Hacker News Reader

>It was a massive net loss to society

Yeah if you totally ignore the unprecedented crazy high standard of living developed over trillions of work-hours.

That standard of living is more due to work-hours put in by people with a much lower standard of living. Often from what is sometimes condescendingly called "third world countries".

That's not how economics works. Everyone pretty much everywhere throughout history has worked, they've worked because if you don't work it eventually means you starve, so people in less wealthy countries didn't just start working since 1990. And yet, since 1990 the number living in extreme poverty globally fell from 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million, the big majority of those in sub-Sahara Africa.

https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty

Random citation, I think the situation is actually a little better than they do, but that'll do since they present some data in an easy to read way.

The standard of living went up because productivity and value creation went up significantly. That's the only way that happens.

This is easily refuted. [In 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure. Today is it 63.3%.](https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....) In 1950, 87% of family households were married couples, and only 21% of married women participated in the labour force. Today, 62% of cohabiting couples have both partners working. Households are earning more, but prices rose almost commensurately. If you were correct, the proportion spent on necessities would be far lower.

I will concede that luxury goods are far cheaper, and perhaps one could make an argument that cheap TVs are a reasonable concession for expensive food and housing. I would not agree with that.

You didn't compare apples to apples, housing in 1950 was radically different than housing in 2026. Homes today are significantly larger, better insulated, vastly more robust construction codes, more technology incorporated (not least of which is air conditioning, which was just starting to be a notable thing in the 50s, didn't become truly mainstream until the 70s).

Real estate is a very local thing, so I can't speak to your area, but 1950s equivalent homes in my area are still impressively cheap. Why? People aren't interested in a 900 to 1000sqft home with no central AC. There's cities in this country that will give a run down property like that to you for free if you agree to live in that little town for a certain number of years, or at least there used to be. Those things come and go.

Also, because that's not what they want, the neighborhood becomes a meth lab. But if people actually wanted those homes that issue would resolve itself.

The data doesn't all support this common misconception. Really, it's an intentional deception on the part of many people who know better.

Some reasons why your dismissal may not hold up:

1. In many jurisdictions, many of the homes built in the mid-century can’t be built anymore due to modern code and zoning ordinances.

2. Building the same 1950s home, if it’s legal at all, is more expensive than it was back then. Materials and labor are more expensive.

3. Air conditioning is more of a necessity as global temperatures increase and as employment centers move south. If I can’t get a job in Detroit but I can get one in Arizona, then yes I need air conditioning.

4. Consumers are generally not in control of what housing is available on the market. Builders don’t build homes for lower middle class people because they’re not profitable. Nobody is forcing them to build the kind of homes the lower middle class can afford.

Homes built today are being built with all corners cut, into a market that doesn't seem to care as long as there is a house. They may be big, but they're bigger than people actually need and there aren't any smaller ones, so that's a bit like saying phone users don't want headphone jacks. Better insulated, yes, probably. But was that ever a huge issue?

I don't disagree with your stats but the jump from "households have to work more" to "society is worse off" is a personal value judgement. Seriously would you rather spawn as a random person in the 1950s than random person now?

The housing is better. Square footage per person for example has approximately doubled.

Also, in Chart 1 on page 6, "expenditure share for non-necessities" in the US goes from about 32.5% in 1950 to fully 50% in 2002-2003.

It would be nice if you told us the page from which you got your, "in 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure." Searching for your text verbatim fails, which is not particularly surprising because PDFs cannot be searched reliably.

Also because 1950 is considered by some to be a particularly prosperous time in the US, some might accused you of cherry picking. For example, in 1918-1919, the "expenditure share for non-necessities" was about 22%.

Do you also think of all the things you could do if you didn't have to sleep with such seriousness? Unless you actually don't think women deserve those rights, why even spend time pondering such things? I don't go around annoyed I can't read books instead of sleep because I'll always need sleep.

>most economists admit that as women entered the workforce en masse, prices settled higher for the same goods and services.

Most economists emphatically do not admit or maintain that.

Most might believe however that compensation settled slightly lower because the economy's ability to create jobs lagged slightly behind the increase in the supply of workers.

#meetoo was about abuse and not wanting to pay the social cost of that. Complaining about it and stopping it is a social good. There is massive social cost to abuse, even if abusers and their friends like to pretend otherwise. There is no wide social benefit of males being able to abuse those around - whether women or other men.

Somehow your weighting of social weighing individual vs society-wide rights ends up with very self serving "other peoples rights are hindrance, I should be in positions to do whatever to them, that is social good".

I don't think you read my comment before you replied (or the comment I replied to). I encourage you to take another look. It's hard to meaningfully respond to a non-sequitur.

To reiterate, the social cost discussed is the inability for people to form relationships at work. I acknowledge all of the costs of people being harassed at work. That's bad. I hope you read this comment and understand that I am not disagreeing with you.

I did read it and my response was not non-sequitur.

1.) Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.

2.) Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.

3.) Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).

4.) This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.

You continue to soapbox without addressing the content of this discussion. I'll try one more time.

> Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.

You are confidently incorrect. [People widely reported a stifling effect on office relationships.](https://legacy.vault.com/blogs/workplace-issues/2018-vault-o...) More than 1 in 4 said #metoo made them less accepting of workplace romance. 43% considered relationships between workers at different levels unacceptable - 15% higher after #metoo.

> Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.

This has nothing to do with what we are discussing. I understand you have strong feelings about this but I need you to understand that from the bottom of my heart, I do not care about your feelings.

> Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).

No one claimed it was the primary mode of forming relationships.

> This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.

This is one step removed from, "men are stupid, am I right, ladies?" Your disdain for men, the users on Hacker News, or whatever villain you've concocted in your mind prevents you from having a normal conversation like a normal person.

This has been a thoroughly uninteresting waste of time. I suspect you became lost on your way to some protest or /r/Politics.

> Vault's 2018 office romance survey received 654 responses from professionals in a number of industries. Approximately 70% of responses came from the Law, Banking, Accounting and Consulting professions. A further 7% came from professionals in the Technology sector.

This survey is weak evidence based on a small number of self-reports. Population was not representative of the American work force c. 2018. Their call for submissions heavily primed the pump:

https://vault.com/blogs/general-articles/take-vaults-2018-of...

> Have you ever had a fling with a colleague, hooked up with a coworker, or met your significant other through work? We want to hear about it (anonymously, of course!) in our latest Office Romance Survey, our most popular study which has been featured by Forbes, Newsweek, and NBC.

So of course the people with strong opinions are overrepresented; the survey was more or less clickbait for marketing purposes. I suggest you find better data to support your own degree of confidence.