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What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

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Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#191

Post by ipiz0618 »

mstade wrote: post #58
haunter wrote: post #15

>Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever th…

> This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these. Anecdata – I'm on of these people. I live in central Stockholm, Sweden, and almost any hour o…

I guess it depends on the location and wealth. Eating healthy is wayyyy more expensive than cooking healthy in some cities, even when you can buy a meal virtually everywhere.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#192

Post by Nbox9 »

sovnade wrote: post #168
paradite wrote: post #152

Yes, the prediction is incredibly accurate. So my question would be: Is this a case of selection bias (survival bias)? Did we cherry picked one accurate prediction (at the right time) out of many different predictions made about the future?

That only seems relevant if the author of this had a vast number of predictions. Overall, yeah, there were tons. That doesn't detract from how accurate this particular piece was.

I’m unsure, unless the author is of especially high renown.

If there was two dozen “What life will be like in 100 years” articles published per year in decently sized newspapers we will have 240 such articles to choose from this decade. Surely we would only see the most accurate of these predictions, and that is survival bias.

Of course, maybe there was not a large variance between predictions, or everyone is accurate to a similar level of degree. In that case some other method of selecting which old predictions we read will be at play, perhaps based on which publications were better archived or random chance.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#193

Post by marcus_holmes »

I was fascinated to read about the predictions of communal-living skyscrapers with their own management, etc. Eerily similar to the Hab Blocks of Mega City 1

I then came to horrifying realisation that 1977 (when Judge Dredd first appeared) is only 55 years after the article, and now 45 years behind us(!!!). More or less halfway. Totally reasonable for them to have read this article, and still been far enough away from now to assume that this will still happen. This could easily have been the inspiration for Blocks.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#195

Post by hooande »

overthemoon wrote: post #35

It's interesting to compare this to the WEF future projections: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... Especially with regards to this passage:: "In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-da…

> They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much.

honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about right. A lot of that isn't even lost productivity, it's cutting back on the general time overhead of working in an office.

I don't think that Americans are so prosperous that we've become less enterprising due to class immobility. but we do seem to be getting more efficient with our time

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#196

Post by User23 »

md_ wrote: post #179
didericis wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change? The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations. Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, bu…

I’m confused. If you mean public debt, doesn’t central banking free the public from meeting debt obligations when those obligations are denominated in the national currency? Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge. It’s worth noting, as an a…

The primary purposes of central banking are to privatize seigniorage[1] revenue and increase bankers' ability to control politicians. The former is achieved through the Primary Dealer system and the latter should be self-explanatory. Needless to say, since most spending is electronic transactions, the seigniorage revenue is very nearly the entire face value of the created instrument.

It's a blatantly undemocratic power grab, effectively allowing a consortium of private banks to limit Congress's power of the purse. Or at least that was the theory. As we're seeing now, that one putative upside is nonexistent and the Fed is happy to cooperate with Treasury to spend trillions a year. The rentier class appears to be consoling itself with massive asset inflation, while still banking the seigniorage.

The United States could just as easily once again fund all of its spending by creating new U.S. Notes[2] (perhaps without the public debt clause) and then control inflation by extinguishing those liabilities through taxation.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/seigniorage.asp

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#197

Post by jollybean »

didericis wrote: post #150
jollybean wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization. And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. And what 'freedoms' have you lost? Well, there's more taxation. And you have to…

Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change? The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations. Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, bu…

" why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change?"

I didn't mean to imply that.

Most of those things didn't come from Central Banking.

That said, modern finance has 'enabled everything' just like having a highly literate education 'enables everything' as well.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#198

Post by ghc »

Aperocky wrote: post #170
tomxor wrote: post #33

This is surprisingly accurate, reserved and balanced through the lens of society as well as science. I was expecting something more fanciful like flying horses or whatnot.

Except that: > I'm sure that technological advancement in 2022 will be amazing, but they will be nothing as amazing as the present day than it is over 100 years ago (i.e. 1822). I don't know about that statement.

If you think about what they didn't have in 1822 that they did have in 1922:

- Radio

- Movies

- Motorized Rail Transit

- Airplanes

- Blimps

- Recorded Audio

- Electrification (esp. lighting)

- Telephony

- Cars

- Subways

- Fax

- Early Television

- Telegraph

- Skyscapers

- Underwater tunnels

- Air Conditioning

- Elevators

- Modern Hospitals

- Machine Guns, Tanks, Dreadnoughts and other tools of modern war

- Stock Tickers

- Early computing (Tabulators, IBM, etc.)

- Modern Steel Manufacturing

I would bet that the people of the 1920s would find the world of the 2020s much more recognizable than the people of the 1820s would find the world of the 1920s.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#199

Post by feintruled »

another_story wrote: post #181
Aperocky wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that: > I'm sure that technological advancement in 2022 will be amazing, but they will be nothing as amazing as the present day than it is over 100 years ago (i.e. 1822). I don't know about that statement.

Cars, trains, airplanes, electricity used in consumer devices, movies, telephones, radio, instantaneous intercontinental communication, etc... We have some cool stuff compared to 1922, but you could argue the shift was greater.

Reminds me of the Gavin Belson freakout in Silicon Valley when his holographic call started freezing and they suggested he went to audio only "Fuck you, the audio's still working! Audio worked a hundred fucking years ago!"

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#200

Post by ramesh31 »

>"It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same."

Nailed it.

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