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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.

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.

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