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Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

It's not like we're ever given the option right, society poses a narrowly defined set of options as to how we can live and the lives of a 1929 person is never presented. If when I was in primary school or high school someone had presented that as an option I might have foregone university and lived simpler

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Okay, but that means no fridge, no car, no air conditioning, no television or computer, no air travel, only a few sets of clothing, and many other things missing besides. That's what's being offered as the "1929 life". Not the life of the 1929 affluent, but the life of the 1929 average.

I know a number of people who've intentionally decided to live pretty much like that. Mostly they don't do it anymore after a few years, but it's totally an available option if you really want it. Saying "society poses" an expensive standard of living is not much proof that you're being forced to do anything.

Actually, refrigeration existed by the 1920s, as did evaporative cooling ("swamp coolers").

It existed, but was quite expensive, and mostly not used in homes. People generally purchased ice blocks to put in small iceboxes. Not like the refrigeration that exists now.

In middle/working class urban homes?

I would defer to a period expert at that point.

But iceboxes were certainly common, as were fans. I guess my point being: the people of the 1920s weren't savages, and while it's obvious that they didn't enjoy the same comforts we enjoy today there were still many conveniences that did exist.

The past is a strange place, with odd customs, but it's not totally alien or barbaric.

yep cars too, in fact there were many quite stylish cars back then.

Again, my point is that the average home probably wouldn't have had a car, and if it did, it was far worse in terms of efficiency, safety and performance than all but the cheapest used cars today. This is the mis-perception I'm talking about - people imagine living in the 1930s as though they'd have been in the top 5% or 10% of the population in terms of income, but what we have to look at is the overall level. Just because some people could zip around in a sleek Plymouth Phaeton doesn't mean that everybody, or even many people, could.

Safely maybe but early cars were comparatively fuel efficient. Look at the Model T, close to 20 mpg. That's not far off modern cars.

The curb weight of a Model T is 540 kg and its engine produces 20 horsepower, while a Honda Civic is 1150 kg, produces over 160 horsepower, and gets 35 mpg. It's moving twice as much car, with better efficiency, much faster, over a longer lifespan, with a much higher top speed. The performance of nearly all 30s cars would today be considered terrible in nearly every respect.

At a fraction of the price though. The cost of a Model T at the end of production was like 1/6 that of a Civic. For the price it doesn't seem so bad.

With an extra 3 days of leisure every week I'd think I could handle not driving 80 mph on the highway. There are pictures of these 20s and 30s cars at the top of dirt roads in the rocky mountains so what ever power they had still let them go places.

Do I really need all the car that the civic is?

The inflation-adjusted price of a Model T in 1930 would be about $4000 2008 dollars, but the per capita income was only about $7000. (A big reason the Model Ts seems so cheap is because labour costs were comparatively low - but so were incomes.) Now, US per capita income is nearly $40 000, and a Honda Civic has an MSRP of about $20 000 new. So the average person is not really working more, but they're getting much more. Most modern goods really are vastly better.

And for an extra three days of leisure a week, you'd be giving up not just driving on the highway, but indeed a whole load of things.

Again - for most things, nobody is making you consume these additional goods and services above the 1930 average. But, as we can see, they're quite popular and people apparently prefer to work more and consume more rather than work less and consume less.

Then consider useful lifetime of the car. Ford used to recommend an engine rebuild around 50,000 miles.

I find that very hard to believe. Do you say that in the full knowledge that you'd be giving up roughly 20 years of life expectancy? In 1929, life expectancy was late 50s for men, it's now almost 80 for men. That's roughly a 34% increase, and it's even higher when you consider all of those extra years are adult, master-of-your-fate years.

That life expectancy equation is a bunch of malarky. It means average time a person is expected to live based on death rates. So if you have a high infant mortality rate, it will affect the numbers. For example, in Sri Lanka during my grandparents time the life expectancy was abysmal but both they and most of the people around them lived healthy into old age, probably much healthier than the average elderly person now. The language is misleading because "life expectancy" is a statistic used to measure how likely you are to die not how long you are expected to live.

Your grandparents and their friends may have simply been lucky. You also have to be careful of survivorship bias.

Yes, a high infant mortality rate skews the figures. Still, I'd be willing to bet that the average 40 year old in 1929 had a life expectancy at least 10 years less than the average 40 year old in 2017.

Edit: Table 21 in this report is informative: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf Expected years remaining for a 40 year old in 1929-31 was 29.67. In 2011 it was 40.58.

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