Sorry about the edit, I thought I was waffling on too long.
My position is not that you're wrong, it's that most of us are missing the subtext of our technological development which is that nearly all of it is computer related and we've papered over failures in a large number of technological areas by simply not talking about them (in society, not on HN).
> Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past.
That is true. I wouldn't dispute the affect of accumulated incremental changes to existing product lines, it's meaningful.
It's true in two directions. For instance many items today are inferior goods to past goods. Here is an example.
New growth lumber is inferior to old growth lumber. Something made out of wood such as siding, framing or window/door frames will require more frequent replacement due to rot, insects, weather. The old growth equivalents lasts for decades and even centuries. Today we rely on a mixture of more frequent maintenance and often toxic additives (protective coatings) and if that doesn't work we are forced to leap to far more complex, sometimes expensive replacements e.g. UPVC, I-Joists, LVLs.
I'm not saying the technology is bad. It's great engineering ingenuity, I'm stating its requirement exists because of a failure in our ability to match or improve qualitative tree farming and botanical biotechnology.
> So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.
This is a big subject, I'll just throw one dart at you.
There is a hidden assumption. Why are your houses more energy efficient? It's because a barrel of oil doesn't cost $1 anymore.
There's a dark side to energy efficiency.
The side affects of higher insulation requirements is that houses cost more, studies on passive houses suggest 10%-20% more in the positive scenarios. The real problem though is that the most common forms of insulation offgas toxins and since houses are meant to be more air tight... The fact is that most buyers of houses and most builders of them aren't up to speed on what is required to do this sort of housing without health risks.
Right now most houses in my country, without the latest insulation requirements, suffer from moisture, mildew and mold problems, all of which is not positive for human health - this only gets worse with the new regulations because consumers don't understand the importance of hvac or building houses as holistic systems.
Most of my complaints seem to go away if we actually had a real biotech revolution.
When DNA was discovered, when Human Genome was decoded, they said the exact same things they are now saying about CRISPR, that's what troubles me.