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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.
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??!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!"
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Just looked it up; cute passage:
Reminds me of this scene from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (published in 1859, but the scene takes place in 1780):
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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.
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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)
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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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:
So if we're talking the rise of fast food/takeaways, 1959 was the year, baby!
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!
Plastic seats in your car? Plastics were the wonder material of the future!
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?
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".
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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).
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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.
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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.
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It's simply inaccurate.
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