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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.
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?
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