In 1987, I bought an 80 MEGAbyte drive for $775 (around $1600 today), thinking how amazing it was that disk drives had broken the $10/MB barrier. When the first 1GB drives came out a few years later, I remember thinking, "Who would trust that much data to a single device? What an amazing single point of failure!" Now there are 128GB MicroSD cards for under $1/GB. Even understanding the technology, the mind boggles.
You got a deal. Around 1989 I sold a 315MB IBM "Winchester" drive to the phone company, for a whopping $10,095 (list price at the time). It slid into a fairly clunky PS/2 Model 80, as I recall.
China has the right idea. If you don't work, you don't eat.
I imagine that would do wonders to clean up my city's streets from the hundreds of young people who prefer to camp there 24/7 versus getting a job.
Where I live and work (as a CSR consultant), Indonesia, people also don't eat if they don't get a job. Among other failings, malnutrition of children under 5 years runs at around 35%. That causes stunting and is associated with poor cognitive test scores, which is in turn correlated with lower income. I don't have the data for China handy, but your solution is overly simplistic and reflects poorly on your understanding of the article and the issue.
Was just in Vancouver and learned that they've done away with Uber. It was horrible. Not enough taxis so it was impossible to get around the city. Frankly, it will impact my decision on whether or not I go back to visit. Unless your taxi companies can offer the same level of service, killing Uber will result in an impact to tourism... maybe just from me, but it'll be an impact.
Toronto has poor to adequate taxi service. Vancouver has NO taxi service. It is not a taxi town, everyone drives cars. Taxis, when you can get them (airport or phone in) cost real money. Public transit is perfectly fine for the young and poor. Vancouver also has the worst traffic in North America, according to Wikipedia.
You could work the same hours (per family) today and still have a vastly higher standard of living than people had in the 60s. You might have a lower standard of living than your neighbors, with 2 earners, and that's mostly what people care about, but that's a relative, not absolute, measure. And we are absolutely doing better now.
I understand your point -- please don't jump up and down saying I don't get it. I disagree with it. You are correct that your money today, even in nominal terms, can arguably buy more value in manufactured goods. That may or may not be true, but it is only a small subset of what we buy. Manufacturing (both what we buy and who we employ) is a constantly decreasing share of the economy in most countries -- including some in the developing world. Services can generally be grouped into professional and unskilled, and there are more and more people looking for fewer and fewer unskilled jobs.
Others are correctly pointing out that the important criterion is what the person with the median income can buy. That excludes the education many of us older folks got, the DB pension our parents got and many other things. Medicine is probably a wash, depending on where you live and in the US your coverage.
There is, tragically, no doubt that the median earner has experienced a decline in his standard of living. Real median incomes are declining, and the cheaper cost / higher functionality of manufactured goods today is not enough to compensate.
But the bottom line is: people aren't as stupid as you'd like to think they are...
Your post is strong evidence that at least one of us is. Since you're taking on and defaming scientists as a group, perhaps you would care to share your analysis leading to your figures of "trillions" and "5%".
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
