution. Food that travels well and doesn't deteriorate in taste significantly after a delivery time of an hour is getting more popular, as is the quality of batch food that can be made in cafeteria quantities.

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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