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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17470 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.

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

you could order bland steak, potatoes and veggies.

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

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

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

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

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

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