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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

30-50 years ago, with a single salary you could support a house with a yard, a non-working spouse, multiple kids, and a car. Our society knew how to make that happen once, and we've forgotten.

We've had incredible advances in technology and productivity since then, so why can't we have that kind of economic environment now? What's gumming up the works?

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The US population in 1972 was 209b, now 333b. I remember learning about the black plague in middle school. There were many fewer people after the plague. The survivors could command much higher wages, and had more freedoms than before. Crowded environments make for pressures that are unpleasant for everyone.

I think moving to a less crowded location where your individual contribution in society is more valued could be a good start.

A lot of people have been moving to California, making it not as nice as it was even 10 years ago. People sit in traffic forever. Rents are unaffordable for everyone moving in.

Social media makes everyone miserable. Probably best to avoid that.

I’m on vacation in Thailand, noticed some nice things about life here:

1. Everyone has a shop under their house, or food truck somewhere. People hang out at their shop, and it’s also like their living space. People come to buy, but also friends just hang out together in these spaces. The constant connection with others is really nice. It’s possible there is less pressure to fine work with the additional income.

2. Best traffic of any country I’ve visited. Crowded, busy, but no one honks at each other. Everyone gets let in, people respect others space on the road. The large number of scooters makes it easy to find parking, get to your destination without too much stop and go hassle.

Life always seems better on vacation. It's not really a fair comparison. I'm sure people from Thailand vacationing in CA also feel like it's better.

This is true 100%. Also, as a foreigner it is easy to see what people here have, or take for granted that we are missing in the United States.

Birth rate in the US has been in a decline for a while now - both in the US and globally. In the US, the last uptick was in 2021 but it's been dropping since 1983. It's already has caused China to reverse their one child per couple law and Japan population numbers are going to force that country to reconsider what it means to be Japanese that will have long lasting repercussions to it's society.

People are also leaving California in droves too - to Texas where they were lured by people chasing after HGTV "Property Hunters" home prices - just to end up in another ticky-tacky neighborhood being pressured to keep up with the jones.

If the trend of telecommute is allowed to be the norm, then there is a much higher likelihood of population distribution which will bring it back to a more stoic level. But this will impact global trade which we've seen needs to be rebalanced anyhow due to the supply chain issues presented during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Scale that globally, then maybe there will be better ground to discuss "nationality" in a different light compared to our current political borders. Especially when it comes to law and powers given to a person that is allowed by a society.

Because even the UN can use some improvement.

One reason is changing geopolitics. USA is not the sole superpower that it was in the 60s. Other countries are also doing a lot better now. A lot of the jobs in manufacturing have been outsourced to China, in service industry to India. This has led to shift of wealth from US to these countries. The days of American exceptionalism are probably ending. It's only going to get tougher from here.

This is also a fair point as the USA after WW2 was the only first world nation with an untouched industrial base (that was recently upgraded thanks to the tax payers). That gave the USA an insurmountable advantage as the rest of the world rebuilt.

easy to blame this, but all productivity gains in the US for 40 years have gone to the top; the reason is that our labor market has been undercut by immigration (legitimate and illegitimate) and globalized supply chains. workers do not have the ability to extract higher wages because of a concerted international project to make the labor market as liquid as possible and arbitrage populations with lower standards of living against them. this has been a huge boon to the owners and financiers of industry (and parts of the developing world) at the expense of normal americans. this is the trade our masters have made on our behalf, beginning as a solution to the economic crisis of the 1970s, and as a dead woman once said, "there is no alternative".

What you are seeing is perpetuation of both the rich staying rich and those who were able to capitalize from the technologies invented between 1940 to now. The same could be said in the US at the turn of the last century (1900). The advances that will happen now will be largely thanks to Machine Learning and Quantum computing as our understanding of Quantum Level Physics grows.

The USA weren't the sole superpower in 1960s.

I'd go so far as to say that the US is more the sole superpower in the 2020s than it was in the 1960s.

People in the 60s were afraid of nuclear war with the other superpower, USSR. In the 80s job were outsourced to the Japan superpower. USA has never been alone up there. Maybe in the 90s.

The reality is that we need to think about how a population of people will survive when it's more efficient and easier to mechanize a job.

We saw it during the pandemic as we see more of it now. They're finding ways of mechanizing agriculture to make more food with less labor input. They are finding ways of improving health by improving the cognition of machines to find black and white problems within the data deluge. They're even finding ways of making burger flippers and package delivery people obsolete by building machines to do the tasks.

Because when you push a business to try to solve labor problems, they will look for ways of growth that may not include people in general.

That has nothing to do with nationalistic ideals but with simple Capitalism. If you legislate the requirement of it, then what changes how we evolve?

It seems immoral to force people to do something they may not want to do at the same time people will complain that the value of one person shouldn't be held to be lower than another.

Basic income so far has been showing the best way to address this issue - and we've all seen a form of it during the pandemic. What needs to happen is to get society as a whole to make it permanent.

To echo the sentiments of the other commenter: is it really fair to compare everything to the period immediately after the USA won a global mega war and all the other regions internally tore themselves apart?

I assume you live in the US because you probably wouldn't be glorifying 30-50 years ago if you lived in USSR sphere or any country affected by the proxy wars.

Why don't you pick a more representative time period of human existence for comparison, like 1800s or something.

Probably because income inequality is at an all time high in the USA. When 1% of the population has +60% of all wealth....

What's gumming up the works are the billionaires who have more money than whole countries using that power to get favorable laws and treatment. Once you reach a certain level of money you can just print more basically by manipulating the systems in place.

There's not a fixed amount of goods in the world. Middle class people today are far wealthier than they were 100 years ago.

There’s a fixed amount of real estate however. Rent and housing prices have doubled over the past few years in my market of interest. the wealthy have been buying up second and third homes, landlords have been outsourcing collusion to black box ML models, mega-investors have been gobbling up land, housing starts have been trending down while the population has been growing.

I can't sleep on in a macbook.

I always hated the arguments you're replying to. As if owning electronics, gadgets, or other plastic trinkets is akin to living a life where you don't have to constantly worry about housing, healthcare, retirement, or education and every little thing that can cause your path to come crashing down (getting in a car crash could potentially mean losing your job, losing your job equating to losing health insurance, etc).

I just have to assume people espousing things are divorced from reality, because how else can you equate a poor person owning a microwave to societal success?

We refuse to build houses at the rate the population is growing and doubled the labor force by adding women. Simple laws of supply and demand explain it.

> and doubled the labor force by adding women

This has really been the biggest scam in recent history without regulations going along with it to reduce the work week accordingly. It's insane to me that we still expect the average worker to spend ~1/2 of their waking life working for other people.

Largely, overly aggressive (shareholder) profit maximalization. Productivity shot up but wages didn't follow. The only two countries I know that have a working work-life balance are France and Spain. The French are raising their voices and protesting for every little thing and it works. 6 weeks of holiday per year and 62 years of retirement age. Still, a middle class person can afford to drive a new car and many families have 2-3 properties just from their work income.

If you wanted to keep living with the same standard of living as back then you could do it as well. The average family had a 1,000 sq ft house, a single car, almost never went out to eat, never traveled on airplanes, etc.

We expect much much much nicer things.

Yeah, that house had one bathroom. One phone. Zero air conditioners. Zero computers. The four kids had two bedrooms with bunkbeds. The TV was black and white with 2.5 scratchy channels. If the car made it to 50,000 miles you were doing well. Entertainment was maybe a trip to the movies once a month. Eating out was for celebrations only.

Certain things have gotten worse, though. The neighborhood was pleasant, with friendly families and social clubs and a walk to the park right there. The television and newspaper and local college and personnel dept. at work weren't constantly telling you how racist you are.

I'm not a historian but I'm pretty sure a lot of people talked about racism in the '60s! People thought the same thing about colleges, television, and movies pushing a radical racial message.

> I'm not a historian but I'm pretty sure a lot of people talked about racism in the '60s!

But less so around the mid-1990s, which was the nadir of the perceived incidence and racism in the US (and this is fairly consistent—though the degree of perceived racism and concern about it is not—across racial groups.)

So, while the issue is not new, and not by any means the worst it has ever been, there is a generally greater perception of a problem today tha a few decades ago, whether the problem is worse, sensitivity/standards are higher, or some mix or other factor.

We have become wealthier in terms of material goods but poorer in terms of social capital. I wonder if there's some inevitable relationship there, like if you don't have much you are more likely to seek the support of others.

This. Lifestyle creep at the social level. Smart Phones, dishwashers, Netflix and so on. You CAN still find multi-bedroom homes w/in an hour of large metros that a single income can support. Go to New Jersey and get a <200K one with a 45 min drive to Manhattan.

In those decades most consumer goods have become cheaper (adjusted for inflation), but we've seen drastic increases in the cost of housing, medicine, education, and infrastructure. Those are big money pits.

As for why this happened, and continues to happen, and what could be done to fix it... those are hard questions. You can see some good grappling with the subject in this article, and the follow-up listing other people's responses to it:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co...

> 30-50 years ago

One of the reasons that is not mentioned is that in the 1960s, the US's share of global GDP was 40%, today it's around 24%.

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