Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#201

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:23 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #96

cc439 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A manufacturing business That alone cuts out nearly half the country. The skilled labor economy has been hollowed out and is nearly extinct in most places. You and I live in similar places and the dream remains alive here, but it is long dead in the corner of the country in which I was raised.

It is true that you may have to move to find places where a single income can buy a house, but that has always been true. The necessity of having to move to find better economic conditions has been true since the dawn of humankind. It's why we left Africa, and eventually covered the globe. It is not like in the 40s and 50s you could live anywhere you wanted either. In fact, the 40s and 50s is right in the heart of th…

The difference between then and now, is now the planet is full.

At some point there must be a paradigm shift in this line of thinking or very bad things will happen.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#202

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:24 PM UTC

bumholio wrote: post #175

randomdata wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Has that really changed? A manufacturing business in my area is currently hiring everyone who shows up to an interview. They pay they are offering isn't wonderful (at least if you concept of money has been warped by the IT industry), but you should expect to make around $40,000 per year to start.…

> Rule of thumb says you shouldn't spend more than three times your income on housing Is this a rural rule of thumb? Looking around me, I see people routinely paying 5-10 times their annual income to get a crappy city apartment and spending the majority of their income making mortgage payments. The alternatives, spending the majority of their income on rent or moving to an area where the majority of the income would…

A conforming loan usually requires you to have a debt to income ratio of 43%. I'm definitely not in a rural area and you can buy a decent house in a slightly above average school system for $200K - if you live in the burbs.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#203

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:29 PM UTC

st26 wrote: post #129

ngngngng wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this the case while the average wage has not even kept up with inflation?

Well, consider you pay the dealership $80-120/hr for the mechanic's time, but the mechanic gets only $30-40 of that.

The billed rate is not just for the mechanics time. It also has to cover the non billable support staff and other fixed costs. The dealership is not taking home $80 an hour.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#204

Post by JASchilz » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:31 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #199

JASchilz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a few substantial points, but any use of the "single income earner" argument is incomplete if it doesn't acknowledge that _women were also working at home_ while their husbands were doing income-earning work. It's not only income-earning work that counts against prosperity: it's all work. Studies indicate that men and women gained 6-8 hours of leisure from 1965-2003. There are probably caveats and addenda to…

Can part of the increase of leisure time be explained by a drop in the number of children per family?

That's probably one of the caveats and addenda. So, my counterargument doesn't prove that life has gotten better--maybe an additional kid is "better" than six hours of leisure time by some calculuses. But it does rebut any argument that we used to get by one 40 hours per week per household of labor but now we need 80.

Edit: Of course, as parent notes the drop in number of children represents at most _part_ of the increase in leisure hours. We can definitely attribute part of it to things that are definitely modern advantages, like labor-saving devices such as dish-washing machines. The year 1965 is kind of a poor year for my argument, in that by that point most households had the most labor-saving devices: refrigerators that allow you to shop and cook days at a time, washing machines that saved many hours of labor washing clothes, etc.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#205

Post by hycaria » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:41 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #178

randomdata wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the 40s and 50s the use of a car, even in rural areas , was normally reserved for a special trip once a week to run errands and get out of the house, if you were able to afford a car at all. The average family at the time wouldn't dream of wasting money on a second car, let alone the first one, to 'frivolously' get out of the house on a daily basis for pleasure. That money was needed to pay for the house. It i…

Lets be real the second car is so the spouse can get a job too because otherwise the bank is taking the house.

Then there's another income to add to the equation

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#206

Post by JASchilz » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:41 PM UTC

another-cuppa wrote: post #166

JASchilz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a few substantial points, but any use of the "single income earner" argument is incomplete if it doesn't acknowledge that _women were also working at home_ while their husbands were doing income-earning work. It's not only income-earning work that counts against prosperity: it's all work. Studies indicate that men and women gained 6-8 hours of leisure from 1965-2003. There are probably caveats and addenda to…

So who does the work at home now? Both partners after they get home from work? That doesn't sound like a better deal to me.

There are fewer hours of work done at home now. The increase in leisure time reflects a decrease in total labor: income-earning labor, labor around the house, etc. Figures in [1] break it out a bit, although the years-reflected are a bit different than I used above. Search for "60.9" to find the relevant table.

[1]: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#207

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:43 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #167

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #120

It's easy to understand why people may not believe that prosperity has increased across the board. I also used to believe this, but after looking at the data I'm not entirely sure what it is that drives our perception. This [1] paper from the urban institute is something I found precisely when looking to put specific numbers to the hollowing out of the middle class and the overall decline, or at least stagnation, of…

I wouldn't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class. And a big part of what defined class is how much control you have in your life. If you have to work 80 hours a week and get $100k that's far different than working 40 hours a week and getting $100k. Another thing is how secure your position is. Are you at risk of being outsourced? Is your job going to be automated? Are you in construction with temporary…

I wouldn't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class

If your household income is $100K, you're close the 4th quartile of income.

https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...

Many households in the US see six figures as an unattainable dream.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#208

Post by Retric » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:45 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #198

Retric wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, failing to keep up with the Jones has real impact on happiness. Absolute vs relative prosperity is like buying a top of the line new computer in 1995 or a used computer today built in 2010 that is vastly more powerful yet can’t run a lot of current software well. One issue is we are constantly bombarded with things we don’t have. Basic cable has far more channels than existed in 1960 but the menu constantly…

Exactly, failing to keep up with the Jones has real impact on happiness. Absolute vs relative prosperity is like buying a to of the line new computer in 1995 or a used computer today built in 2010 that is vastly more powerful yet can’t run a lot of current software well. A computer you bought in 2010 would be more than capable of running most modern non game software well. https://www.computerhope.com/history/2010.ht…

I am mostly talking about games. Still, a good PC from 2010 holds up well, but low end PC’s from 2010 could have as little as 2GB of RAM which would have issues with a modern OS and a wide range of applications. Other issues where anemic SSD storage space, a HDD from 2010 holds up ok, but SSD’s tended to just barely work.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#209

Post by ridewinter » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:51 PM UTC

wozniacki wrote: post #187

todd8 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in college in the 70s, so yeah, it was a fun time for me when I think back on it. Who wouldn’t want to hear Aerosmith live in a club with maybe 80 people there before their first album. But I walked to class cold and wet on many days. Gortex hadn’t been invented and I couldn’t afford a car. When I got my first real job I bought a car, but I carried a toolbox in the trunk. Cars broke down frequently and with no…

Perhaps the deficit of happiness can be better explained by one of Peter Thiel's most excellent reductionist observations: The countercultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. [1][2] Perhaps, for too long, the left has engulfed and held…

Those hippies brought us Apple computer and the Internet. What have conservatives contributed other than environmental destruction? Legit question.

Re: Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

#210

Post by dagw » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 12:53 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #207

lotsofpulp wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class. And a big part of what defined class is how much control you have in your life. If you have to work 80 hours a week and get $100k that's far different than working 40 hours a week and getting $100k. Another thing is how secure your position is. Are you at risk of being outsourced? Is your job going to be automated? Are you in construction with temporary…

I wouldn't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class If your household income is $100K, you're close the 4th quartile of income. https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe... Many households in the US see six figures as an unattainable dream.

I think the point is that there is more to 'class' than money. If you're a single income family in a low cost part of the country where the working person is pulling in $100k working 40 hours a week in a stable and secure job, then you're definitely upper middle class.

If on the other hand you're a dual income family in one of the more expensive parts of the country and both of you work 60 hour weeks in a very insecure job market to clear a combined $100k then you're probably not upper middle class.