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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.
That's not how inflation works. Inflation has already taken that into consideration. $100k in 1959 would be the equivalent of $1.1 M today. If that's your annual salary, you could be hiring maids to drive to the grocery story and do your shopping for you, personal chefs to make whatever you want out of whatever recipe cookbooks you got for them, foreign or domestic, and delivery drivers to do your shopping while you sit in your home cinema.
Yes, you wouldn't have smartphones or modern medicine, but you'd have the best things available to anyone at the time. This is a bad thought experiment comparing middle class now to middle class 1950s. The entire point is that you would not be middle class, you would be rich. Why would a rich person have a little TV set with a fuzzy picture?
Yes, I would rather be rich now than rich then, if I could choose between $1.1 M now or $100k in 1959. But that's not what he said.
Worth pointing out: although $1.1M is nothing to sneeze at, $100k in 1950s NYC would afford you a live-in maid, live-in cook, and a governess, along with a 10 room apartment on Park Ave and a house in the Hamptons. I don't think $1.1M would go that far today; I think you'd need maybe $3M or so for the same baseline luxury (though, the 1950s elite would have an even harder time buying an iPhone).
True, but that’s because 1960 was at the trough of a 150 year housing cycle. Maids and cooks weren’t actually much cheaper (the big pay rises for them happened between about 1915 and 1945, and mass immigration, especially illegal, means maids in NYC are still quite inexpensive) relatively, but prime real estate was probably 1/6th to 1/10th the price. In the 1950s you could buy gilded age mansions at a quarter of what they cost to make, in not-inflation-adjusted dollars, in the 1880s!
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If you pay each employee a generous $100k/yr then you can easily do that with 1/3 of your money. I'm not able to easily verify prices, but AI suggests that the apartment or house would be somewhere around 30k-100k per month which... on the lower end would eat up a large chunk of your money, but is still in the right ballpark and order of magnitude, so you could probably afford one but not both.
Inflation is not uniform. And land in particular is especially resistant to technological improvement, so it makes sense that its relative price has increased much more (as population grows) than most other things. Meanwhile stuff like super fancy technology is much cheaper than the equivalent in the 1950s, and those all averaged together produce the effective inflation rate. So the modern version would give you have a smaller house but with fancier computers and smart technology, which is either better or worse depending on your preferences, but should average out to about the same.
Or, another way of thinking about it is that the $1.1M person is less rich today compared to everyone else than the $100k 1959 person would be, but in a world with cheaper and more plentiful goods and services their purchasing power is similar (greater among goods and services which have gotten much cheaper, but lesser among things that haven't because they're not actually as rich as the 1959 person)
2/3rds, because you lose almost 50% in taxes. 37% Federal + 6.85% NYS + 3.876% NYC.
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$100K today would be $12.5K in 1959 (PCE wise).
Is that relevant?
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