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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 lack of smart phones is only the tip of the iceberg of what makes the 1950s dreadful. There is a lot more tech which has made live more bearable since these days. Medicine is a big one, dying of something which we could cure in 2025 will severely impact your QoL. Social techs are another, unless his daughter wants to be a tradwife, I think it highly unlikely that raised on SJP (like everyone is, to some degree), she will appreciate the roles which 1959 can offer to her. For me personally, even the idea of going back to an age where indoor smoking in public buildings was normal would be a hard no. The ability to own property in a somewhat desirable location without being a millionaire would be nice, though.
Unlike in South Park, there is no immigration to the past or future or exchange of goods with other times in the real world. Inflation is typically tied to a basket of reference consumer goods, and there is certainly some leeway in what you consider equivalent.
On reflection, I think that the utility of having 12.5$ in 1959 is dwarfed by the requirement of having to live in that time. Another consideration would be to simply ask "would you rather have invested 12.5k$ in 1959 or 100k$ in 2025?" That one is not even worth debating, because the stock market has increased 60fold since then.
The problem is that (long-term) historically speaking the big human prosperity question of "can you reliably feed your family now and in the medium future" was the benchmark, occasionally missed entirely, and that has ceased to be relevant for quite a while now. So any other measure is in some sense 'unnatural' and artificial.
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