I think it’s helpful to be able to say, concretely and with specificity, that the common refrain “Life just really hasn’t gotten better for the typical American since like 1970” is materially incorrect.
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A good article by @gwern about improvements in “real life” since the 1990s:https://www.gwern.net/Improvements
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Also Gwern is a treasure brought to you by the Internet, a cornucopia of treasures so ridiculously overflowing with abundance that it pops out a Gwern for free as a side effect.
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(If you’re not familiar with his work a) his website is up their with TVTropes in terms of places you could get lost for days and b) I had assigned a 10% probability that he was actually a pen name for an underground research collective but no he actually exists and is one person
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Makes you wonder if the quality-of-life claims of today imply that people are not as happy as before or if they are but simply don't realize it If former, then that attacks one of the core values of today about progress for progress's sake If latter, then onwards w/ capitalism
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Happiness is certainly an odd thing. There's so many issues about self-reporting, perception of inequality, ordinal vs cardinal scales, measurement invariance. Like suicide, there are a lot of inversions of expectations. (eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/23/the-price-of-glee-in-china/ … https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/15/depression-is-not-a-proxy-for-social-dysfunction/ … )
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Interesting to read in the context ofhttps://twitter.com/oren_cass/status/1230505649794166785 …
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(I read his thread but his car example was so obviously silly and wrong I couldn't muster the patience to read the paper.)
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"I remember my desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil sharpener, but between smartphones & computers, most of my desk space is now dedicated to cats." Great line. Great list.
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Change I’m grateful for is the amount of time saved pushing a shopping cart around stores. Power drill, diapers, coffee filters, books — whatever it was, my parents had to leave the house and buy it, which often meant warring with traffic. E-commerce has cut that dramatically
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In 2000, I came up with a list of changes since 1970: The Internet was an obscure military research project. Slide rules and log tables were used by every engineer. Textbooks were typeset using hot lead. Bicycle tires had to be changed every few months. Gold was $35 per ounce.
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Microwave ovens were only seen on the Batman TV show. It looked like central planning was the Wave of the Future. If you couldn't be home in time to watch a TV show, you missed it. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.sf4m/1bwpsG9OeY4/B9cGwDIQgAAJ …
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