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Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

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Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#261

Post by quartesixte »

dopidopHN wrote: post #253
zdragnar wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget making and mending your own clothes, washing them by hand, beating rugs outdoors by hand, all the little chores that have been replaced by electrical tools or are cheaper to purchase than make yourself. Harvesting and chopping firewood, or managing coal. If you visit an Amish community, they might talk about how people occasionally want to join them, only to realize just how much easier modern life is an…

I’m almost 40, not from the US, and mass market hit us later in ( 1955 rather than just after WW2 ) Still: you will have to go back to my grand parent generation to find folks carrying out the activity you describing. And even then, that was seen at the time as a rural predicament ( bigger cities had «modern confort » already, but not isolated farm and so on. ( agreeing with all you says… just that the timing seems o…

East Asia at the onset of WWII was playing catchup to European comforts. Took a while for them to catch up.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#262

Post by perth »

peter303 wrote: post #260

According to this months US employment figures, 36.3% of the working age population (16-64) are neither employed nor seeking work. This includes students, housewives, disabled, financially independent, etc. So good fraction of the population has avoided the puritanical work-all-the-time ethic. If you spread out the work hours evenly, everyone would work about 25 hours a week. If you add in the young and elder, the pe…

I feel as though this is skewed by the fact that US college students can’t really pay for their college with a job and rely heavily on loans for the younger portion of their life (typically up until 22). I’d be curious to see the statistics for the ages of 22-55, aka, post college when many students are drowning in loans and before the beginning of when people begin to retire.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#263

Post by vorpalhex »

azemetre wrote: post #237
koheripbal wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has more with a lack of discipline, than a lack of available time or resources.

How can you argue it’s a lack of discipline when companies like Meta and Google literally hire psychologists to make their products more addicting? Why should society pay the price for their malfeasance?

I'm going to rephrase the parents comment:

You're going to have a lot more luck correcting yourself than moving others.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#264

Post by vorpalhex »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #227
koheripbal wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has more with a lack of discipline, than a lack of available time or resources.

It's a common, almost universal, complaint which indicates pretty clearly there is more at play than individual virtue.

It is a common, almost universal complaint that God sometimes plays favorites.

Ergo, we can deduce from this that God exists and does indeed have favorites...

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#265

Post by DoreenMichele »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #200
DoreenMichele wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so? New houses have more than doubled in size since the 1950s while holding one less occupant on average. Houses have a lot more amenities than they used to have, like AC and a clothes dryer instead of a clothes line. We have torn down about a million SROs* since the 1950s and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle housing. We are more car oriented than in the past and cars a…

I guess those are US statistics but housing has gotten more and more expensive basically everywhere. Can't do much about that. Thanks for the recommendation!

Yes, US stats. My bad for not stating that.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#266

Post by carapace »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #21

I went to a "progressive" school where we had one strange class called "Design For Living". Today we'd probably call it "lifehacking". Among the fascinating and odd topics was a lesson on managing free time. The premise was a (socialist?) vision that everything would be done by robots by 2000, and we would have to find good hobbies and interests, keep fit and volunteer doing good things for our communities. I think d…

Bucky Fuller calculated that we should all be able to retire after a career of about two years having paid for the rest of our lives, by sometime in the 1970's if we apply our resources and technology efficiently. It was part of his "Design Science Revolution".

The technology has arrived on schedule but the logistics are still messed up.

At least part of the problem is the elites siphoning off capital to Panama or wherever, but the real issue is just getting the basic idea across: you no longer have to "earn" a living. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We have effectively already won the game of "Life on Earth" but we collectively haven't noticed it yet!

- - - -

Ideally programmers are working to replace themselves, and the set of problems you can solve with a computer expands (to some theoretical limit? E.g. will an AI one day tell you who to marry? Which schools to attend, what career path to pursue?)

Anyway, have you heard of the Futumura Projections? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation ) I think one path forward would be to use a notation for programming that is amenable to partial evaluation.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#267

Post by azemetre »

olalonde wrote: post #258
azemetre wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you argue it’s a lack of discipline when companies like Meta and Google literally hire psychologists to make their products more addicting? Why should society pay the price for their malfeasance?

Because our free society is based on the fundamental assumption that grown-up adults are generally responsible and act in their own best interest. Throwing out those assumptions is very dangerous and brings us closer to authoritarianism and tyranny.

Do you apply these same arguments to other moral hazards like pollution?

Wanting to regulate social media (when there are no meaningful regulations) is hardly tyranny.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#268

Post by azemetre »

vorpalhex wrote: post #263
azemetre wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you argue it’s a lack of discipline when companies like Meta and Google literally hire psychologists to make their products more addicting? Why should society pay the price for their malfeasance?

I'm going to rephrase the parents comment: You're going to have a lot more luck correcting yourself than moving others.

No it’s actually much easier to correct at the government level because it forces bad actors to rectify their behavior. Blaming the individual is such a weak argument, especially since the deck is stacked against you as an individual.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#269

Post by olalonde »

azemetre wrote: post #267
olalonde wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because our free society is based on the fundamental assumption that grown-up adults are generally responsible and act in their own best interest. Throwing out those assumptions is very dangerous and brings us closer to authoritarianism and tyranny.

Do you apply these same arguments to other moral hazards like pollution? Wanting to regulate social media (when there are no meaningful regulations) is hardly tyranny.

> Do you apply these same arguments to other moral hazards like pollution?

No, it's not in the same category. Pollution is a cost that is imposed on an uninvolved third party.

I do however apply the same argument to things like gambling, fast food, video games, traditional media, etc.

Re: Experts once predicted that Americans would face excess leisure time (2015)

#270

Post by nosianu »

dopidopHN wrote: post #253
zdragnar wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget making and mending your own clothes, washing them by hand, beating rugs outdoors by hand, all the little chores that have been replaced by electrical tools or are cheaper to purchase than make yourself. Harvesting and chopping firewood, or managing coal. If you visit an Amish community, they might talk about how people occasionally want to join them, only to realize just how much easier modern life is an…

I’m almost 40, not from the US, and mass market hit us later in ( 1955 rather than just after WW2 ) Still: you will have to go back to my grand parent generation to find folks carrying out the activity you describing. And even then, that was seen at the time as a rural predicament ( bigger cities had «modern confort » already, but not isolated farm and so on. ( agreeing with all you says… just that the timing seems o…

East German (GDR) here, born early 1970s.

Let's go through OPs list one by one:

> Don't forget making and mending your own clothes

Not making, or not a lot, but some. Mending, definitely.

> washing them by hand

No, we had a washing machine.

> beating rugs outdoors by hand

Yes! We did that regularly.

> Harvesting

We had the garden in front of the house and an extra one a little further away. We had veggies and fruit in both, lots of it and great variety. And it tasted great. And it was A LOT of work. We also regularly went into the forests for mushrooms and berries and also spent a lot of effort on preserving food for winter.

> chopping firewood

I did that as a kid, a lot, and it was fun! I managed to never hurt myself somehow.

> managing coal.

Yes! We got coal every year, unloaded in front of the house blocking the street for the neighbors, so I, after coming back from school, had to start asap to put it into buckets and slowly move that large mountain of black dirt behind the house into storage. I must have gotten a lot of coal dust into my lungs. It only stopped after reunification when we got natural gas and central heating, which was not an option to buy anywhere in the GDR.

We had our own house. On the other hand, he (in)famous concrete dwellings of the East Bloc, which East Germany had more and more of too to solve the housing crisis that lastet I think well into the 1970s or even the early 1980s, had central heating from the (extremely dirty) coal power plant of the (very large) local chemical factory. Still, even those living in that kind of housing often also still had a garden nearby usually used to grow fruit and vegetables to supplant what could be bought in the stores.

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