You absolutely don't need to work 37 hours per week if you are willing to live 200km from the big cities in an old house.
You buy something dirt cheap for less than 80k USD. It's not great, it's old run down. But if you do minimal repairs and don't live the high life, you can get by with very little.
But if you want a new car and nice comfy house in a decent location, with all the modern amenities, well, that's expensive.
brother rusted out farm houses 2 hours from any office building, let alone one that hires programmers are like 350k in rural states. Idk where you live, but it ain't Earth.
For those who don't want to click, a house in Des Moines for $125000 - this was the very first house that came up when I searched des moines real estate, I didn't bother to look farther.
Houses less 400k DKK ~ 60k USD, granted houses at price range are small, worn down, far from cities and job market in area a bit challenged - but not impossible.
Personally, I'm happy with my 700k USD home, I'd probably be working anyways, since to me it's preferable to work full time and enjoy modern amenities.
I'll concede that of the two properties available in Turtle Lake North Dakota you can get a trailer on someone's property for ~100K, 417 Putman St, Turtle Lake, ND 58575 looks like you got me there.
EDIT: reporting back from Steele, looks like there's an undeveloped acre next to a highway and a power junction for ~75K, it's under 80k so I guess you know where to find me pitching my tent.
Productivity improvements have been partially eaten up by cost of living increases. We don't need everyone working, but how do we decide who has to work and who gets stuff for free? Should workers pay higher taxes to support more retirees?
Cost of living doesn’t wipe out productivity increase. Cost of living is a money transfer. People buy things from other people. The question is therefore where is this money actually going. A casual look at how richness is shared in the USA will give you the answer to that.
how are will still framing this as an ethical dilemma?! THE RICH should pay higher taxes to support retirees! there are people with hundreds of millions of dollars! we just turn down the dial labeled "how rich you get to be" until this shit gets figured out
If you’re willing to put up with 1925 living standards, you can get away with working way less than people worked in 1925, and way less than most people work in 2025.
What is 1925 standards? All organic food? Mostly tailored clothing? Custom fitted shoes? Only one spouse working? Brand new, incredibly high tech cars being made affordable to the average factory worker? Incredibly high tech entertainment centers? They even had washing machines. So are we talking giving up a dishwasher, a clothes dryer, and only having 1.5 baths in houses? Or are we talking the affordable city workers' hotels where man/women mingled, that enable people to live affordably with dignity in the city center, and actually have a life?
What does '1925' mean? No more shein plastic semi-disposable clothes that fall within what 1920's would consider sci-fi dystopian, universal basic income disposable clothes? Or hormone/chemical saturated 'food' that they wouldn't recognize as such? Or huge McMansions made of literal urea board and plastic extruded chemical 'luxury vinyl' floors? Brand new technology such mass produced cars, affordably available to the average person?
Only half of US households had electricity. I imagine many of the ones that were electrified didn’t have washing machines.
Likewise, about half of US households had indoor plumbing. So we’re not talking about giving up multiple bathrooms, we’re potentially talking about giving up bathrooms, period. Do you enjoy outhouses? I don’t.
Only one spouse working? That’s a myth. Who do you think was making those tailored clothes, washing the dishes, washing clothes by hand, and all that? Maybe you mean only one spouse getting paid to work, which is quite different.
You’re looking at a life in a small, drafty house that’s very cold in the winter and excessively hot in the summer (my houses were like that in the 1980s, even), crapping in an outhouse, and washing clothes by hand. But you won’t be washing a lot of clothes, because you’ll probably only have one or two sets.
If this lifestyle sounds attractive to you, you can have it right now for quite cheap.
Jevons paradox. Productivity has increased, but so has consumption because those productivity increases have decreased cost and made many things more affordable and normal.
Bring in more young people via economic opportunity and immigration.
Making kids easier to have really only has two real options:
1. Go back down the development timeline of a nation and remove rights from women (bad).
2. Implement more social programs to incentivize children.
The reason we need to do 2 now and not in the past is we've developed. Women have rights now, and we need real reasons for them to have kids, not fake reasons like we had in the past.
If everyone thinks that government will take care of them when they are old, they will prefer spending time on "self actualization" (whatever that means) instead of the boring dull work of raising kids.
Boring, dull, expensive and risky. We need to incentivize people to do it, not just give them vaguely nationalistic reasons to do so.
Pretty much the only people holding up births in the US is young people who accidentally got banged up. That demographic has only been shrinking as access to contraceptives and education goes up.
We don’t want to remove privileges from people, we want to add on incentives. Currently, there’s a million and one incentives not to have kids.
Not for the young people, no. Besides, countries like the US have made elder care a cash cow. We don’t actually want young people to care for the old, because we can’t bleed them dry that way.
How tiny of a fraction? Can you quantify this for us?
In principle I think some kind of wealth tax on fortunes above a certain level would be a good idea. But there are a lot of practical implementation problems in terms of identifying and valuing illiquid assets. Like for example I have friends who own forestry land (for softwood timber harvesting) in a foreign country. Those assets have some value but trade infrequently so there's no reliable market price. And they probably hold the assets through a foreign corporation rather than directly in their own names. What is a "fair" amount for them to pay in taxes, and how would the government enforce that in a consistent and cost-effective manner?
It's taxation, not brain surgery. If political will is present we can figure out the accounting. The central question is whether we want to drive the economic output of nearly the entire economy into the hands of the 50 richest people in the world, or if we feel that split should be more equitable.
It's always odd to see this dichotomy on HN comments:
1) I'm amazing, I can solve any problem, I'm enlightened by my own intelligence, I'm the mover and shaker who drives all worldly productivity, and I do it by wrangling the newest technologies in the most imaginative creative and intelligent ways, no problem is too great for my superior intelligence!
2) Pay taxes? Ah but, uhh, that's impossible; like ... who decides? There, there's a dealbreaker for you! Hah! And anyway how much? I.. I... there's complexity, don't you know how difficult and complex it is to ... own a forest? Nobody could make a decision, I can see already that the combined might of a nation's experts could not come up with a figure, forget AI, this is just ... give up already, come on, some problems are forever out of reach.