Originally Posted by
KingNothing
In 2013, $1000 can buy you a laptop and several months of internet service. In 1913, it couldn't do that because the technology wasn't even close to existing. It could buy you, like, a telegraph, or something.
Who has a higher standard of living? The man with the technology to mentally go anywhere on the face of the Earth (anywhere in the known universe, even), or the man with the equivalent of many, more dollars in his pocket who has to leave his house to use the bathroom and can't call anyone he knows on the magic device we carry around with us that we refer to as cell phones?
Standard of living is not just real wages.
Honestly, in consider that real wages were a bit higher in the 1970s.... but also that society was more violent, transportation to vacation destinations was more expensive, food more costly and less available, entertainment further from our fingertips --- Lord almighty, I'm conversing with someone I've never met, and will never even see, instantly. If we wanted, we could both download an episode of The Wire and talk about it in the chat, simultaneously. And then I could drive to a restaurant, listening to satellite radio on the way, and when I arrive I could eat fresh mozzarella that was imported from Italy this morning as an appetizer before an entre of, say, Kobe beef and Alaskan salmon, then drink a microbrew imported from Belgium. An average man is affording things that even a very wealthy couldn't have had several generations ago.
Life is good. Seriously, life is obscenely good. Don't lose sight of that.
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