Quote:
Originally Posted by Cd
How were things in the 1950s when a lot of items were made in the US ? Have things really improved ? Do people really have more money than they did back then ?
If enough Joe Smoes buy a paint sprayer and do it themselves, the paint contractor goes out of business.
I buy everything cheap ( except this damned overpriced Apple ) - so most likely stuff made overseas.
I'm a hypocrite, yes.
I still see a problem though, and i wish there was a solution.
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Actually we aren't more wealthy, by most standards ALL people across the world have become poorer as population has gone up but not poorer in the traditional way.
How is wealth measured?
1. Land and "real" non-trinket style possessions. Most people across the world have ended up with smaller footprints, while houses in the US have increased in size the land they sit upon generally has not.
a) Another measure of wealth is how much income goes toward owning a plot or a home, by that measure 3 years hard labor to the king in the middle ages was a better deal than most houses today.
2. Freedom of movement - a wash from 1950 to today but certain areas are much worse and actually true mobility among americans has gone down in strange ways among certain people. (around here they keep taking the buses away so there is zero public transport)
3. Small possessions - this has "improved" in QTY over the years, we are swimming in things and this is where we are wrong, we should not have this crap.
a) In the old days people all over the world had less stuff, stuff was smaller and more of it was made by themselves or locally. The positive of this was that much less waste was tolerated, things were more valuable, were kept and used and rebuilt. Nothing was disposable, everything would be repurposed and re-used until it was scrap which would usually again get re-used for some other purpose.
4. Last but also least is real income - the mode of real income has gone up on paper across the world, food is generally more available than it was many years ago and starvation has been reduced worldwide. Sadly this is a mixed bag and doesn't actually mean we are better off,
we have traded our health, environment, certain freedoms for having things and having the appearance of money to then have certain necessities become dramatically more expensive and items that should be priceless like the environment mostly become more universally damaged, though again locally some areas are better but many others are much worse. Human/animal waste has been substituted with "other" more permanent types of waste in many areas of the world.
Poverty with a few durable lifelong valuables has been substituted for poverty with less mobility, industrial pollution, degraded environment less ability to "live" off the land and high levels of a different type of work hour than traditional.
Is having more stuff but a more crowded degraded environment, with some massive waste land zones, poor but more plentiful foods but less access to traditional food, more wealthy?
I don't know but it is what we have.