It 100% goes without saying that global poverty decreasing is cause for celebration, but eroding quality of life for a economic bracket of people should not be ignored.

If you look at both facts together however (global poverty is down, wealth has concentrated at the top) then it would suggest that the wealth of the non-wealthy has merely been redistributed. Indeed, this is intuitive if you consider the trend of moving your labour to a cheaper country.

Having travelled to many developing nations, it also (admittedly anecdotally) feels evident that most the wealth reaching developing nations is concentrating with the already wealthy / those in power.

So what it feels to me is like that local inequality is increasing while global inequality is decreasing - the rich are getting richer everywhere while the working and middle classes are slowly converging everywhere.

Unfortunately, as history has so far told, the notion that the erosion of the quality of life has led to improvements of life to someone very far away is a hard sell.

Starting at the bottom of the Maslow’s pyramid and moving up, do today’s wages buy less of food, shelter, water, clothing, transportation, etc. than someone receiving wages 30/50/100/200 years ago?

This would have been about 1920 when the Sears kit houses were invented.

Look at this: http://eastsidehill.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/1927...

The inflation calculator here:

32,424.83 in today's dollars for a respectable, quality 8 room house.

Sure it doesn't include land or labour but there's no way an 8 room house costs 32k today.

Today that would buy you a Tiny House on the low end of that market.

In my opinion, and I know we are far richer than our great-grandparents, but anybody arguing we're quantitatively richer than our parents has a long row to hoe. If this is progress it sure is lumpy. As Peter Thiel says the most likely explanation is we've had an nearly completely unacknowledged (by Western intelligentsia) stagnation technologically.

Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past.

So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.

Have you been to the UK recently? :)

I don't know how much of an increase there was from about a century ago, but for the last few decades it's very much been going the other way. But the UK is something of a basket case when it comes to housing; people want to spend all their money on a mortgage.

Tangentially related, not long ago a minister suggested that people could keep a "jerry can" or petrol in their garage and was roundly mocked not only for the fire hazard, but for the casual belief that everyone has a garage.

I don't mean Americans aren't aware of it, I mean that sort of thing never comes up when Europeans discuss how to increase innovation. They will produce 'e-centers' and 'hubs' but I think most of the good stuff just comes from some people screwing around, probably with some things that don't rate much fanfare or seem adequate for a proposal.

My position is not that you're wrong, it's that most of us are missing the subtext of our technological development which is that nearly all of it is computer related and we've papered over failures in a large number of technological areas by simply not talking about them (in society, not on HN).

> Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past.

That is true. I wouldn't dispute the affect of accumulated incremental changes to existing product lines, it's meaningful.

It's true in two directions. For instance many items today are inferior goods to past goods. Here is an example.

New growth lumber is inferior to old growth lumber. Something made out of wood such as siding, framing or window/door frames will require more frequent replacement due to rot, insects, weather. The old growth equivalents lasts for decades and even centuries. Today we rely on a mixture of more frequent maintenance and often toxic additives (protective coatings) and if that doesn't work we are forced to leap to far more complex, sometimes expensive replacements e.g. UPVC, I-Joists, LVLs.

I'm not saying the technology is bad. It's great engineering ingenuity, I'm stating its requirement exists because of a failure in our ability to match or improve qualitative tree farming and botanical biotechnology.

> So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.

This is a big subject, I'll just throw one dart at you.

There is a hidden assumption. Why are your houses more energy efficient? It's because a barrel of oil doesn't cost $1 anymore.

There's a dark side to energy efficiency.

The side affects of higher insulation requirements is that houses cost more, studies on passive houses suggest 10%-20% more in the positive scenarios. The real problem though is that the most common forms of insulation offgas toxins and since houses are meant to be more air tight... The fact is that most buyers of houses and most builders of them aren't up to speed on what is required to do this sort of housing without health risks.

Right now most houses in my country, without the latest insulation requirements, suffer from moisture, mildew and mold problems, all of which is not positive for human health - this only gets worse with the new regulations because consumers don't understand the importance of hvac or building houses as holistic systems.

Most of my complaints seem to go away if we actually had a real biotech revolution.

When DNA was discovered, when Human Genome was decoded, they said the exact same things they are now saying about CRISPR, that's what troubles me.

I totally agree that many products are not "made to last" anymore. A fancy blender can do amazing things compared to an old one. But it will probably not last as long, and that's a problem.

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools book and website. Metafilter Reddit's Buy It For Life subreddit Finehomebuilding's Tool Guide

I find I buy less stuff, but of much higher quality or utility in this way. Some times I get something at a cheap price which works really well, like my Kiwi knives. Other times I have to be educated into realizing why something costs what it does and why or why not it's worth the money. Usually the answer is that the price is right because the object lasts much longer than the cheapo alternative or that the cheap version has a health drawback.

Recent Examples:

Merkur Safety Razor vs cartridge disposables ($$$) (factor of 100 decrease in cost!) Cast iron skillets vs Teflon pans ($$$) Tempered glass (container/bakeware) vs disposable trays/soon-to-be-cracked stoneware. ($$$) Induction cooking vs Gas (health) Expensive meat vs cheap meat. (health) Glycerin soap vs liquid soap/regular soap ($$$)

Here's a clear example. I buy a hard shave soap in a nice wooden bowl that costs $30. That's way more than a can of foam, but I've been using this for over four years now and it's only half used.

I don't do this with everything. I have a Silvercrest blender that has worked for a year, expected lifespan of three years I think, about $30 but buying a Vitamix or Blendtec at $500+ wouldn't 'pay me back' in a lifetime.

[waffle]

The China market isn't a problem if and only if it is understood by the consumer that they're getting disposables, so they should stock up and throw away more frequently. That requires money and space a lot of people do not have.

China production is immensely valuable for the bottom billions of the world who simply cannot plausibly afford West levels of wealth.

The rub is of course that you and I are getting lots of boxes with broken appliances/tools.

http://modularhomeowners.com/how-much-will-my-modular-home-c... https://blog.capterra.com/the-pros-cons-and-cost-of-modular-...

The reason why I mentioned a Tiny House or THOW is that the comparison is much closer, I think like most countries in the past there were no planning permission or taxes on house building. A THOW too is built by the owner, but it is 200-300 sq ft and not 1200 sq ft.

The website you listed suggests a 50k modular house costs closer to 130k to install once everything is worked through. Do you believe the Sears house cost ~150-200% more in the end? Sure they had to dig wells too but I don't think that is plausible.

https://archive.org/details/SpecificationsAndBillOfMaterials...

It seems like there should be a collection of historical lumber prices somewhere. Just that comparison will be pretty informative about the relative material costs.

We have a growing population of homeless folks too "rich" for public assistance. A lot of them already have jobs: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/nyregion/in-new-york-h... And it has only gotten worse since that was published.

The Hoovervilles that showed up before the great depression are back: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/05/america-home...

Dude, you have to either be drowning in kids or make nothing to fall under the official poverty line. But what catches people's eyes is the rise of those officially falling below that line. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extr...

I mean, that's awesome. The problem is just about everybody else is moving downwards.