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Notes -
Consider the following thought experiment, courtesy of Scott Summer
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's this claim based on? Just curious.
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.
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.
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