> Wages, after adjusting for inflation, are more than 20x greater today than they were 200 years ago.
Agree. Though, the time periods are not all that comparable and I'm really referring to the last 20 to 40 years.
200 years ago, agriculture was dominant, things indeed have changed a lot since then.
To another extent, I think this is kinda like looking at stock charts of something like AAPL. Yeah - it is up by like a million percent since the 1990s, but if you are an investor in the last year or two, you're not up by that much per se, and with the right timing, possibly down (AAPL is not the best example, but the point is hopefully conveyed).
Mass automation with computers, did not start until the last 50 years. It's potentially of a different nature. I hear you on the skepticism, people thought ATMs were going to put all bank tellers out of a job. In a way it did, but also displaced jobs to new work.
> That's why infant mortality has declined so much.
Wage growth was not the only factor. Vaccines against childhood sicknesses, that previously routinely killed children before they were 3 years old was a huge factor as well. The lack of childhood deaths is largely attributed to longer life expectancy - it's kind an effect of averaging. 200 years ago, if you lived to be 25, you had a good chance to live into your 40s and 50s and later. With that said, better overall incomes, better sanitation, better knowledge of things like infections - there's a number of keys factor (wage growth included). I just want to point out that it was not just wage growth.
> We still have a lot of room for improvement, with the masses still forced to subsist on sub-par products (e.g. ultra-processed foods, products that poison them with microplastics, etc)
In a way this was more my point. Craft goods replaced by mass produced goods. It's not all bad for sure, but it is what it is (not all good either).
(Though, market capture and monopolies, IMO the mass produced goods, notably tech products - are arguably getting enshittified at a faster rater than anything that happened in the 1900s. Market forces indicate that these companies don't need to put out better products, they can do shrink-flation, price gauging, generally lower the quality of already cheap stuff simply because they can and profit motive dictates that they should [profit motive IMO is a good thing, but profit motive without competition is not])
> and long work hours just to afford basics (housing, healthcare, childcare, etc), and the only way to get there is continued economic development, which literally amounts to automation of labor-intensive production processes.
This is getting to my point as well. 50 years ago - a high school degree was plenty to have a middle class lifestyle. Since the last 50 years, the stratification of 'lower' and 'higher' has increased. That middle that was the backbone of the US from the mid-1900s is shrinking.
> Wages strongly track per capita GDP. The natural instinct to be cynical is misguided when it comes to expectations regarding the impact of automation.
Some automation is good, some is not. The new automated AI summary of Google I abhor. It's wrong so often, and absolutely no better than the existing site summaries they had previously. We can think of a lot of really not fun software to use. Things like JIRA replacing a good old whiteboard. Sometimes the automated tool is awful - but sometimes it's great and saves a gob of time too.
My fundamental point though is that the automation of the last 50 years, really of the last 30, is of a very different character from the last 200 - in a way that puts a lot more pressure on 'middle' jobs. It is yet to be seen how that will play out. Income inequality of today is essentially unparalleled in history. Monopolies have not been broken up in a very long time (AT&T is probably the last big breakup, but that has re-formed), regulation to avoid capture of markets is essentially non-existent. I do believe in free markets, but at the same time I believe that over time 'winners' can arise - and that destroys those free markets. I don't know of any similar time in history that matches the last 40 years with respect to these parameters: runaway income inequality, automation eliminating "middle" jobs and stratifying the workforce, unfettered monopolistic powers (eg: tech companies, food companies, meat producers; these are all places where a few companies control 90% of all activity)
While this response was long, I hope it was interesting and furthers the dialog a bit. Thank you for your original response, I appreciate the dialog & exchange of ideas.