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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26702 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Yeah. And beyond that the whole “tech revolution” didn’t show up dramatically in any aggregate economic stats like GDP or productivity growth. My model for what happened is basically, we used to do a bunch of tasks using a red widget. Someone invented a blue widget that does those tasks 5% better (but they’re super annoying to use). As a society we switched en masse from red to blue widgets. The way people do their tasks is now very different and so it feels like there must have been some dramatic upgrade, but in reality:

  • we do essentially the same tasks
  • we use blue widgets instead of red widgets
  • economic output is a tiny bit higher because the blue widget is a tiny bit better
  • were all stuck living in blue widget world where everything is more annoying but anyone who uses a red widget gets outcompeted
  • the guys who invented blue widgets got incredibly rich in the (in aggregate, marginal) transition from red to blue widgets and now they’re on Twitter peddling some exhausting reskin of Ayn Rand.

And beyond that the whole “tech revolution” didn’t show up dramatically in any aggregate economic stats like GDP

The way gdp is calculated systemstically undercounts the gains from technology. If you sell 1 black and white tiny tv in 1960 for $2000 it adds the same to the gdp as selling 10 4k OLED tvs in 2023 for $200 each but the latter are obviously orders of magnitude more valuable. If you had a device with the capabilities of a modern smart phone in 1970 it would have been worth millions of dollars. Welfare recipients in 2023 have access to all the worlds books and movies at their fingertips. Literal kings would have killed for such a privilige. We are all rich beyond our ancestors wildest dreams and gdp reflects only a small fraction of that.

Quality increases show up by reducing the price index, making real GDP higher.

And even supposing these things are systematically missed and we are in fact much better off beyond what GDP reports, they should be apparent in measures of happiness or quality of life, and they are decidedly not.

And yet, here we are, complaining that we're still not rich enough. Decades of economic growth over the 20th century didn't make Americans happy, just greedier.

And tech is making our children much more depressed

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