The past was not that cute

Maybe, but really consumerism wasn’t a thing for most of history because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally in the way we do today. The very wealthy did to varying extents. When we look at the past we always imagine ourselves to be the ones in Downton Abbey, but most people were lucky to inherit some furniture.

I would argue that the reverence for real wood and craft you espoused (and I share) is in part possible due to living in a consumerist society. For what it’s worth it is still possible to buy those same quality goods today, and certainly at lower cost . However, I would balk at paying the historical fraction of my income (or multiple if we go back to the 1700s), for a new bed.

In short cheap dishonest crap is what we ultimately want. It lets us focus our time and resources elsewhere

A good depiction of the gritty realities and the meaning of material striving for the very poor in turn of the century farm life is the novel Independent People, by Halldor Laxness, an Icelandic nobel laureate.

A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".

The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.

There's a reason everything in America was super sized for so long.

Things have averaged out a bit now, but if you look at the trendline, we're still doing remarkably well. The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.

> The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.

Yes and no. It is very impressive what humans can do and the US is a remarkable country for managing to achieve what they have. On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.

The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency. To me the mystery is less why the US succeeds but more why polities are so committed to failing. It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1]. It mostly happens by accident, foolishness and ignorance.

[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation - see the figure, note the logarithmic axis

[1] I suppose the environmentalists, maybe.

My first exposure to this - tired of $40 particleboard bookshelves and tables, I went looking for solid wood furniture, reasoning it was fine to spend a little more for something that would last. I found it- and discovered humble, small tables were a months pay.

I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've moved away from tables that can support a car.

Yeah, like I said, we blame boomers who voted for and supported Reagan.

I’m very aware that a healthy minority opposed him and his policies.

Thank you for your work on ARPANET and remaining a proud socialist! Computer networking is what drew me in to the technology space (not programming like most folks here, I presume), and socialism just might finally be having its due time here in the US (e.g., Mamdani, Katie Wilson).

I think you have one big piece of it: economic progress has a lot of search problems and it is impossible to master-plan it; consequently free intelligence beats centralized regulation. It's a bit out-dated now[0] but The Fifth Discipline distinguishes between 'detail complexity' (things that have a lot of bits you have to figure out) and 'dynamic complexity' (systems that have feedback loops and adaptive participants). It might simply be that handling systems with dynamic complexity is out of the reach of most humans. Economic regulation strikes me as something that can be particularly like a thing that modifies a dynamic system.

In fact, creating good policy in a modern economy might be so dynamically complex that no mind alive today can simultaneously comprehend an adaptive solution and act in such a way as to bring it about.

Perhaps, given this, we are simply spoiled by the effectiveness of certain economic actors (e.g. the Federal Reserve) in maintaining an monetary thermostat. Their success is not the norm so much as it is extraordinary.

0: which is humorous given this, because the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect applies to things that become mainstream - insight and humor both disappear as the spark or joke become common knowledge

This is true of basically everything people complain about having gotten worse over time.

Whiteware and kitchen appliances are the same - you can absolutely buy a fridge, or a stand mixer or whatever that will work well and last forever. It's just the value proposition compared to cheap crap that will still likely last for a few years but at a 1/5th of the price is not great unless you're going to use it really heavily.

> The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency.

Every component here is ill-defined and doubtful, especially the claim that lower regulation is the "main" reason.

Keep in mind that Halldor's book is depicting a situation fairly specific to Iceland: people recently freed from debt bondage, in a desperately poor and isolated area caught between much larger forces. It's not an attempt to accurately depict what it meant to be working poor for American laborers, like say grapes of wrath.

Well; in some sense. The only person on HN who talks seriously about economics is patio11 because he writes those long-form articles that go on for days and could use a bit of an edit. Which is imperfect but certainly the best the community has come up with because it takes a lot of words to tackle economics.

That acknowledged, I did link to a profession economist's blog and he goes in to excruciating detail of what all his terms mean and what he is saying. I'm basically just echoing all that, so if you want the details you can spend a few hours reading what he wrote.

Oh I see, all our bogeymen are created by a shadowy conspiracy of very rich bogeymen.

Last time I had to buy a refrigerator it seemed like the choice was between one that cost around $1k and one that cost $10k. I really couldn't find a mid quality option. There wasn't a price point at around 2x the cheap ones for better quality. Those price points exist, it's just that they're usually the same cheap fridges crammed full of pointless features that actually make the whole thing less reliable because it's more stuff to break.

What I wanted was a refrigerator with a reliable compressor. That's where it really seemed like the only options are cheap and astronomical.

> On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.

Focusing on GDP handwaves away so much around externalities that it's hard to know where to start with it.

How much worse off would people be if the US GDP was 20% lower but FB/Instagram/Google/everybody-else weren't vacuuming up ad dollars by pushing as-addictive-as-possible mental-junk-food in people's faces to make them feel bad about themselves? How much of that GDP is giving anyone optimism for improving their own individual condition?

How much of the nostalgia for the olden days is about agency and independence and perceived trajectory vs purely material wealth (from a material standpoint, many people today have more and better stuff than boomers did as kids, when a single black and white TV may have been shared by a whole family)?

Would regulation preventing the heads of big-tech advertising firms from keeping as much of that profit for themselves really be a net drain? Some suggestions for that regulation, harkening back to US history:

1) bring back super-high marginal tax rates to re-encourage more deductions and spread of salaries vs concentration in the top CEOs and execs. worked for the booming 50s! preventing the already-powerful, already-well-off from having another avenue to purely focus on "better their own lives" seemed wise there. seems like there were mega-wealthy super-tycoons both before the "soak the rich" era in US history and after it, but fewer minted during it?

2) instead of pushing more and more people into overtime or second jobs, go the other way and revitalize the earlier 20th-century trends towards limited work hours. get rid of overtime-exempt classifications while at it. Preventing people from working 100 hours a week to "better their own lives" and preventing them from sending their kids to work as early to "better their own lives" seems to have worked out ok.

3) crack down on pollution, don't let people "better their own lives" by forcing others to breathe, eat, and walk through their shit

4) crack down on surveillance, don't let people "better their own lives" by monetizing the private lives of others; focus on letting others enjoy their own lives in peace instead

> Maybe, but really consumerism wasn’t a thing for most of history because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally in the way we do today.

This reminds me of being a kid excitedly repeating the trope I’d just learned: “Back in your day it was nice because you didn’t need to lock your doors!”

To which she responded “Because none of us had anything worth stealing.”

1850-1950 is much closer to a norm over human history -

3+ catastrophic major wars

3+ other minor ones.

2+ great depressions (each of which was as large as ever financial panic 1951-current combined)

3+ financial panic events

At least one pandemic - plus local epidemics were pretty common.

When I tell people "its never been better than it is today" they dont believe me, but its the honest to god truth.

Compressor is replaceable. Also, how do you judge reliability of a compressor before buying it?

Instead, try to find a refrigerator with access to the cooling pipes. Last fridge I threw away had a leak that couldn't be patched because the pipes were all embedded in the plastic walls of the fridge.

even second hand?

>how do you judge reliability of a compressor before buying it?

Reviews, specs, teardowns, brand name.

> because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally

Poor people always decorated and still do. There is basically no larger human culture where decorations dont take a place. The only ones I can think of are small religious orders that dont decorate to deprieve themselves.

You go to any poor area and see dirt, mess, issues and people showing off decorations in their houses or on themselves.

Yeah I think the caveat is that the compressor and maybe seals, lights and few other bits are the ONLY repairable parts of most fridges. The whole structure of a modern fridge is foam panels and sheet metal folds that aren't ever meant to come apart after being assembled.

> The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience.

All countries who had participated in WWII experienced it, winners and losers.

What you said is the compete opposite of the truth.

>A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".

>The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.

Especially ironic when perpetrated by youth from countries outside of America - like mine. I'm not a boomer, but my parents generation had it rough and my life was much easier in comparison. Importing "boomer" memes is a bit stupid in this context. Hell, even the name makes no sense here, because our "baby boom" happened later, in 1980-1990s.

Where do you find reviews you can trust? Honest question

What's wrong with plywood? Why jump instantly from particleboard to hardwood?

The article you linked to makes a different claim.

Having grown up in East Germany, that is the truth. From both my grandparents, born early 20th century, to me things continuously got better. Apart from the war of course. They started little better than servant class and ended up with their own big nice houses, and in comfort. That is true even for the GDR. They lived through war and famine and at least four different currencies and types of government.

They also got more and more educated. From the lowest education to ever higher education degrees, one more step in each new generation. My grandfather tried many new tech hobbies as theY appeared, from (actual, original) tape recorders over mechanical calculators to at the time modern cameras and color slides, to growing hundreds of cactuses in a glasshouse, maybe as a substitute for being unable to travel to those places. I still have lots of quality 1950s and 60s color slides of people and places in East Germany.

Looking around. even the GDR until the end experienced significant improvements over what existed before, at least for the masses. Except for the environment especially near industry.

Not sure there's much market for quality plywood furniture. It's neither cheap nor fancy, just functional, which as a market segment has vanished. The price of today's plywood also seems to have closed a lot of the gap with hardwood - it's often actually a superior material depending on project.

> However, I would balk at paying the historical fraction of my income (or multiple if we go back to the 1700s), for a new bed.

It’s probably fine if you are going to use it for the rest of your life. Or you can pay just for the nails, and do the rest yourself.

That's funny, just about a year ago, I had to replace a dead fridge and ended up with a reliable $3000-ish model. It's been great. GE PWE23KYNFS

https://www.geappliances.com/appliance/GE-Profile-ENERGY-STA...

This is actually super helpful! I ended up with a less expensive GE model because it seemed like they were the only brand with positive reliability reports besides the super expensive premium brands.

You are misquoting me. I wrote:

> to decorate intentionally in the way we do today

Most people not so long ago did not have the luxury of saying “that shirt is so last last year” , or “that living room set is a relic of the 90s!”.

Of course people always find ways to decorate and show off, but that’s different than what OP talked about WRT quality furniture. In the past that stuff was so expensive you bought it and lived with it, possibly across multiple generations. If the style changed you probably couldn’t afford to just swap it out.

Illuminating point but quite a lot of people live in 1st world countries where you still dont need to lock your door. Even in a major city.

It’s very time and place dependent. Burglaries are less common these days because the valuable stuff is iPhones now, rather than televisions.

> It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1].

Eeeeeh. Very debatable. One could argue that both extremes of the bi-partisan political spectrum are laser focused on making the individual businessman powerless. They just hide it all behind altruistic rhetoric.

Oh well fair enough. I'm claiming what the article says.

Got a nice Samsung fridge for 500€, it is running without issues for 10 years already. There is no sense to buy expensive fridge unless you need a professional one.

> luxury of saying “that shirt is so last last year” , or “that living room set is a relic of the 90s!”.

I do not think that luxury is a good thing. We are able to afford it, by having wage slaves in other parts of the world. Also now these kinds of shirts have become of so low quality that you need to throw them away. It is simply an enormous waste of resources, mostly of human work and lifetime.

Such an intellectually dishonest comment.