A Report Card for Humanity: 1900-2050
06 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic growth, health economics, technological progress Tags: The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, The Great Fact
January 1984: First Mac goes on sale
05 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
30 Years Of Cell Phones
03 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
The average American household was poorer in 2013 than it was in 1983 – Vox
31 Jan 2015 1 Comment
in applied welfare economics, population economics, poverty and inequality, technological progress Tags: Brad De Long, The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, The Great Fact, time machines
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US net worth rose considerably over that period, which is what you would expect to see.
Technology has improved and productivity increased, so society has a greater capacity for wealth building. America was also quite a bit older on average in 2013 than it was in 1983, so average wealth should have gone up.
But all of these gains went to the top 20 percent of the population. It’s worse than that, actually.
Over 100 percent of the gains went to the top 20 percent, because the bottom 60 percent of the population got poorer.
What does this claim by Matthew Yglesias exactly mean? He writes frequently on economics, so his editor must think he knows something about it.
http://t.co/0hEAL8X1kS—
EPI Chart Bot (@epichartbot) July 04, 2015
If 60% of the population got poorer as compared to 1983, they would be better off stepping into a time machine to go back to 1983. That is the only logical interpretation of this claim about 60% of the population. I owe this time machine thought experiment to Brad De Long.
Of course, going back to 1983, would involve giving up all products and services invented since then, and all product upgrades since then.
https://twitter.com/classicepics/status/561432237976322048
More importantly, for a good proportion of the population, they have become very sick or die immediately when they stepped out side of the Time Machine. This is because of shorter life expectancies in 1983 and the unavailability of a whole range of lifesaving medicines.
Am I just pedantic because I want access to crucial diabetic and other medications unavailable 30 years ago? No Internet, no cable, no international travel and no mobile phones.
In his original thought experiment, De Long asks how much you would want in additional income to agree to go back in time to a specific year. De Long was an economic historian examining the differences in living standards as compared to 1890 and 1990 and how that gap is greatly underestimated in economic statistics. De Long would have refused to go into the time machine to return to 1890 unless he could pack a very large bag to take with him:
I would want, first, health insurance: the ability to go to the doctor and be treated with late-twentieth-century medicines.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was crippled by polio. Without antibiotic and adrenaline shots I would now be dead of childhood pneumonia.
The second thing I would want would be utility hookups–electricity and gas, central heating, and consumer appliances.
The third thing I want to buy is access to information–audio and video broadcasts, recorded music, computing power, and access to databases.
None of these were available at any price back in 1890.
19th century Internet
31 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
Every 20 years we worry about losing jobs to technology
26 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, technological progress Tags: creative destruction, search and matching, technological unemployment
Every generation has its moral panic about technological change in creative destruction.
For young people, it’s that overweening conceit about the problems they are attempting to solve are new.
For the middle-aged and older, rather than suggest that they are policy hustlers, it’s more like you they simply forgot that these debates were had 20 years ago and the scaremongers lost the same reason they lost 20 years before that, and so on.
HT: https://twitter.com/JamesBessen/status/498435714322014208
Proof at last, that the moon landing was real
26 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of bureaucracy, politics - USA, technological progress Tags: conspiracy theorists, immigration, moon landing
Decay of the Hollywood sign, 1978
24 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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