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Comment by aahhahahaaa | Hacker News Reader

The thing is... you can have the choice. Sometimes you need the choice, things can go south for any of us. The choice can also free you to take risks... it makes it easier to start a business, it makes it easier to fail.

I've been literally working without an unemployment gap since I've been 14. I worked 60+ hours a week through most of my 20s. I didn't have a choice. It took me half of my life to reach financial stability and normalcy. I still get stressed about healthcare costs despite being healthy. It doesn't have to be this way for anyone.

Even if you want to work all the time, most people aren't being paid appropriately for the time they put in. None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.

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> None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.

You're just not seeing it. I remember the days of manual typewriters. Make a mistake, type it over again. Put in an envelope, mail, wait weeks for a reply. Write the letter by hand, even worse.

Today, shoot off a text or email with automatic spellchecking.

Cars need far less maintenance.

TVs are practically free.

My microwave greatly reduces meal prep time.

I could go on and on.

Those examples save us minutes but don’t make humans more free or happier or safer. Better examples would be increased lifespans and lower infant mortality. Stuff that ties into the standard of living definition. Which is the point: our standard of living has not increased at the same rate as productivity.

Modern cars are a heluva lot safer.

Expected lifespan is quite a bit higher.

You can't expect it to increase at the same rate as productivity, because it asymptotically approaches a limit.

Whether you're happy or not is up to you, not society. People, regardless of their status, tend to be at about the same level of happiness.

Are you saying that right now the quality of life for all Americans has reached a its asymptotic limit in regards to productivity?

Lifespan asymptotically approaches biological limits, i.e. the rate of progress inevitably slows.

> all

I wish people would stop adding such qualifiers to construct strawmen.

Ohhh by “it” you mean lifespan not quality of life or standard of living which are the relevant measurements of what we should be gaining from productivity. I didn’t realize you were going to nit pick a couple of very specific examples among many.

p.s. also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.

I remember my mom helping my dad write his book. She did a lot of the typing. Make revisions, retype the whole book. I thought that was hell even as a child watching her work.

Today, just do the edits, hit [print].

Hours, hours, hours saved.

Ironically, my dad told me in the 70s that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall and a typewriter where you could edit without retyping the whole thing. To think some people think we don't live in a wonderland!

(He missed the calculator. What a marvelous time saver that was!)

Walter You can go on and on, but you're talking about an illusion. You are literally working more and getting paid less than previous generations. It's objective data. People had cars and televisions. Your cellphone doesn't cost the lifetime of productivity gains that are being stolen from you.

Stolen? Please, spare us the hyperbole. How is it stolen?

You're working more and getting paid less than people did, 10, 20, 30 years ago... meanwhile the wealth gap has increased dramatically. Where do you think it's going? It's not hyperbole whatsoever.

Sure things have changed and the wealth gap is a problem, but it is not stealing. If it were, you could take them to court for paying you only min wage and making you work 40 hours.

Money isn't wealth, money is just a common & convenient representation of wealth. You don't need to look into people's paychecks to see wealth. You can see wealth in the buildings and streets, in health and technology and culture.

People work tirelessly to create & improve that, and you can see that society is improving bit by bit. That's not an illusion.

Stagnant wages likely signify an actual problem in valuation worth fixing, but it's silly to solve that by being less productive. Lowering total productivity may generate lower surplus value for greedy employers, but it's a weak revenge. You still earn less than you should, and society is poorer for it. There are many other ways to address the root issue.

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