So the change from sleeping on hay and riding horses and subsistence farming to this is just a facade?

I'm not talking about numeric wealth, which I agree is hand wavey, but actual tangible physical wealth as well as our insane increase in knowledge and capability.

I can go watch videos from the surface of Mars and pictures of galaxies from the beginning of time, then go to the doctor and get injected with something that programs my immune system to resist diseases I've never encountered, then ask an AI to explain any concept from the history of science or mathematics. I am middle class and live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, and some of the things I just described are available to the very poor. This is simply nuts and it is not a facade or an illusion.

The collapse of the numeric financial industry won't take all this away unless we let it.

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somenameforme 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's unusual to repeatedly refer to wealth and economics if you mean technological progress. And yeah we have obviously made tremendous technological strides, though I also would not entirely idealize that either. When you say that you live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, would you rather be a pharaoh or middle class, let alone lower, now a days?

Technology is definitely the driving factor behind all changes in society, and it's an absolute requirement for our species to ultimately survive in this universe. It's also made it easier than ever for a larger chunk of those those of ability to live lives that would not have been possible for them in the past. But on a social level, it's overall effects are, in a seemingly large chunk of cases, somewhat sordid.

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TheOtherHobbes 3 days ago | parent [-]

Economics doesn't measure wealth, it measures money, which is a proxy for political power and social status. In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality.

Wealth in an anthropological sense means the extent to which a culture is increasing its collective intelligence - its ability to understand itself and the world, and to invent and create more interesting and open possibilities for humans to live in and explore.

It's assumed technology is the only way to do that, but that might not be true. Technology is a harsh medicine with spectacular benefits but terrible costs and side effects.

There might be other processes which get to the same ends in more subtle ways.

This culture certainly likes to believe it's the only possible game in town. But cultures tend to do that - until something changes and they discover it's not true.

	▲	dragonwriter 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Economics doesn't measure wealth Economics measures a lot of things, including wealth. It often uses monetary units as as the units of measure for both stocks like wealth and the numerator of flows like income, but even then its not actually measuring money, its using various techniques to convert things into money-equivalents to have common units. > which is a proxy for political power and social status. “Wealth”, “political power”, and “social status” are different ways of saying “the ability to get other people to do things you want them to do”. They are different lenses on the same thing. > In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality. No, in economics “externality” is the label given to a cost or benefit accruing as a result of a transaction to a party other than a direct participant in the rransaction. These are important because they explain one reason why even if rational choice theory did hold (which it doesn’t), markets could produce non-ideal results, because market decisions are based on (and optimize in aggregate, if the assumptions of rational choice theory hold), only those costs and benefits that are internal to the transactions (that is, accruing to direct, voluntary participants in the transaction.)