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Comment by slumdev | Hacker News Reader

I don't like this trope because it obscures the one thing that wealthy people know and non-wealthy people don't.

Money is time. It's not gadgets or electricity or running water or toilets. It's time for yourself, your family, your religion (if you have one), and whatever hobbies make you tick. If you're on the hook to do someone else's bidding for 8+ hours a day, you are not wealthy, no matter how much they're paying you.

Today's poor are worse-off than those in times past regardless of whatever trinkets they have. In almost every culture and occupation throughout history up to the industrial revolution, working people have never spent 8+ hours a day, year round, in servile labor. It's absurd.

Regardless of how many Scooby Snacks you're so generously awarded by today's silicon robber barons, you will be poor until you stop measuring your life in trinkets and start measuring it in time.

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I really think it's pushing it to describe the ability to safely store food without it going off and access to clean fresh water as trinkets as though they are silly little things rather than massive impacts on quality of life.

> Today's poor are worse-off than those in times past regardless of whatever trinkets they have. In almost every culture and occupation throughout history up to the industrial revolution, working people have never spent 8+ hours a day, year round, in servile labor.

Every single analysis of that ignores women. Women in the past spent basically all their time cooking and washing. Washing clothes before washing machines was an arduous, laborious task. In addition, without reliable birth control, family sizes were larger so a women had more children to take care of.

Now women have the opportunity and control to not be consigned to a life of house work.

Hans Rosling has a great TED talk on how socially transformative the washing machine was:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...

I'm not sure I buy that. Would you consider doctors significantly poorer than most other professions? Or surgeons at the least.

The easiest way to miss a point (on purpose or not), is to take a metaphor literally.

I see a lot of this here on HN, and I think it is a common vice among people with strong knowledge in the hard sciences but with a rather narrow scope of interests outside of it.

I believe that the point was that sovereignty over how one spends one's time is more important than material possessions, beyond what is strictly necessary. Surgeons can save a lot of money and retire early, probably are less restricted by managers than the typical wage slave, have a very meaningful job (something quite rare these days), etc.

Most people's lives today are not like this. They are stuck in a hamster wheel that they cannot jump out of without becoming homeless.

You make it sound as if even if not intentional, misunderstanding someones point in this way is as a result of negligence ("vice").

If you express yourself in metaphor, it is reasonable for someone to ask you to expand upon or specify your views, so they can build a more accurate model of what you're trying to express. This could be because of simply not understanding fully what's being said, or being unwilling to assume that what they mean is what you think they mean.

Asking for clarification is one thing, immediately providing a counter-example to the most literal interpretation is another.

Doctors are a rare breed. Now that the money isn't what it used to be (for most specialties, and in proportion to the cost of education), very few go into it as a "lifestyle profession". It attracts only the workaholics. Same with law.

Hopefully, the word you’re looking for is “vocation”.

That matches up with my experience with them.

Depends on how much they enjoy their work.

Most people today get more time through advances in healthcare because a simple infection won't kill you. We get more time through almost instant answers to many of life's question (search engines). We get time back through instant communication.

I don't disagree with parts of what you say. However, the idea that today's poor are worse-off I think is wholeheartedly, incredibly wrong.

Does society have issues today? Of course! There are an incredible number of issues. But I believe that the data support that on virtually every metric we look at, we are living in the best time because through technology and social progress. Have some of these advances come at a cost, of course. Do some of these advances have hidden costs and maybe they're not so great? of course. Are there rent-seeking assholes who have pseudo-stolen wealth from many, of course.

Still, I'm not sure you can make a credible argument that poor today are worse off on any large time scale.

Would you rather be middle class now or stupendously rich 100 years ago?

Does your answer change if you get sick?

> In almost every culture and occupation throughout history up to the industrial revolution, working people have never spent 8+ hours a day, year round, in servile labor. It's absurd.

If we're talking about pre-industrial-revolution, but post-agriculture, I would expect that mandatory labor took up more than ~2000 hours a year, and probably much more. Farmer workers famously work very long hours even now: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+hours+do+farmers+wo...

For a review of a (somewhat speculative) look at the transition to agriculture and how it enabled mandatory work:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-th...

>In almost every culture and occupation throughout history up to the industrial revolution, working people have never spent 8+ hours a day, year round, in servile labor. It's absurd.

In almost every culture throughout history up to the industrial revolution, almost everyone worked in agriculture. I'd gladly trade 8 hours a day working mostly on interesting problems comfortably in an air-conditioned office for somewhat fewer hours of manual labor outdoors.

How many software engineers genuinely work on interesting problems?

How many spend their days rolling Yet Another CRUD App(tm) gilded with the latest fad?

How many "solve" the same problem, over and over and over, with only a small twist--different platforms, different languages, different architectures, different industries, etc.?

But you can if you want to! Or are you saying you would gladly trade for equal pay vs sitting at a desk?

I read things like this, and think, so you have never done any manual labor, nor your parents or grandparents or relatives? Not your chores as a teenager, your first job, or anything? Is there nobody in your extended family who spent their retirement years in agonizing pain from the effects of lifting things all their life? Nobody who died early from an accident on the job?

I wouldn't make the trade in that direction.

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