not only inconsistent over time, but also inconsistently distributed over people. rich people got richer (at least lately) and the less rich didn't get much richer (if at all)

The problem with these discussions is that it’s hard to control for the horrendously lower living standards of pre-industrial life where things like antibiotics and flushing toilets weren’t around.

Certainly, many people still lack access to those things. But also, the median person essentially lives better than the monarchs did 400 years ago when it comes to some of the more important things in life.

Sometimes, whether or not your power distance from your employer is high is less relevant than all the other important stuff in your life.

Such a good comment, I would also add how much our perception of technology lifting conditions is conflated with the increased ability of governments to steer the economy to smooth things over.

> The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973.

This is just blatantly untrue according to your source.

Hourly wages have been consistently growing since the 90s, after the big retraction in the 70s/80s. They exceeded 1973 in 2019 and are higher now.

Can you provide datasets?

Show me on one of these graphs:

Income up after inflation:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881600A

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Hours down:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHNONAG

This corresponds with the increasing share of the economy consumed by the government.

> the hourly wage

This is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation", which includes the benefits packages, the (so-called) employer contribution to SS, 401k employer contributions, etc.

The TEC is often worth up to 150% of the wages.

Everything changed with floating currency. Inflation became a tool for centralization of ownership.

I don't believe that "6 hours a day" is an answer any historian would give when asked how much workers in any period in history worked.

There have been indications that there were approximately 150 days per year which were most active for medieval farmers, but if I had a time machine I wouldn't stay there very long if my desire was to experience good working conditions.

I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up.

Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic options for a career shift because it’s really hard to get an entry level position when you’re middle aged; doubly so when there’s a glut of middle aged people looking for jobs.

And waving away the pain those people experience with an appeal to large scale, intergenerational, historical trends is simply heartless.

Awful compared to what though? To our modern perspectives yes, but for subsistence farmers working in the fields 16 hours a day and rarely far away from starvation, life in a factory might not seem so bad. After all, wages were far worse before the factories and wage growth was almost non-existent.

Exactly. Workplaces became safer and more equitable to the laborers despite technological advances, not because of them.

>to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.

Was this ever true? During the 1950s, (the perceived heyday of American middle class wealth) the female labor force participation rate was 35%[1], which was close half of the male labor force participation rate.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this.

You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.

Early in the Industrial Revolution people voluntarily moved from the countryside to the cities despite all that, so apparently a lot of them thought it was an improvement. Some of the cities were proud of the soot, since it showed that they were participating in Progress.

You can see some of this repeating in China. Migrant workers move to the cities because, while what they can earn is low, it is a lot higher than subsistence farming in the countryside. "The Last Train Home" (documentary) follows such a family, although to understand the tragedy in the documentary you need to understand that Mao created the hukou system to prevent exactly this, which means that their children can only receive state education in the countryside.

> The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century.

I find this topic very interesting, do you have any reading you could recomment on this?

> Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous.

Average height and life expectancy improved steadily in the US throughout the 19th century.

The pre-Revolutionary Americans tended to live short and backbreaking lives.

Take a tour through Fort Williams. There is a collection of clothing from the Revolutionary War. The baby clothes look like doll clothes, and the adult clothes look like they were for boys. Then look at the clothing in the Gettysburg museums. The people were taller then, but still about the size of boys.

> I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors".

We can and we will.

If you read HN for any period of time, you'll probably read at least 5 apologia for the harms caused by prior technological change for every one critique or expression of sympathy. After all, we're well-indoctrinated software engineers, and most of the rest are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. We know what we're supposed to think.

> And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".

Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.

Now compare that against:

1. working conditions before 200 years ago

2. working conditions under feudalism and communism

3. explain why ships laden with scores of millions of people came to the US, and went back empty

The expectation is always that employees will do more for less. Employees are considered a cost, while their productive value is considered an entitlement, so the economics always push for cost reduction.

In practice businesses above a certain size accrete layers of make-work and bureaucracy, which is how you end up with "It takes three weeks to change a button" friction.

AI will make it easier to change the button, but it won't necessarily - yet - cut through the processes around it.

> Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around.

This is such a flawed, but common take. Are you seriously going to claim you were never a junior dev that nobody trusted with "hard tickets"?

Note that I am not making a statement about what your skills were like when you started getting paid for dev work.

I'm saying that the "easy ticket solver" devs are an illusion. When they really fail to perform, you should ask yourself whether it's because many years of bad management undermined the motivation they may have once had. Yes it would suck to be one of those unlucky people, and I'm not saying they shouldn't get fired, but you still need to recognize the bias there. I won't comment on why they weren't given opportunities. There are so many.

Choosing dev work while lacking the necessary skills over other career paths that often pay more, whether back then or even now, is so irrational that it breaks your premise.

it was terrible for weavers

it was great for workers around the world who now can afford clothes

> Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.

Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.

There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.

EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.

The 8-hour workday movement in the US predates Marxism, let alone communism.

Yes agreed, but the net result is that living in the countryside was far from romanticized agrarian life people often picture it as. Lords owning land was a very old idea, it's a bit of a leap to say that was due to mechanization.

Please don't post flamebait or engage in ideological battle on HN. We've asked you this before. We have to ban accounts that keep commenting like this. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This point could be made on every ideology.. Capitalism in essence is pretty gruesome too. The enlightenment, american and french revolutions and the labor movement was stuff that moved the pin in the right direction.

Marx builds on Smith. Would you agree then that Adam Smith is disproven even more and responsible for far more starvation? That would be ridiculous.

There’s communism the theoretical idea and “communism” the application.

The twentieth century was neither, but just authoritarianism wearing a trench-coat.

What part of Marx's work do you think has been disproven?