Where has all the productivity gone?

You know what? I paid double what my parents paid for the house I really think of as my childhood house that they bought in 1989, and I paid more than quadruple what they paid for our actual first house in 1979. But my house is also double the size, it's downtown in a major metro, I'm not going to have to rebuild it from the inside out because it's not falling apart and everything already works. There is no asbestos in my walls, no lead in my paint.

I guess I'm paying more for healthcare, but I also get better healthcare. I suffered severe spine damage in the Army, but I'm basically fine now thanks to procedures and techniques that didn't exist 20 years ago. I had severe pneumonia when I was 5. If I'd been born prior to 1928 when antibiotics were invented, I would have just died as a child and wouldn't even be here to be paying for anything.

My grandparents, man. One of my grandfathers effectively worked, grueling manual labor, until the day he died. The other one died with nothing, left in a nursing home rotting with Alzheimer's for the last decade while con-artists tricked him out of what little he could have left to his children. And he experienced unimaginable horrors as a young adult. His ship in the South Pacific in 1945 was destroyed and he survived for six weeks on a raft drinking fish blood. I served 8 years in the Army on a tank crew and I can't even imagine what these people from earlier generations went through. My grandmother literally murdered someone when she was a teenager. I guess it's a minor miracle she never went to prison, but I suppose the police just didn't bother policing the segregated Mexican neighborhoods back then, which is probably why she was killing people.

I have no idea where this idea comes from that we're worse off than our parents. I guess it's because the people believing this kind of thing are mostly writers in a collapsing industry who came from upper middle class highly educated backgrounds? Well, guess what? A lot of us didn't and we're way better off than our parents and grandparents.

College got more expensive. Great, but I was the first person on either side of my family in any generation to even go to college. The idea of getting educated at all and not working your entire life doing manual labor would have been an unimaginable luxury to my great-grandfather who grew up picking cotton and taught himself stonemasonry.

These people who think it's been so downhill since the 70s. Do you seriously not remember the 80s and 90s? I was with my dad and got trapped doing side jobs during the LA riots. Over 60 people were murdered. The National Guard enforcing curfews and perimeters in the nation's second largest city. Nowadays we flip out that a single woman died trying to break into the capitol. My school got shot at in drive-bys more times than I can remember. We weren't allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys because the school district was so afraid gangs would kill us for it. My sister's best friend was murdered.

I guess life was great in the 70s for the 0.0001% of the world population employed on the factory floors of major US auto manufacturers, and it sucks those opportunities dried up, but man is it myopic to act like that's the only thing that has happened in the last 50 years.

How nicely should a consumer device be made? I feel like technological improvements make the device obsolete and disposable, so making the build quality higher just artificially slows down iteration time. (Why will 5G be widely adopted? Because eventually everyone will drop their 4G phone down the stairs or the battery will be uneconomical to replace.)

If you go back and look at old appliances, they basically have no value despite being well built. They don't solve the problem they were designed to solve anymore. A shitty laptop from Amazon is a whole different piece of technology compared to a hand-crafted Apple 1 from 1976, enabling you to do things that people wouldn't have even dreamed of when the Apple 1 came out. So making it "survive the test of time" is futile -- that computer isn't garbage because it was put together sloppily, it's garbage because technology advanced past it. (Probably a bad example, I think the Apple 1 was just a circuit board cobbled together in a garage.)

I feel like even consumer appliances have changed. Clothes washers use significantly less water. Stoves use precise electronic control instead of burning flammable gas that gets piped into your home. TVs display content on-demand, with 8.3 million individually-colored pixels and 6 channels of sound. Computers connect to a library where you can read pretty much any book ever written, right in your home. Technology changes so people discard their old devices and replace them with new ones. It's not just some scam to make companies that can't innovate some cheap money. Everything has a lifetime, and sometimes it's shorter than the lifetime of the physical materials that the device is built from.

Maybe you don't need any of that, and just want to read novels from the 1950s with your dog in a log cabin. That's totally legit, but where you think people excited about 4k TVs are weird, they probably think you're weird.

Honestly, I think phones are something people hate the most for being a little too breakable, but thinking about it more deeply, I think the right tradeoffs were made. They last as long as they need to on average. 10 years ago, the technology (hardware, software, connectivity, design, everything) was immature. So they broke more and cost less, because you were going to need to upgrade. Now we have $1200 phones, and they are a little nicer, and the technology isn't changing enough to make them obsolete every 6 months. This all sounds about right to me. I have a $1000 phone and thoughts about upgrading it haven't crossed my mind in the ~3 years I've had it. That is very different from the phones I had before that, where I felt like they were compromises on the day they came out. (And hey, I only paid $300 for them.)

TL;DR: maybe everything isn't awful all the time.

The average American is something like 39 years old atm. That means the average birth date is 1982 so most people probably do not remember the 80s and only barely remember the 90s. If you were alive when your parents bought a house in the 70s then you have lived a life that most Americans don’t have a connection to. You were in the golden years and wonder why people don’t have the same view you do?