Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
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Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#2The conversation about the grid being born and how rapidly early power systems paid themselves off made me think about how substantially easier it is to produce light now than over historical periods. I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#3The conversation about the grid being born and how rapidly early power systems paid themselves off made me think about how substantially easier it is to produce light now than over historical periods. I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
> I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
Maybe, but I think most economists would say that technology caused productivity to increase to previously unimaginable levels, so today's labor can create way more photons than in the past.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#4That's cool, but inflation is still hitting me harder than I expected at the grocery store with 3 hungry kids.
This article and honestly a lot of articles by the WaPo seem tone deaf lately.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#5That's cool, but inflation is still hitting me harder than I expected at the grocery store with 3 hungry kids. This article and honestly a lot of articles by the WaPo seem tone deaf lately.
(2017)
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#6(2017)
Take anything you hear from the Cato Institute with a large pinch of salt and climate change denial BS filtering.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#7The conversation about the grid being born and how rapidly early power systems paid themselves off made me think about how substantially easier it is to produce light now than over historical periods. I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
We’ve turned what used to be an exceptionally precious commodity (light, especially after the sun set) into a pollutant. Go us.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#8Mildly weird piece, in that it's really measuring two things; lighting efficiency (and only at an extremely low resolution, implying a whole-system efficiency that doesn't change between the invention of the light bulb and the fluorescent light) and wage growth. 60 hours of work may have bought 72 hours of electric light in 1880, but rather more in 1990, say, for a combination of both reasons.
That said, LED bulbs do still feel like a bit of a sea-change; since they showed up, lighting is cheap enough that most people don't really have to think about it at all.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#9That's cool, but inflation is still hitting me harder than I expected at the grocery store with 3 hungry kids. This article and honestly a lot of articles by the WaPo seem tone deaf lately.
Inflation is the economics version of "software getting slower faster than hardware gets faster". In other words, the increased output is being diverted to areas that don't produce value.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#10The conversation about the grid being born and how rapidly early power systems paid themselves off made me think about how substantially easier it is to produce light now than over historical periods. I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
We’ve turned what used to be an exceptionally precious commodity (light, especially after the sun set) into a pollutant. Go us.
LLMs are doing the same with written content.