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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   23074 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.

I goddamn will take $100,000 in 1959 where I can go out to eat in a restaurant and order steak, instead of 2025 where "hey, beef is getting so expensive, go vegan!" or what boggled my mind today when I read it "eat venison instead" (that has to be some 'let them eat cake' moment, except where cake is indeed less expensive than bread) and going out to eat in a restaurant will require a second mortgage.

Yes, we have a lot more luxuries today. We have a lot more choices. And if we can't afford those luxuries and choices, Mr. Summer?

The strength of the dollar was a lot more than it is presently today. It’s one of the problems with using GDP as a metric. China for instance is the leading national economy in the world in terms of PPP. It already overtook the US several years ago.

China for instance is the leading national economy in the world in terms of PPP.

PPP is absolutely, utterly useless when applied to total GDP (as opposed to per capita GDP). In fact I'm convinced the only reason to use it for total GDP is to be able to make misleading claims like this. There is zero useful information derived from the number because GDP is a measure of the total economic output of a country, while PPP adjusts things for cost of living in a country (which means the amount per capita is essential to getting any useful information from it). In fact, on /pol/ they're regularly called "Poor People Points" because they make shithole countries that have large populations look a bit less shitty. If we look at GDP per capita adjusted by PPP it's a completely different story:

China: $27k

India: $11k

US: $85k

Japan: $51k

South Korea: $52k

Singapore: $150k

Taiwan: $84k

Yeah but basic observational skills whilst traveling indicate that the gaps in per capita living standards don't really line up with raw GDP since so much of the surplus gets siphoned off into non-negotiables like real estate and paying for your fellow man's higher wages. PPP makes sense on that front.

I've spent decent time in the last four of that list and the typical quality of life seems pretty much identical across them. There's no way I can see the median Singaporean feeling 3x as rich as their Japanese or Korean counterparts. It may be the rural parts of the latter two countries are much larger and/or worse off than would be expected. Same for Taiwan being >1.5x.

Given that microstates like Monaco and Liechtenstein have similarly high PPP adjusted GDPs per capita, the rural-urban divide is likely the cause.

unless the rural parts of the latter two countries are much worse off than would be expected

I think that's the main hidden variable, yes. UK is actually ~$60k, and I can't see QoL as better in the UK than Japan, but it makes more sense if you ask about rural Japan vs rural England rather than comparing Tokyo vs London.

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