That is 300x more than a zero sum model would predict.
Of course people are better off with food and iPhones, but in many major European cities people with middle class incomes share apartments that were literally single family worker apartments around 1900.
In terms of living space, the quality of life for the middle class is worse than 100 years ago.
Texas had a population of 212k in 1850 and 29 million today. How can you compare the size of a house or land ownership then to today?
You are pinning your argument on houses in _TEXAS_ having gotten smaller? lol bc if anything they have gotten larger.
most urbanites of today don't own a chicken, let alone a cow, in 800's standard they're worse off than serfs.
Today, the average life expectancy for Americans is 78.7
We may see another example of this if Andrew Yang and other folks bullish on automation are correct. The few people who own the AI systems that replace truck drivers will get fabulously wealthy, while the large mass of workers will get nothing.
In the past ~50 years in the US, labor has been on the back foot, and productivity gains have gone almost exclusively to the wealthy, rather than the working class.
How so? The poorest working people in the US today are much much much better off than they were 50 years ago. It's not even close. A lot of people have recency bias, technology gains etc have given much more freedom to individuals, made work easier and less labor intensive, that is largely due to private industry. Globally, poverty has plunged.
Real wages have been stagnant for the vast majority of workers in the US.
And the "pulled people out of poverty" thing is such a BS stat. Converting subsistence farmers into sweat shop workers so that they they have $1.50/day instead of $0/day isn't a real metric of pulling people out of poverty. It's more a metric of how tied into the global system they are.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
Total compensation at all income levels has vastly outstripped inflation over the past 50 years.
Median is $60k household. People making $30k each aren't having side perks thrown at them.
In the meantime, you could make the same argument about farming equipment in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yeah 90% of the population used to be farmers, and yeah the equipment automated away most of that labor, but did the former farmers and laborers lose out or did they gain, by access to the same technology... either via personal automobiles or via cheaper, more reliable supply chains of abundant food.
Likewise, if and when transportation is automated, people will gain from their time saved in traffic. They will gain from cheaper costs of transportation overall which will reduce price of goods at retail. They will gain from the availability of 24/7 cheap, reliable, on-demand transportation.
And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.
The issue though, isn't that a specific job is going away, but instead the whole class of "human as control theory implementation" is going away. That's way more disruptive. Like, people instead becoming control software for guillotines level disruptive.
> And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.
"Real wages" mean inflation and CPI adjusted so you can actually compare them in a meaningful way. They have indeed been stagnant for median wage earners since the seventies.
I'm well aware of what real wages means in terms of inflation.
"From January 2019 to January 2020, real average hourly earnings increased 0.7 percent"
I literally see Embark trucks going down the I-70 mountain in the snow. They are already here.
Here says they are already making deliveries (albeit test ones): https://www.wired.com/story/embark-self-driving-truck-delive...
> I'm well aware of what real wages means in terms of inflation.
> "From January 2019 to January 2020, real average hourly earnings increased 0.7 percent"
> https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm
And meanwhile when you don't cherry pick a single year (and really 0.7% increase isn't something to be writing home about in the first place), they've been stagnant for decades.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
Many economists have pointed this out. If the 'rapid innovation' that a lot of tech entrepreneurs talk about was happening (and they have an incentive to oversell it), we would see high unemployment (as people are being replaced) together with high productivity and high GDP growth. We see no such thing. The Andrew Yang robot horror scenario is nowhere in the data.
By historical measures, the technological progress of the 1940s to late 1970s vastly outpaces today.
Not at all. Putting a 10 story building on a lot is multiplying the area by 10.
You can buy property and multiply its value by 10 by putting a 10 story building on it, and even sell floors on it. It happens all the time. It is simply not a fixed supply.
> Typical Caltech brat
LOL. My opinions on markets were quite atypical for Caltech students in the 1970s. They're likely even less typical today.
Setting aside opinions, I've been in business and associated with business entrepreneurs ever since Caltech. Consistently, those with positive outlooks and willingness to take action have done very well. Those with negative views and a victim mentality have all done poorly.
Most people can't afford to buy property. That's sort of the crux of this discussion. Half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and about the same amount have less than $10k in the bank.
> I've been in business and associated with business entrepreneurs ever since Caltech. Consistently, those with positive outlooks and willingness to take action have done very well.
Yes, people who have money can easily acquire more money. Most people don't start out with money though, so it's rather selfish to judge the world solely from this perspective.
This discussion is about property being zero-sum. It isn't zero sum.
> Most people don't start out with money though
There are endless businesses one can start with no money.
Check out the "field lab" video's for a now ten year video blog posting of the hardships of attempting to live off the land in the arid SW us. Somewhere along the way he started saying "i'm just not someone who can grow crops". But in reality, its more a case of he can't grow crops because they don't survive 100F summers, or seasons without a lot of rainfal. If the weeds are having a hard time growing, your potato's/whatever are probably not going to be doing well.
edit: just to point out the redundancy, if you go read the newspapers in any of the major cities in the SW what you will frequently read about is water woes. Overwhelmingly those cities ability to supply water at the projected population growth rates are questionable.
Its kind of ridiculous. how little control states have over the land within their own boarders.
And in particular on tech websites like these people vastly overstate how non 'zero-sum' economic activity actually is mostly because tech has been in a bubble of highly anomalous growth. (A lot of it ironically arguably not real productivity growth but rent collection through platforms and market power).
In many ways the tech startups of today look more like digital landlords than innovators whose disruption is primarily taking over the market from a host of competitors rather than improving process efficiency. If we were living in Fordist times and the assembly line and other innovations delivered 6-7% growth annually, then we could rave on about non-zero sum economies. Total factor productivity growth these days is relatively non-existent.