cost and effect
Ross quotes Brad DeLong as follows:
Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.
Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer's earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century.
What DeLong does not mention is the very important fact that in pre-industrial Europe the cost of housing was, on average, only about 5% of people’s household income. (This is a thoroughly substantiated point: see this PDF for one example.) Even with real estate values plummeting, I don't think we’ll see that anytime soon.
Thank you for that information on the cost of housing. I was wondering about that, but i hadn’t had a chance to track down the numbers. As an LA resident trying to square his budget with general guidelines, i’m familiar with the effect differing shelter costs have on relative expenses in other areas. Try as i might, i cannot live find an apartment that would allow me to keep my shelter expense below the suggested portion, so i have to make peace with less nights out and more time in my scantily furnished apartment.
At least the weather’s nice…
— Jack McBride · Jan 29, 07:28 PM · #
Brad’s point is good; I’d just pick the nit that in 1776 Smith’s book was brand-new. A brand-new and reasonably popular nonfiction hardcover would cost (guessing) $25-$30 today, not $7.
— Barry · Jan 29, 09:11 PM · #
Two of my closest friends, who have never met and do not know each other, have both related to me independently that anthropological evidence suggests that hunter/gather societies spend about 10-15 hours/week meeting their basic needs, and the rest of the time making art, telling stories, playing with their children and making love.
— Tony Comstock · Jan 30, 07:48 PM · #
But how many hours a week are spent with parasites and pain; how many hours watching another child succumb to treatable disease and infection, or worrying about the tribe next door hacking your arms off and violating your wife and daughters?
How many times is hunger endured because the rains never came, or came too often? How much time is spent shivering in the cold? And how much time is there period?
I’d trade all of that for toilet-papered, toothbrushed, drunk-fucked and educated ennui any day. But that’s just me.
— JA · Jan 30, 08:32 PM · #
JA, I may be wrong, but I think Tony’s point was that we don’t have to choose one or the other — that is, we could keep modern science and medicine and (if we’re willing to live more simply) have a great deal more free time.
Or maybe that’s just my point.
Anyway, the point of my original post, anyway, was not to decide whether I want to live now or at some time in the past; I was just pointing out that DeLong left some significant cost differences out of his comparison.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 30, 08:37 PM · #
Tony’s point was that we don’t have to choose one or the other — that is, we could keep modern science and medicine and (if we’re willing to live more simply) have a great deal more free time.
Perhaps we could keep it. I’m not so sure we could continue to grow it, which means, among other things, that we wouldn’t be keeping it very long.
I agree with your original post completely.
As to living simply, sure, marginal adjustments abound and are, in the main, things we should do. I’m more skeptical about our ability to live simply in any material way. Not as individuals and groups — pockets of simplicity (kibbutzim) can be sustained — but as a society among societies.
That said, a new epoch always awaits. Maybe global unipolarity, political insight, and technological achievement will give us the sky-hooks we need to get back to living deliberately. Be nice, if true.
— JA · Jan 30, 09:05 PM · #
JA, Our family spends well under 25% of our income on housing. Between tax sheltered and after-tax saving we put away about a third of our income. Most days both my wife and I send our daughter off to school and stay home with our younger daughter. Most days we’re both here when our older daughter returns. When the weather is fair we ignore work go to the beach.
Yes. I am bragging.
I have also thought that if everyone else lived the way that we live, the economy would grind to a halt. ;-)
— Tony Comstock · Jan 30, 09:35 PM · #
Oh, one other thing. Our health insurance premiums (family of four, no health problems, $5K deductible) are fast on their way to being our number one household expense. But that’s probably the starting point for on another blog.
— Tony Comstock · Jan 30, 10:11 PM · #