Standard of Living

I'm reading through a chapter of Brad DeLong's Slouching Toward Utopia. A text on US economic history that he has been hatching for over a decade but is yet to appear as a book. He has an eye for how we under-appreciate economic change. Here's a table from his book:


When I look at this I think of my great grandparents who were born around 1870. I remember looking at pictures of their "house". It was a wood shack with a dirt floor. There is a lot of progress from their life to my life. The funny thing is that there could have been even more if people were rational optimizers, invested more, educated themselves more, worked to build rather than go to war to destroy, and shown more kindness to their fellow humans. But they didn't. And despite that, we live in a world which would be considered paradise back 100 years ago.

I remember being impressed as a schoolboy in the late 1950s with comparisons of how long it would take a worker in the America to earn various consumer items compared to a worker in the Soviet Union. Here's a comparison between a worker 100 years ago and today:


Here are some bits from DeLong's chapter that struck me and made me stop and wonder:

• In 1940 when Hitler went to war, four-fifths of all wheeled vehicles used by the German army were "powered" by horses and mules.


• To get an idea of how productivity has raised the standard of living:
  
  • in 1600, a working person in London could use a full day's wages to buy 2500 calories
  
  
  • in 1800, he could buy 3500 calories
  
  
  • in 1870, he could buy 5000 calories
  
  
  • today, he could buy 2,400,000 calories

A book that looks at the acceleration of progress through a speed-up in innovaction is Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. Here's a posting I did on this topic.

And here's an earlier posting I did on the coming singularity.