From: Robbie Lindauer (robblin@thetip.org)
Date: Sun Aug 24 2003 - 13:24:09 MDT
On Saturday, August 23, 2003, at 01:30 PM, Olga Bourlin wrote:
> Better for whom?
Good points, all.
Here's a brief response:
Better would have to be defined as "amount of time the average person
had to work to pay for their own subsistence, relative to the amount of
time they were able to spend on the rest of, say, maslow's hierarchy of
needs."
That is, let's define quality of life as the ability to bypass the
subsistence level of living "plus sex". We'll define "most" purely
percentage wise.
I don't know ALL the details, but here's what I do know. The relative
chunk that "upstream pyramid" people take is relatively the same now as
in 1900 "for most people" given that still, "most people" live in bleak
poverty with little hope of moving past caring for their basic needs
plus sex.
If you restrict "most people" to the united states, we can all agree
that pre-slavery US was morally intolerable, but on the pure numbers,
with slaves making up less than 10% of the overall population, while
they had a tendency to drag the averages down, they didn't do it any
worse than the poverty-level people of today. (And I am DEFINITELY NOT
blaming them for bringing the "average quality of living" down.)
As for women's suffrage, this clearly enabled fully half of our
citizenry to potentially exercise one of the major rights of
self-determination, the empirical question though is whether the
overall effect was to give women and men together more
leisure/self-improvement time or give them all equally, less time, and
whether or not in fact more people were empowered politically by the
movement. I think both of those questions are objectively open. It's
not clear that with 20% of the people in the country continuing to
control 90% of the resources that self-determination was served by
women's suffrage (though once again the right to vote being denied was
a morally intolerable state of affairs).
If there were any major improvements in the last 200-hundred years with
objectively correlate-able effects to overall average improvements in
leisure-time/self-improvement-time they were:
1) The 40-hour work week.
2) The minimum wage
3) The child labor laws
4) The unionization laws
Remembering that "most" eg 50% or more of the people are poverty-level
and the next largest group are "middle class" the top 10% tend to not
matter very much when doing calculations of overall improvement in the
quality of life. This means that major medical advances (heart
transplants, curing glaucoma, etc.) tend not to matter very much in the
equation. Indeed, it's hard to see how the life of King George II was
much worse than Queen Elizabeth's or whether how an 18th-century-duke's
life compared to Bill Gates "matters in the long run". The things that
matter tend to be large-scale changes in the ways that people interact
- paradigm shifts in how people are treated by each other. And these
changes tend to be power-shifts from centralized to democratized
control. (The ancient addage that people are too stupid to govern
themselves having been given the lie by empirical evidence over the
last 2500 years).
I would argue that these paradigm shifts tend to have the greatest
overall and specific effects as well - with more average leisure-time,
more effort is put into self-realization and likely neo-extropic
activities (researching glaucoma) and because some of these problems
are so intractable (like beating despotism worlwide) it takes a LOT of
effort to make them happen, requiring a lot of parts of everyone's
days. I take it it's axiomatic that life-enhancement for the rich is
not the primary concern of extropianism and even if it is the creation
of a sustainable society should be one of the key elements in that
concern.
Best,
Robbie
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