This opinion is impossible to hold if you know literally anything about how much standards of living have changed in the past 100 years. It’s the equivalent of calling the sky green.
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alright im reply guying on this one because the OP is quite right that the savings gained from tech and automation very rarely accrue to the worker unless labor has power either formally or via very low unemployment. Good Manufacturing Jobs of the past were awful before we MADE them good.
aug 17, 2025, 11:49 pm • 1 0 • view
capitalism obviousy creates horrific externalities and inequalities but like, my dude, go look at the LCD TV prices at WalMart and imagine how you would've felt about that price (forget inflation even) just 15-20 years ago
aug 17, 2025, 6:52 pm • 24 0 • view
There are so so so many examples. The quality of food available in the typical grocery store or restaurant, I mean my god.
aug 17, 2025, 6:53 pm • 27 0 • view
yeah tons of examples lol
aug 17, 2025, 7:13 pm • 1 0 • view
aug 17, 2025, 6:58 pm • 1 0 • view
aug 17, 2025, 6:58 pm • 11 0 • view
Like half my immediate family would probably be dead if not for the medical advances of the last half century. People chose to remember the past as they prefer it was not as it was.
aug 17, 2025, 6:57 pm • 2 0 • view
It’s wild to me that people think automation is primarily about reducing costs.
aug 17, 2025, 6:54 pm • 2 0 • view
Primarily about meeting & exceeding ROI targets on invested capital - just too bad quickest return is found by ⬇️ labor component of expense side of equation while commoditizing (“enshitafying”) the product sold to the consumer at increasing margins..
aug 17, 2025, 7:35 pm • 0 0 • view
much simpler to reduce & remove “the sand in the machine” (labor); which has always been the primary impediment of ever increasing shareholder returns. Maybe displaced workers can learn write LLM prompts - err “learn to code”.
aug 17, 2025, 7:35 pm • 0 0 • view
I don't know what people expect here. The post you're quoting is a response to a post that complains that self-checkout and such hasn't led to lower prices. What do people expect to see? A 50% overnight price drop, with big signs saying "way cheaper because we can do with less labor?"
aug 17, 2025, 6:53 pm • 9 0 • view
Simply put: yes.
aug 17, 2025, 6:57 pm • 13 0 • view
Man, it's almost hard to imagine why we're in the political situation we're in.
aug 17, 2025, 6:58 pm • 8 0 • view
Distribution of income is indeed a separate conversation from level of total income but there are reasons today’s lowest income workers are fabulously wealthy compared to those a century ago and pretending it’s not because of higher capital intensity and total factor productivity is lying to people.
aug 17, 2025, 6:56 pm • 120 12 • view
In 1960, all homes in the US did not have TVs, by 1985 it was rare to find one which didn't have 1+. Etc
aug 17, 2025, 7:24 pm • 0 0 • view
we are like one/two generations removed from a majority of american households not having refrigeration and a wide swath of them not having indoor plumbing.
aug 17, 2025, 6:58 pm • 23 0 • view
Yes, I think it’s important to distinguish that working and lower-middle class Americans are poorer than ever RELATIVE to capital, but also enjoying a quality of life that has vastly improved in an ABSOLUTE sense. These things are not mutually exclusive. We are getting robbed even as things improve
aug 18, 2025, 1:04 am • 6 2 • view
Exactly
aug 18, 2025, 1:06 am • 3 0 • view
My pet peeve is people using one of these facts to refute the other. They do not! I can have a life workers of old could scarcely dream of, while still being exploited to an even greater degree.
aug 18, 2025, 1:09 am • 5 1 • view
And yet, a century ago those same people would not have a similar lense to the lives of the 1% that today’s social media provides
aug 17, 2025, 7:26 pm • 0 0 • view
It’s a little silly to take the least charitable version of someone’s off-the-cuff comment and respond to it as though it’s the reasoned opinion of an economist. Perhaps you could try making your point without relegating others to ignorance.
aug 17, 2025, 7:16 pm • 0 0 • view
The comment can only be made from a place of ignorance though, there’s no middle ground.
aug 17, 2025, 7:17 pm • 8 0 • view
That response just confirms your uncharitable positioning. I’m saying you could focus on their engagement and respond accordingly. You could assume they’re interested in knowing the information you have to offer, instead of just telling them they know nothing.
aug 17, 2025, 7:25 pm • 2 0 • view
It's both things put together, fabulous forces of production and social struggle. I'd say that's the original marxist position, it's just that respect (at times, even awe) for the productive forces of capitalism is no longer fashionable for most of the post-marxist left.
aug 17, 2025, 6:59 pm • 11 2 • view
Clean, hot water on demand, and the safe disposal of household wastewater, are astonishing accomplishments.
aug 17, 2025, 11:40 pm • 5 0 • view
You can drink tap water from any city with zero fear. That's astonishing progress.
aug 18, 2025, 2:26 am • 1 0 • view
The degree to which they have changed over my lifetime is itself incredible
aug 17, 2025, 10:05 pm • 4 0 • view
We went from sushi as a delicacy to pretty fine sushi available in every local grocery store in bumfuck Arkansas in the course of twenty years.
aug 18, 2025, 2:18 am • 1 0 • view
Another good one is clothing, there is literally infinite amounts of decent quality clothing at cheap (insanely cheap) prices at all times.
aug 18, 2025, 2:18 am • 1 0 • view
Yeah an awful lot of what goes on in these parts is “people making bold pronouncements about the vast sweep of human history and intellectual development” while not knowing anything about anything before 1990.
aug 17, 2025, 6:51 pm • 20 0 • view
I mean this is fine in its own way. This is just “kids in dorm rooms” since the dawn of time. But you’ve got to be aware that’s what you are lol.
aug 17, 2025, 6:52 pm • 7 0 • view
A medieval peasant had more days off than we do. I am very intelligent.
aug 17, 2025, 6:52 pm • 10 0 • view
This one drives me nuts because the source of the claim leads to a supposed preprint paper that no one has copies of, doesn't appear on it's purported author's CV, and whose purported author has estimates of like 320 working days in their other work.
aug 17, 2025, 7:10 pm • 2 0 • view
This take is so infuriating that I got the obvious sarcasm and then caught myself halfway through a compulsive well actually anyway.
aug 17, 2025, 6:56 pm • 10 0 • view
This happens SO MUCH lol. Just go ahead and write it out. I did.
aug 17, 2025, 6:57 pm • 6 0 • view
like yeah sure on Saint Swithin’s Day or whatever you didn’t technically work but you had to go to church and then head back home to get caught up on “having dysentery”
aug 17, 2025, 6:55 pm • 3 0 • view
Buying a consumer computer costs less in actual dollars than it did when I was a kid in the 90's, despite inflation and advances in computer capability.
aug 17, 2025, 6:55 pm • 6 0 • view
There was a time when anyone working full time could buy a house, take the kids on a holiday each year and not go bankrupt from a medical emergency. Lots of progress over 100 years but the worship of tax cuts and their trickle down bunk is only 40 years old and workers have lost in that time.
aug 17, 2025, 7:10 pm • 1 0 • view
When was this golden age?
aug 17, 2025, 7:26 pm • 1 0 • view
That description is more true of the present day than it has ever been true in the past.
aug 17, 2025, 7:16 pm • 2 0 • view
Less than half a century ago when the top tax rate was 70% and strong collective bargaining meant a fairer distribution of profit between capital and labor workers had more freedom. Now many need 2nd and 3rd jobs just to exist in a society that worships the wealthy over the productive.
aug 17, 2025, 7:26 pm • 0 0 • view
Half a century ago families worked more jobs, had 2/3rds the real income, and owned their own homes at lower rates than today.
aug 17, 2025, 7:38 pm • 0 0 • view
I know your home ownership claim is bunk, so I still question the rest. Home ownership has been in the low 60s since the 60s. I'll admit I am from a country that used to have free healthcare and education to university and those things have certainly changed. Not to the predatory level in the US.
aug 17, 2025, 7:57 pm • 0 0 • view
You don’t know what you’re talking about lol. The home ownership rate was lower in 1975 than it is today.
aug 17, 2025, 10:12 pm • 2 0 • view
Ok but I don't care about the highest marginal tax rate. The effective tax rate was ~%3 percent higher during that period and you shouldn't believe a small shift in the effective tax is what completely destroyed your imaginary paradise.
aug 17, 2025, 10:40 pm • 1 0 • view
You mean i dont need to have 20 kids to sustain a subsistence existence because now a tractor and a loom does like 99% of the work the children used to do
aug 17, 2025, 6:51 pm • 5 0 • view
Dingus is apt. Forsaking manual agriculture on the Mezzogiorno led to no improvement for anyone who remained in Italy, allowed people to leave.
aug 17, 2025, 7:26 pm • 2 0 • view
My impression of reading the history of both automation and of labor is that while there were real savings from automation, clawing them away from businesses and shareholders to distribute them to workers and normal people took a Herculean effort. This savings don’t reach us unless we take them
aug 17, 2025, 6:51 pm • 12 1 • view
Getting the benefits to us as workers has been tough; getting the benefits to us as consumers has been a lot easier
aug 17, 2025, 6:56 pm • 12 0 • view
Supply-side economics vs central planning is really a question of "how much of each do we need." Real improvements in the human condition have really happened and it's wild how much people take for granted
aug 17, 2025, 8:48 pm • 0 0 • view
I started looking for what people in the 60s would think about the future.
aug 17, 2025, 6:53 pm • 6 0 • view
The increase in standard of living has nothing to do with “trickle down economics” because it’s been proven through multiple studies that wealth does not ever actually trickle down. This is like saying the Red Sox are playing well because I stopped drinking.
aug 17, 2025, 6:51 pm • 4 0 • view
I have many opinions about the color of the sky fwiw but y'all ain't ready for that conversation
aug 17, 2025, 6:55 pm • 3 0 • view
So far today I've had honeydew, cantaloupe, blueberries, pineapple, eggs, peppers, sausage, potatoes, bread, coffee, and oranges. all of these are inexpensively available to me bc we grow them by hand behind the shed on our subsistence plot.
aug 17, 2025, 6:55 pm • 16 0 • view