[jameslk]

> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat

Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive

[toasty228]

It's always the choice between flying cars and living in a hut made of cow dung, right? No in between is conceivable by the human brain, either boundless growth or the Neolithic

[inglor_cz]

I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.

A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.

I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.

Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.

I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.

Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.

[toasty228]

> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.

Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)

I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost

[inglor_cz]

Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.

[nkrisc]

> Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.

[inglor_cz]

GP seems to prefer the 1960s, which would mean that the "not living enough to die from cancer" would likely be off the table.

[toasty228]

And how many people suffer/die from obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle disease (lookup the main causes of deaths in the US, and their causes) ? All I'm saying is that there is a middle ground between "living in huts made of cow dung and dying at 35" and "75% of your population is obese and die from literal over consumption and lack of physical activity"

> but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

Trump was elected twice, the voters are brain dead cattle anyways

> BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago

At what scale? People could go to the US in 1700 too, it doesn't mean that commercial airlines are sustainable at ANY rate

[inglor_cz]

At scale lucrative enough to stage coups in Latin America. Read up upon this.

Let us not even go deeper to the Age of Sail. Large-scale trade and consumption of sugar, tobacco and cotton fueled slavery operations from Virginia down to Brazil, long before a lightbulb was even a thing.

[pjerem]

> without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.

Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.

[inglor_cz]

OK, true, but the question is: what is the minimum workplace effort of living people that must go into that organizing process? Let us measure it in hours for the sake of simpliticy.

In the extremes, 1 hour weekly is probably too little and 100 hours weekly is excessive. But given how almost the entire world has converged to approx. 40 on average, I'd be surprised if it was very different from 40.

Yes, this may change with robots and AI.

[Ma8ee]

If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.

At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?

[flextheruler]

The argument that commoners now live better than historical kings because we possess better technology is reductive if by living better you mean life satisfaction. Happiness is relative. Most people compare themselves to their peers. This is borne out by a multitude of studies one being that upper middle class people are unhappier living in upper class neighborhoods than in middle class neighborhoods despite the richer neighborhood having lower crime, better services, etc.

There will never be a point that society at large will decline to exploit resources when there is competition for those resources. It's easy to see why on average this behavior is common from an evolutionary perspective.

[Ma8ee]

No, I don't mean life satisfaction, I mean exactly what I wrote. Our material standards are unimaginable high compared to a few hundred years ago. I've never imagined kings to be particularly happy.

I am convinced there will be a point where humans will find other ways to compete than buying expensive goods. I thought the whole "humans are slaves to their genes" became quite out of fashion already 30 years or so.

[jameslk]

Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht

0. https://www.paulgraham.com/brandage.html

[Ma8ee]

What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?

While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.

[throw0101c]

> What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?

If your job involves network connectivity and SSH, satellite Internet would allow you to do your job on your yacht where ever it happens to be, even in the middle of an ocean.

James Hamilton, Senior Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, [1] was doing this 15+ years ago as he motored around the world in a Nordhavn 52 [2] with his wife:

* https://mvdirona.com/2009/06/remote-data-communication-costs...

* https://mvdirona.com/2015/08/communications-at-sea/

* https://mvdirona.com/2018/03/kvh-v7-hts-twice-the-speed-more...

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/

[2] https://mvdirona.com/dirona/

[darkwater]

> Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.

Sounds like a poshy neighborhood colonized by expats. I mean, I do share the values but it's definitely a luxury and entitled position (with its own consequences on the rest of the locals sharing the same city)

[Ma8ee]

I wouldn't call it poshy, but it is mostly inhabited by academics. And it is not in the US.

I genuinely don't understand why you think it is entitled.

[darkwater]

Sorry, maybe "entitled" is not the right word, I'm not a native speaker, and I don't live in the US.

What I mean with "entitled" in this context is that this whole "enjoy life, moments, family" movement - which I subscribe to and try to do myself! - comes from people that don't have economic issues at all. So yeah, instead of focusing on buying the fanciest Mercedes or BMW, they can leave work earlier to stay with their kids because they have a highly paid and specialized job where their place is safe, and the employer understands that's what they want and need.

They are certainly better than the hustlers that work 80 hours a week in my world view as well, but they are still entitled because if you were a cleaning lady, a cashier or the guy sweeping the streets you will need to obey to what your employer forces you to do rather than arriving 10 minutes late because you brought your kids to pre-school in a cargo bike.

[preg_match]

People view it as entitled because it’s good. Generally when confronted with people doing better than them people have two choices:

1. View it as an opportunity to question or improve their own situation.

2. Prefer fairness and attempt to tear those people down.

Many Americans prefer 2. It’s fundamentally self destructive, but when they see workers who don’t hate their lives their immediate first thought is “gosh how selfish and entitled, someone has to stop them!” It’s a crab bucket mentality, driven by hyper-individualism in American labor.

[supriyo-biswas]

> If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories

Handwaving away constraints on production on physical goods because of advances in code generation is a new one.

[rcxdude]

I think this is a deliberately somewhat fantastical hypothetical scenario (though not far off the sales pitch from humanoid robot companies).

[littlexsparkee]

The loudest gripes in this moment are housing, healthcare, childcare - essentials, not worries about keeping up with the Joneses.

[AngryData]

Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.

[defrost]

Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade.

African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.

Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/

Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?

[Maxatar]

>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.

UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.

[nephihaha]

Many of them live in shacks made from wooden pallets and corrugated iron roofs instead. This is true across much of the Third World – Brazil, Haiti, South Africa and Indonesia all have them for example.

[jameslk]

I’m talking about how many people lived in the past

OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves

[TheOtherHobbes]

From people I know who traveled, the people in thatched huts are sometimes reported to be far happier than we are.

And a lot of people in the US can't afford hospitals or antibiotics today.

[Windchaser]

It's one hospital, how much could it cost? $200 million?

[preg_match]

People work less = we live in mud huts? I’m not understanding the connection at all. You can’t just make that jump and then not explain it and pretend as though it makes sense.

No, it doesn’t make sense, only in your head. We’re not mind readers, please elaborate and at least try to use logic or reasoning. It’s frustrating to readers otherwise.

[CalRobert]

Thatched roofs are an expensive art installation compared to many other types