The change in our standard of living

by Russ Roberts on December 6, 2007

My next book, The Price of Everything, is about the transformation of our standard of living and wealth creation. The widespread improvement in the quality of life that comes from the creation of wealth is hard to quantify, Is the average person today five times richer than in 1900? Ten times? Thirty? In many ways, qualitative measures are more effective at conveying the improvement—the increase in access to luxury goods by the masses, changes in life expectancy, the reduction in the dangers of the workplace as we’ve moved from an agricultural economy to a service economy.

This old post from Coyote Blog that I stumbled on recently says it beautifully and it has a picture worth a few thousand words.

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Jonathan Lasater

Dr. Roberts,

I wholeheartedly await your next book. "The Choice" and reading Cafe Hayek religiously since then have utterly changed the way I think. For that, I thank you, and I shall order "The Price of Everything" as soon as it is available.

Sam Grove

I agree that most of us are wealthier in most regards than those that came before.

Now let us consider how wealthy we would be had we not allowed government to divert large portions of our wealth, and investment, into our global empire, the various wars (both foreign and domestic), and other wasteful boondoggles, such as corporate subsidies and extensive bureaucracy.

How wealthy would we be? Wealthy enough that there would be little demand for government provided services?

Have you given much thought to that?

Chris Meisenzahl

Sounds great, looking forward to it.

shawn

projected date?

Sam Grove

I really want to know.

One problem with an improved standard of living through technological innovation and improved productivity is that the perception of being better off than we were distracts us from how well off we could be and diverts our attention from politically enabled (unearned) consumption, which is a polite way of saying that people are unaware of how much wealth political parasitism steals from the productive.

Swimmy

I actually had an econ teacher who presented the case to my class: would you rather make $50,000 a year now or be a millionaire tycoon a hundred years ago? I was the only one who volunteered to take the former option. After he made the same argument Coyote does, most of the class still said they'd prefer to be late-19th-century millionaires. I've always wondered if that was because of a status-oriented mindset or some sort of bias.

Of course, if I were a millionaire today, I'd probably spend most of it on videogame-related oddities, so maybe I have a little bias too.

Sam Grove

I'd rather be a millionaire today, and many more of us would have been but for all the wealth wasted on various government enabled 'projects'.

HELLO! Doesn't anyone else think about this?

brotio

Sam,

You're in good company. With the exception of a question-ducking troll and a couple of others, most of the people who read this blog understand how forced redistribution of income has made us all poorer.