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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   21712 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.

As usual, he's "not even wrong" -- a 1959 Cadillac totally had leather seats, and cost like $10k -- if you made 100k/a, you could buy one for cash. (and it would be fucking awesome-even now a like-new 1959 Cadillac is much more awesome than a new Mercedes or something!)

You would not live in Wisconsin -- you might have a hunting lodge there or something though. But if for some reason your hirelings failed to keep the car clean and it got rusty, you would buy another one! In fact you would probably get a new one on more like a yearly basis, because your company would be providing it for free.

You would certainly not be ordering in and watching Lucy -- you would be going out and having fun smoking, drinking and fucking your secretary. (see Mad Men)

If Zoomers would rather have Candy Crush and a poke bowl, it says more about them than about the 1950s.

and it would be fucking awesome-even now a like-new 1959 Cadillac is much more awesome than a new Mercedes or something!

What do you know about classic cars? They're like motorcycles - cool, but objectively bad:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-cSsuJQiL3A&list=PLoTU9_iCGa6i_C38pwQyg0pBGoov76NNv&index=1

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dXdpi08fmHI&t=32

(and I love motorcycles!)

You seem to have confused "safe and sensible" with "awesome" -- they are not the same thing at all!

As discussed last week in fact, life is quite a bit more awesome if you don't try to optimize everything for lowest possible risk -- including (maybe especially) around vehicular decisionmaking.

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