I'm no economist but it seems like competition for housing drives up prices as wages increase. Also, more generally, people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society, rather than their wealth in absolute terms [1]. So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
This is why Keynes' prediction "... that technological progress and rising productivity would lead to a 15-hour workweek (about 3 hours a day) by the year 2030." was so wrong. He couldn't imaging the increase in our demand for standard of living which has becomes a hamster wheel. He just saw that we'd no longer need to grow our own food or collect water or chop wood to stay warm or hand wash clothes or any of the other huge labor needs of the previous century.
I would work fewer hours/days if I could. Employers mostly don't like this. Also, working fewer hours could affect my ability to obtain health insurance in the U.S.
I guess the point is that you cannot work less if the others don't.
If we all agreed to work less (and have less), it would actually work. But as soon as competition enters the game (some people work more and have more)...
> I guess the point is that you cannot work less if the others don't.
Ah, damn, that's the catch with everything isn't. As alway, the only winning move appears to be not to play, and to even get to state where you can drop out, you need to play well for at least a while.
If anything, it’s many of the basics that have become more expensive. Housing and education are far more expensive today then 100 years ago (as a share of average salary). And some essentials like health care, while more effective today, definitely absorbs a much higher share of people’s wallets (and the nation’s GDP).
Totally. If business can ship more in less time. They won’t stop at 15-hour, they will keep shipping more because competition and hamster wheel. In fact, I feel like the amount of work is actually increasing too…
> people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society
That may be broadly true, but it's descriptive, not prescriptive.
There are many relatively poor people (with physical needs met, but not always) who are far happier than most of the top 1%. The secret is character -- things like contentment, thankfulness, and showing faithful love to family and people in general.
more simply, my happiness is correlated with how few obligations i have, especially obligations im uninterested in, such as paying banks interest on loans
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $25 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
You weren’t talking about running a business, but in investing into one. The question is do you primarily care about what the business is accomplishing in the world, or do you mostly just care about the money you get out of it.
Investing in my wife's business inevitabily comes with also doing quite some work for it :) I'm just not at helm. And it's not primarily money I care about here, but money is the lifeblood of business, you can't avoid earning and spending rather noticeable amounts.
> This is because I want a better education for my children
The research strongly suggests that the most important factor in giving a child a better education is the degree of parental involvement. Do you think working and focus on business success gives you more attention capacity to be involved with your child's education than the downshifted option would have?
Above some nonzero level of parental involvement, the peer group dominates. I want my kids to be around brighter, nicer kids; many of them gravitate to schools in expensive locations.
The research does show that peers do become significant in the teenage years, but suggests that parental involvement is still most important even then. Prior to that, the peer group seems to have little-to-no effect.
So, the good news is that even if you want to give your best in that area, you only have to endure for five years, give or take. Something tells me you won't be packing your bags after that, though. It may not be your intention, but the combination of words gives the impression you're actually more interested in the appearance of giving your child a good education than giving a good education.
I was one of the dumbest among the smart kids I hung out with, the bad influence, but we did have fun.
peers count for alot, parents count for alot. but what counts the most is the kid him/her self.
I say this because there came a moment, and I remember it well, when I knew that I knew how to learn. before that, I didn't not know that.
I knew WHAT I wanted to learn, just not how to learn it, how to nurture and guide myself. it was a big deal and it still is
I used to live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Sitting inside everyday is not how I want to spend my life. Now I live in a mountain town of 10,000. There is no traffic. We ride everywhere in town. I work 10-20 hours a week on writing and books, depending on the season. I snowboard 100 days a season. We took our 6 month old on a trip for a year (wife got 18 months maternity leave) she works 3 days a week.
I cut our firewood so we have no heating bill, have no phone, no tv. We really enjoy the simple life. We have plenty of time to host dinner gatherings, hang out with our daughter, hike, camp etc.
We did a 10 day wilderness canoe trip with friends this summer, it was unreal.
We realized More money will not make us happier. We don’t want more money. More time doing the things we love with family and friends will.
The choice is there.
I live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I love the city, the friend group, being into some communities that do not exist in small towns.
If you'd put the outdoorsy small town lifestyle on me, I'd kill myself.
I'm really happy for you it worked out, but what you suggest is not an overall solution. (And just imagine how your town would look like, if we all moved out of the cities ... we'd create new cities).
The fact that cities are big is cause by people wanting to live there, not elsewhere.
A big portion of that is the greatly restricted access to healthcare. Federal law changes caused a large number of rural hospitals and other medical facilities to shut down over the last decade. This delayed access to diagnostic care, and slowed down golden hour treatment have greatly impacted average age of death for rural communities.
I am also very happy your choice has worked for you and you are happy.
Obviously it’s horses for courses.
That being said, would you take an extra paid week of leave if offered? What about two or three?
Would you be happier?
What if you had 20 weeks of paid leave? Would you be happier?
I think the very vast majority of people would work less if they could.
> I think the very vast majority of people would work less if they could.
But you also said "the choice is there". So which is it? If you think they can, and you also think they would do it if they could, then why do you think they don't?
They said "if we all moved out of the cities". Do you think the whole world could live in the countryside? Historically people moved to the cities because they weren't able to live in the countryside anymore...
What do you do for health insurance? That seems to be the big thing at least when I was not a W-2, and the state marketplaces are not cheap and way worse than insurance from any employer I've had.
I work, earn money and pay taxes. So does my wife. We have a mortgage, and pay property taxes too.
Is it a requirement of society to work maxx?
If a doctor can earn $50k a year working one day a week and a Walmart worker has to work 40 hours a week to earn $50k, does the doctor have some kind of obligation to work and earn more? What if they just want the kind of life $50k a year allows for?
Should the Walmart worker do 80 hour weeks to contribute the same taxes as an engineer working 40 hour weeks?
Surely we all get to choose how much we work.
If I want to live in a 100 year old house and ride my bike with no phone and no tv, and modest lifestyle, it’s absurd I should be forced to work “full time” when I earn as much as I want to live the life I want. That is my choice.
That was a genuine question: you say you don't have to worry about paying health insurance because you immigrated to a country where it's free, right?
My question is: if it's free, it comes from taxes. And if you earn less, you contribute less. Does it pay for your health insurance, or do you benefit from the fact that others work more and contribute more?
Not saying you should be ashamed at all. Just wondering if you would get the same level of health insurance in a world where everybody did the same as you. I guess not? Which is maybe fine, of course.
> I pay more taxes than the millions of people on minimum wage.
I assume those people couldn't survive on working 10-20 hours a week, if they are on minimum wage at 100%?
I guess what I am saying is "good for you, but it's not like everybody can do that". You are lucky that you can do that, it's not "just a choice everyone can make".
You say "the choice is there", but right after you explain that millions of people wouldn't be wealthy enough to do it...
I guess it felt to me that the OP was answering the question "why are we still working this hard" by giving an example of how we actually could work less.
Which does not seem to be the case at all. The OP seems closer to someone who would be wealthy if they worked full time (they say that by working 10-20h a week, they still make more than people on minimum wage).
They conclude with "The choice is there". Sure, "the choice is there" when you are wealthy enough.
"Research shows that average U.S. income growth is strongly related to rising house prices but is essentially unrelated to changes in the supply of housing units across metropolitan areas."
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo.
This book is most famous for being misquoted by nitwits trying to argue that globalization is always good for everyone, but if you had asked David Ricardo he would have said his most important result was that of Rent (later specified as differential rent or Ricardian rent), the idea that economic productivity tends to get squeezed onto land prices. A modern update would argue that this applies to assets more generally. Assets go up by squeezing productivity out of the main economy. Whether you think this is brilliant or terrible depends largely on whether you own lots of assets.
This. The last time I looked at this, worldwide (per-country*) median salary to house price ratio has stayed stuck at about 5 years for the past few decades.
Hey, hopefully some of you techbros can 'disrupt' the status quo.
> So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
That's not what your data shows. It just shows that people don't want to be near the bottom of the pile, because it indicates they're being mistreated (which they are).
People don't want to "do better then their neighbors," they just don't want to be left behind by society.
Framing it the way you do makes it seem like everyone desires brutal social darwinism. It's not true. People just want to be treated fairly and live in a relatively egalitarian world.
I'm not dismissing what you are saying, but do you have evidence for what "people want"? In my experience, when somebody claims to know what people want then it tends to be a mix of "I want", "the people I know want", "I hope people want", "people should want", and a few others, rarely with any evidence.
For the interested: people prefer a 'fair' society, which means if a person puts in more effort it is fair they receive more, which creates inequality by the simple fact some work harder than others, some work less, and it is only fair they each are compensated equal to their effort.
Fortunately, it also makes unwinding the situation easier because assets can fall without upsetting local ranks (relatively speaking, on all three counts).
I used it last night for some 3D modeling and it feels like a big step up from 5.1. 5.1 was able to make models that met my functional requirements but often they were ugly. With 5.2 the models feel simpler and more efficient in a way that makes them prettier.
I'd be really curious to see if another group of researchers would come to the same conclusions looking at the same data. I read an article about this study when it came out, and it caught my eye. Looking at the paper, I would have liked to see a clearer rationale about why the data was analyzed the way it was. For example, why did they look at a window of +1/-1 days around a nuclear test, instead of some other window? Do the statistical effects they are seeing go away if slightly different windows are chosen? If they only look at the period right before the test, is there still a statistically significant effect? If so, that would rule out the possible effects they mention due to contamination etc from the test.
It could also be that Sherline has much more and tougher competition these days. When I looked at getting a small mill 20 years ago, it felt like there weren't many options. Now every week it feels like there's a new Kickstarter claiming to "finally" make desktop cnc machining of metal (aluminum) parts easy. Some of the software on these looks pretty approachable for beginners, and the prices are often lower than what sherline offered too. I've never used any of this form factor of CNC machine so I can't comment on the quality, but at one point I thought long and hard about getting one and the newer designs seemed more appealing
I hope you guys are successful because I would love to see more US options in this space. Realistically, you can get boards in 7 days from China, and competing with them on price seems like a challenge. So that leaves ITAR and people who need boards even faster. Sounds like that’s where you’re focusing your energy already.
What pick and place are you using now that you’ve moved on from the Neoden world?
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
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