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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

"Young people today will most likely become the first generation in US history not to surpass their parents' living standards."

I sat in on a talk that Frank Luntz was giving last night. Everyone else in the audience was 40+, well educated, all at the top of their fields. When Frank asked them how many thought their kids would have a better standard of living than they did, only 6 of the 120ish people in the room raised their hands. Frank's comment was, "If you're all in the top 1%, imagine how the rest of America feels right now."

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This is correct if you consider "better standard of living" to mean "better standard of living relative to rest of the world". In terms of actual consumption and productivity, young people in America will have far richer lives then their parents, because the exponential increase in technology we see every day is creating wealth at a ridiculous pace. Our parents did not have iPods, cell phones, e-mail or social networks (facebook, hacker news). Try living without any of these for a day to see how "rich" your parents were at your age; who knows what will be around 20 years from now?

We take these things for granted and don't consider them "making us richer" because they are widely accessible, and people have a tendency to consider themselves rich only when they are richer then their neighbors.

Ugh. Equating technology with wealth is extremely naive. Standard of living refers to cost of food, housing, health care, etc.

Your point might be correct for the majority of the world's population but certainly not for the US...You don't think technology equals wealth, really? I'm surprised to find people who think that at HN. Think about how much would you pay for a sony walkman today vs. 20 yrs ago.

In that same vein, how can you calculate the cost of healthcare for technologies that did not exist 20 years ago? How do you compare the cost of a McMansion to the kinds of houses (tiny) that were being built 20 years ago? You can't. So instead people look at numbers they can calculate, and draw limited conclusions. It's a sort of selection bias based on what kinds of data we know how to work with.

Even if technology isn't equal to wealth, technology certainly drives down the costs of food, makes modern housing more comfortable and safe, and expands the number of ailments that are treatable by health care.

Read Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" for a more nuanced look at the relationship between "technology" and food. One of the reasons "food" is becoming cheaper is due to eliminating much of the nutrition and through ignoring the externalities of environmental costs.

The improvements in health care seem to be offset more and more by our poor food, sedentary lifestyles, and fractured relationships.

Maybe technology has made it cheaper to build a house, but that seems a wash as the dominant cost of housing is the property on which it is built.

In general, yes, technology improves our lives. But can not solve every problem in and of itself, and can exacerbate underlying problems if misused.

Ask a basketball player (top 1%, in height): "Do you think your kids will be taller than you?" If he answers Yes, he’d be wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean. Update: same thought as donaldc.

It is actually less likely that the children of the top 1% will have a better standard of living than their parents, than that the children of the middle or lower percentages will. The parents in the top 1% have a standard of living it would be hard for their children to top.

Disclaimer: Being a child of a parent in the top 1% certainly makes it more likely that one will also be in the top 1%. But even in good times, such a child falling out of the top 2 or 3% will experience a fall in living standards relative to their parents.

The question wasn't whether their kids would be in the top 1%, it was whether or not they'd have a better standard of living.

To the extent that having a good life comes from one's personal income, if the purchasing power of the dollar were increasing then they could easily buy more even if they were only in, say, the top 10%.

But most of what comprises standard of living isn't even determined by one's personal income, but rather by the resources, laws, customs, etc. of the community at large. And as it stands the wealth and health of society as a whole is dropping so fast that an individual can pretty much never keep up, no matter how much money they make or where they choose to live.

The population of the world keeps increasing. The supply of non-renewable resources keeps diminishing. Sooner or later, some generation is not going to live as well as its parents. It seems we decided to let that happen.

Living in a world without fossil fuel reserves, endless supply of fresh water, plastic, minerals, rare earths, etc. will be nothing like the 20th century. And that world is guaranteed. Those who anticipate what that world will look like have an opportunity to be ready for it. My hunch is that the steady-state of the world could at best look like, say, the Song Dynasty era.

"The population of the world keeps increasing."

This may not always be true. In rich countries, the problem seems to be avoiding population decline, not over population. As more people become wealthy, we might achieve some steady state of population.

There is still the problem, of course, of even a stable population exhausting non-renewable resources (fossil fuels, for example).

And how many raised their hands when he asked if their children would have a lower standard of living?

Perhaps he simply had a reserved audience.

There were other questions where almost everyone in the audience raised their hands.

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