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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16184 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.

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).

Yeah, if immigration policies were different, the social effects DoorDash was having 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

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