In his recent Netflix special, comedian Ronnie Chieng describes how he viewed the US from abroad. He described the US as the NBA of countries, where the best and brightest went to compete. Yet he observed that when he arrived, all Americans seemed to do was complain. They seemed to complain about the most trivial inconveniences despite the fact that they lived in almost obscene abundance
I thought about this when I came across a clip of a speaker that asked the question: would you rather be Nelson Rockefeller 100 years ago or a middle class person today? Most people he asked this question to, at least initially, responded that they would rather be a Rockefeller due to the fact that they would be vastly wealthier on a relative basis compared to everyone else. Yet the speaker pointed out that this myopic view completely misses all of the progress that humans have made for themselves in the past 100 years. That speaker was inspired by this post from the site Human Progress, where an economist makes the argument that a middle class person in the US today is likely wealthier than a billionaire 100 years ago. How can this be?
That Human Progress post was in turn inspired by an economist, Don Bordeaux, who asked the question, how much money would you accept to agree to live out your life a century ago? While posing this hypothetical scenario, he asked readers to keep in mind that no matter how much money you had at that time, you would not be able to have the following list he compiled:
Even if you were Nelson Rockefeller, antibiotics wouldn’t be around to save your son from dying of disease like his did.
As for the average people at that time, they ate as much lard as they did chicken and most people lived in 3 generation households and either rode a trolley to get around or walked everywhere. There were no summer trips to Europe or the Caribbean, no connecting with niche interest groups spread across the globe and diets mostly consisted of what could be grown in season and locally.
This was enough for Bordeaux to conclude that the average middle class person in America today is wealthier than a billionaire was 100 years ago. Even outside of rich countries, people are better off now than they have been throughout human history. This is because inventions and scientific discoveries have revolutionized life for just about everyone on the planet in the past 100 years. That is not an exaggeration either. Even Somalia, the poorest country in the modern world, has a life expectancy 20 years greater than Britain did in the year 1800.
While we are on Britain in 1800, it is estimated that GDP per capita was $3280 in 2018 dollars. That is equivalent to the GDP per capita today of Zambia and only a few hundred dollars more than Ethiopia. Given that no one is around from that time to recall that magnitude of the changes in the human experience since then, it is only left to a few economic historians and anthropologists to remind us.
How Work Has (and Will) Changed
In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay titled Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in it he predicted that his grandchildren would work a 15 hour work week. They would take Monday and Tuesday and then take a 5 day weekend. This article by NPR tracked down Keynes grandchildren and asked them the question of where his prediction went wrong. But this took a black and white view of work from the standpoint of a traditional commute and an 8 hour work day. As the pandemic sent many white collar workers to work from home, it started to dawn on me that maybe we had really achieved the 15 hour work week years ago and had been faking an early industrial work pattern that had nothing to do with the cognitive driven jobs many of us work in today.
Take this article from Inc. Magazine which has been often cited by my friends who also work from home. It references a study that finds the average worker is productive for about 2 hours and 53 minutes a day, or 2.88 hours per day. Multiply that by the 5 days a week most of us work and it comes out to 14.4 hours of productive work per week, about half an hour less than Keynes predicted. Yet we seemed to have been living in the facade that we had to stretch this work over 8 hour intervals over 5 days. Why?
In the 18th century it wasn’t uncommon for people to work 10-16 hour workdays because, well, the factory owners demanded it. Often only one day a week was given off to rest (Sunday). In the US in order to take into account some of their Jewish workers who wanted to observe the sabbath, Saturday was thrown in around the 19th century. For 100 years, activists like Robert Owen argued for a shorter and more humane work day. Henry Ford set the new standard in 1914, offering an 8 hour day and higher pay. The result was a more productive and loyal workforce.
It seems we are upon a revolution like this again. Work from home, primarily internet dependent jobs can be carried out from almost anywhere. This has made these jobs location agnostic. For the millennial crowd that prefers to work from home, they are going to be pulled towards the employers that meet their demands of offering much more of a flexible work schedule. I predict that boomer corporate bosses seeing work from home as an aberration will experience a talent drain in the next year if they don’t change their stance.
This could create a whole new approach to work, where workers are still tethered to jobs to be “on call” but work will be oriented more around task completion and outcomes rather than time spent on green or red via Skype. Just like as with other innovations, this will add to the quality of life improvements across the board for millions of workers. More time spent with children, spouses and parents should we choose to, are qualitative improvements that can’t necessarily be captured in figures but those who experience them feel them. And soon to come innovations like Starlink by Tesla, which will offer broadband internet essentially anywhere in the world, could even ease the housing burden we are experiencing now in the US, allowing people to venture further away from large metro areas while still keeping their connections to them.
Zooming In
We don’t even have to look at the past 100 years to see the improvements in living standards. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston looked at leisure time and found that in the period from 1965 to 2003, leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours).
Even in the last 40 years up until today we have made progress. Median household income in the US has increased 118% since 1981 in nominal terms (about a third in real terms) and less debated statistics like infant survival, food supply per person and mean years of schooling have all increased.
Despite all of this, it’s the angst filled opinions that seem to dominate our consumption in media. The sense that the country has lost something or on the decline is a constant topic in media circles. Even locally here in New York, the primary for mayor seems likely to elect an ex-cop for his tough on crime stance amid a wave of murders and violent crimes. Yet if we take a step back and look at a simple statistic, although an important one, the number of murders in NYC, it hardly looks like an epidemic.
Taking a step back like this should make all of us skeptical consumers of media which I have often taken aim at on this blog. It’s natural as humans to want to improve and want more but agonizing about the problems only makes us lose sight of the wonderful progress we have made as human beings. The next time you think things are difficult for you, keep in mind that it’s better to be down on your luck now than at any time before, things may not be all that bad after all.
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