It's interesting how quality of life baselines have increased so much in the last century. If you wanted to have the QOL of someone that lived in the American West a hundred years ago, it could be done today for probably $100 a month all-inclusive of food, clothing, and shelter. But you'd be eating the same 5-10 things repeatedly, wearing the same clothes, have a few books for entertainment, minimal or no electronics, no car, and so on. This was typical, to be expected a century ago, but with the nature of marketing and social pressure, almost no one is willing to make that kind of sacrifice today.
I am somewhat surprised that there aren't more cheap-living communes in the US. A few thousand dollars could probably pay the living expenses of a few dozen people – assuming they are all on-board with such a materially minimalist lifestyle.
> It's interesting how quality of life baselines have increased so much in the last century.
From John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930):
> > Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
There was a line in the show Orville which stuck with me. The gist was: In a post scarcity society people started to value other for their compassion and "work ethic". If someone wants to read all day and learn, or be a bartender etc. then that is all the same, only laziness and not pursuing something was looked down upon.
A post-scarcity society is kind of a present-day reality for people with enough $$$ in the bank (including Seth McFarlene). Maybe that's the attitude he's cultivated. He's certainly no stranger to labors of love - I just found his old-school-crooner-style albums on youtube last week.
His entire life and career was centered on getting Fox to pay to make his Star Trek fanfic into a TV show. Orville is a lot better than I would have expected.
"Jobs" exist because division of labor is an enormous generator of human welfare.
If I have to grow my own food, compose and perform my own music, build my own housing and vehicles, life will be shit.
If we do have division of labor and pay each other for the work, we've reinvented capitalism. If we don't pay each other, the incentives are very strong to be a free-rider.
> If we do have division of labor and pay each other for the work, we've reinvented capitalism
Nope.
Capitalism, at least 21st century western capitalism, consists of 3 things:
1. relatively free markets, in the sense that what can be bought/sold and for how much is only loosely regulated
2. an entrepeneurial culture that supports the idea of "starting a business"
3. the idea that the rewards of any given human venture should go primarily to those who invest capital (rather than, say, labor or IP) in the venture
What you've just described doesn't specifically cover any of these three, and it particularly doesn't cover #3 which is the most pernicious aspect of capitalism (the other two could exist in a system that did not incorporate #3).
Your (3) contradicts (1). Rewards do not necessarily go to capital.
(1) says rewards are assigned based on supply and demand. If labor is scarce and investment is plentiful, rewards will go to labor. If investment is scarce, and labor is plentiful, rewards will go to capital (with the obvious caveat that there are many other factors that affect returns, and their distribution within the pools of labor and capital).
Unfortunately for western labor, there has been an exploding world population and lower barriers to trade & investment flows (globalization) for the last 40 years - hence a huge glut in labor. Rewards have gone to mobile capital, tech businesses and workers in the developing-world, not so much to blue-collar work in the west. But that is mostly supply & demand, not a built-in rule of capitalism.
I don't agree. If the rewards of a human venture (involving some amount of capital, labor and IP, but almost certainly all 3) do not go to capitalism, then it's not a capitalist venture.
There are certainly other ways of distributing the rewards, no question about that.
So the question arises: why do the rewards go preferentially to capital in so many of the ventures that exist in our system? Your argument claims that it reflects the (relatively) low supply of capital (compared to the (relatively) plentiful supply of labor; we'll ignore IP for now).
By contrast, I claim that it doesn't reflect that primarily, but is instead deliberate economic/political/legal choice made under significant influence by capital, and that's why we call it "capitalism".
If we lived in a world, for whatever reason, the rewards of a human venture went primarily to labor, we can still recognize that there's a "system" distributing the rewards, but we would not call that "capitalism".
So I'd partially agree with your argument but then invert it: an important reason why the rewards go to capital - i.e. we live in a capitalist society - is that there's sufficiently little countervailing pressure on this arrangement. How much this comes from population numbers, lack of political will, schemeing by the rich etc. is always going to be hard to say. However, a system that didn't work the way ours does would not be capitalism.
So you don't think there is a market for labor? You don't think that wages, benefits and workplace conditions (heath & safety), have any effect on where people work? Do you think there are fixed wages for certain categories of jobs, like some soviet economy? Do you think that most jobs are long-term-fixed contracts at some low penalty rate, like indentured servitude? Do you think there are still company towns where people have to work for a monopsonist employer at their terms? Do you think that people can move location?
Wage-based employment in the western world is certainly an economy. It is affected by laws, taxes, regulations, wage transparency, negotiating power, unionization, social welfare benefits, etc. But it is approximately a market, and wages are affected by the supply of labor (with skills/without; with education/without; with an artisan skill/or not; prepared to do dull, repetitive, smelly, disgusting job/or not).
How is labor not a market?
And do you know workers with profit sharing, or performance-related bonuses, or share options? Well they are essentially capitalists in their own employer, with some (small, perhaps insignificant) share of the returns to the business.
Do you know anyone who is self-employed? They are solo capitalists, self-started, owners of their shop or tools, and a capitalist of one.
Do you have a pension that owns equities? You are also a capitalist.
You may hate your manager, or envy them, because they earn more than you, and get to boss people around. They are not capitalists. Managers are not capitalists. Don't confuse your hatreds. They are only capitalists to the extent that they also get share ownership and options. Choose your targets carefully, and be explicit in your class-warfare hatreds.
As I outlined, markets != capitalism. It seems you've wandered far away from my whole point. Free markets, entrepeneurialism are a part of contemporary US capitalism, but they can also exist in systems that are not capitalist.
For a system to be capitalist, it requires additional features, and the most significant of these is the way the rewards of human ventures are distributed (i.e. primarily towards those who invest capital rather than labor or IP in the venture).
You can define capitalism however you like, but nobody can define away the thriving labor market that obviously exists in the western world - even with all the distortions and regulations. The labor market affects how rewards are shared between capital and labor. Nobody has to agree with your unique and special definition.
Words mean different things for different people and in different contexts. That there is only one universally correct meaning is true in Python, but just not how human language works.
Pretty sure what I wrote was understandable for most. You probably also understood it, but felt the need to complain about the vocabulary.
Actually, very much no. I see no connection whatsoever between, on the one hand, division of labor & exchange of labor for money and, on the other hand, capitalism.
The first two may be a necessary precondition for capitalism, but they in no way describe it - they are common elements in human communities that predate capitalism by millenia.
There are countless models available beyond this black and white, boxed thinking.
The dichotomy presented between capitalism as the byproduct of division of labor and the inevitability of free-riding in its absence paints a rather stark picture. However, this view presumes a rigidity in human motivation and socio-economic structures that simply does not account for the complex tapestry of human innovation.
Life is not relegated to the binary of paying or not paying for services. Consider that human motivation is not solely hinged on material compensation but also on intrinsic rewards—personal growth, satisfaction, and the joy of contributing to something larger than oneself. The potential for human societies to organize around principles that value these intrinsic motivations equally, if not more than the extrinsic, suggests that the welfare generated by division of labor need not be confined within the traditional frameworks of capitalism.
A more nuanced approach considers economies as organic, adaptable, and evolutionary entities that can incorporate diverse motivational drivers, beyond just financial incentives. In such systems, the fear of free-riding is mitigated not by imposing structures but by fostering a culture where communal contribution is as valued as individual success. This shifts the focus from a simplistic labor-for-pay model to a more expansive, dynamic model that embraces a spectrum of motivations and rewards.
The content truly reads like AI…so bland and full of fluff…worse than a 5th grade level because it takes something that could be stated in one line and stretches it into multiple lines repeating the same idea.
>If we do have division of labor and pay each other for the work, we've reinvented capitalism.
This is extremely wrong. Every society in human history has some degree of division of labour. Capitalism is a specific economic mode of production that emerged from the embers of Feudalism a few hundred years ago, as merchant guilds and private manufacturors in urban centres gradually grew more independent whilst the noble classes who had subsisted off the labour of an agricultural underclass had gradually lost power. The exact process and reasons for this is extremely complicated and vast in scope.
There is also an unimaginably vast spectrum of potential ways of organising economic production in a human society, and many civilisations historically have exhibited different iterations of these. To make the claim that it is impossible to devise a system different from where
>we don't pay each other,[and] the incentives are very strong to be a free-rider
is not only to ignore not an entire field of historical and anthropolgical research, but also to not even bother to imagine any alternative to a very particular and unique economic system that we happen, by pure chance, to find ourselves in our infinitesimally narrow slice of time.
What exactly is the alternative which has ever been proven to work at scale? As long as we have private property which people are allowed to buy and sell then capitalism is the only possible result. The fact that some primitive tribes managed to eke out a basic existence for a while with a gift economy or whatever isn't a valid counterargument.
What are you talking about? Private property refers to the ownership of the organs of economic production - factories, steal mills, whatever - by private institutions (e.g shareholder-managed organisations). If your referring to markets in general, they have existed since the dawn of urban human civilisation, thousands of years before capitalism. Markets can even exist in the most despotic communist dictatorship, or decentralized anarchist collective. Buying and selling goods or having personal property is largely orthogonal to the mode of production employed by a given society.
Right now in spain, the largest buisness group in basque (10th largest overall) is the Mondragon corporation. It’s worker-owned (but not worker managed), although each worker has voting rights. Clearly it is possible - even within capialism - to have some worker autonomy over production.
In 1936, during the civil war in Spain, around 60-75% of urban industry and agriculture was restructured by anarchist labour unions and run and managed by the workers to varying degrees of collectivization. Some towns abandoned the use of fiat currency entirely and instead used systems of vouchers, in small villages goods where distributed even more informally. Industrial production is reported to have increased during this time, and agricultural yields rose by around 30%.
How? There was no economic failure. It ended due to a political coup. After all there was the slight external complication of a proxy war considered by many to be a prelude to the defining conflict of the 20th century.
This doesn't follow because the assumption that it has to take the form of consumption is unwarrented. People have competed to be the most ascetic or otherwise most virtuous or holy on massive scales before. Certain kinds of religious people, activists, hippies and the like still do. It could be the culture again.
There's nothing miserable about minimalism, quite the opposite. There's a joy from freedom and peace from reduced stress. It's the hamster wheel and packratting that causes misery.
Why does that follow though? Why not just say: in the absence of labor, people would still like to make and do nice things for people to consume. Like, you know, enjoying life and sharing with others.
A "job" is not a spontaneous effect of a desire, its not a natural thing, but simply a formalization step in capitalism for the sake of exchanging labor for pay.
"Post-work" generally doesn't mean "nobody can work anymore," its more "nobody needs to work anymore." People will always "work" insofar as that just means to live, learn, and share fruits of our skill and creativity.
> A "job" is not a spontaneous effect of a desire, its not a natural thing, but simply a formalization step in capitalism for the sake of exchanging labor for pay.
In any system including moderate technological complexity (e.g. roads, sewage disposal systems) there will be tasks that are useful, or even necessary, for a community but that nevertheless have low intrinsic rewards. Providing extrinsic rewards (e.g. money) in exchange for doing these tasks has nothing to do with capitalism.
What may have something to do with capitalism is whether or not people need to exchange their labor for goods or money in order to remain alive. In a system where this is no longer necessary, finding the right kinds of rewards and/or motivational culture to get people to do unpleasant tasks that still need to be done will be a challenge, I suspect.
Every economic system we’ve ever observed had jobs. Communism, socialism, feudalism, tribalism… Human civilization has and probably will always have roles which are essentially responsibilities for ensuring some good or service is consistently available to the community. That’s a job in my book, regardless of the economic system.
Doesn't even need to be a formal economic system. I can pretty much guarantee that a random paleolithic tribe had some people who were better hunters, people who gathered edibles, leaders, etc.
I have a very low material quantity of life, but my spiritual quality of life is pretty good even as I live homeless with a disability in a minivan in the United States.
Americans are way too materialistic and there needs to be a reckoning of this if anything is going to change. Even people I meet that live in other minivans or RVs want to have every single creature comfort they had when they were living in a house. I decided that in my van I would only carry what I need for the van or things I can easily put in the backpack and walk away with.
I definitely use the free places. They list in the Reddit post. At west I always stay on the BLM lands.
Americans are way too materialistic and there needs to be a reckoning of this if anything is going to change.
If this lifestyle works for you, then good for you.
Try raising children that way.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to live a comfortable life; the vast majority of humans forever have wanted this.
In the USA we have a problem with cost of living, but at the end of the day the reason for this is almost always misguided government intervention.
For example, in the housing market, many cities have made it prohibitively expensive to build high density housing (which is what is needed when you have high population density).
If you wanted to make medical care unaffordable then you’d design a system like the US system, with artificial limits everywhere on increasing supply, and (well I am well off topic but could go on forever on this).
I can completely sympathize with young people today who look at the ridiculous cost of living today and come to the (incorrect) conclusion that the problem is consumerism.
But it’s not. It’s a century of well-intentioned but ultimately harmful government policies.
> There is nothing wrong with wanting to live a comfortable life; the vast majority of humans forever have wanted this.
By itself I think that this is a positive attribute. The problem comes when people believe that they deserve to live more comfortable lives than others, which seems true of most Americans.
Come on now, people have done it for hundreds of thousands of years. Just because it’s different from what you used to doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And it doesn’t mean the children will come out harmed in anyway.
> In the USA we have a problem with cost of living, but at the end of the day the reason for this is almost always misguided government intervention.
If there is no government intervention after the 2008 recession (QE, 0% rates) then many more people would be living like I am living. That’s how much people don’t want to reduce their lifestyle, they push it out as far into the future as they can. No matter what the cost of that is later on.
But you seem to think that the government and the corporate state or two different things when they’re one and the same. All these measures were to save stock, prices, assets, etc..But you seem to think that the government and the corporate state or two different things when they’re one in the same. All these measures were to save stock prices, assets, etc.
I’m not a young person, but I can understand what young people think when they see the boomers, who are doing all the consuming, spending all their money which they got from the government interest rates. It’s both not consumers and it is, because the government instituting 0% rates just turned every asset market into a bubble. And this gave everyone with the assets the ability to consume. But you know the government needs people to consume because that’s what creates GDP right?
So all the boomers with the larger amount amount of increase in asset prices, they didn’t have to sell their prices for more money, they don’t have to go on vacation and buy more things, they could’ve live more simply, and there would’ve been no inflation. But it’s the consumption from the people with the assets that to inflation. It’s not 0% interest rates alone that Cause inflation.
> Come on now, people have done it for hundreds of thousands of years.
Come now, people also used to die from toothaches, and during those hundreds of thousands of years infant and child mortality was incredibly high, and education practically nonexistent.
These “we have done this since the beginning of time” arguments always make me chuckle, they are so incredibly simplistic.
That doesn't mean it's false though? The parent seems correct that human beings are capable of subsisting and surviving for many many generations on very austere conditions.
From reading these comments you’d think that human beings were miserable and incapable of any happiness or meaning until someone invented air conditioning and sewage systems.
Yes, life used to be more difficult. No, that doesn’t mean such a life was without meaning.
Only by means of statistics - they had so many children that it compensated for high mortality rates.
As recently as in the early 20th century the fertility rate required to sustain population numbers in Germany was over 2.5 - and that was well into the industrial era.
Before such obvious to us things like antibiotics or doctors washing hands it was likely much higher.
Well, that and survive yourself through said childbirths, which was (and indeed is) never guaranteed for approximately half of humanity. Childbirth is dangerous! Obviously, humans have always had more than enough children on average, but the burden of it is quite high.
It does, but the parent poster who lives in a van does not do it, and therefore he's not really surviving anything. And as the first reply to the van implied, he would not be boasting "spiritually" if he had to deal with children in his van.
psychologically, though, it’s much easier to suffer hardship. If everyone in your community is also suffering the same hardship. Making unilateral choices to deny yourself, creature comfort doesn’t seem all tha likely to succeed as a strategy.
Mainly clothes, much of which I don’t need but I don’t throw away because I have the space. But it includes three pair of jeans, four pair of underwear, shorts, four pair of socks and miscellaneous shirts. A down jacket, rain jacket, and fleece jacket. The pajamas and the down sleeping bag are really important for keeping me warm at night.
For cooking I have MSR rocket and camping cookpot and a set of utensils.
Also a gym bag with a towel and my shower stuff.
Most of the things that take up space in my van or things that I need for the van, like shades for the window and tarps to keep the van cool when I’m in the desert. Also tools, of course. I also carry about 18 gallons of water with me so I can stay out in the desert for extended periods.
Basically, I have clothes, food and shelter so I’m OK. I just wish the shelter was not a van.
Thanks! I would say the loneliness because of the stigma of both how I live, and my mental illness. Even when I am out on the BLM land with people with other campers the fact that I live in a minivan is looked down upon.
And since I have to drive around so much to follow the weather It’s very hard to have long-term meaningful friendships.
The other thing is lack of stable healthcare but I am slowly weaning myself off of Western medicine so that has becoming less of a concern.
It’s not that I want to live this way, it’s the only solution I have right now unfortunately.
That's not unusual for small studios. Oftentimes people get an electric countertop stove and/or toaster oven.
I know that's not ideal, but how does that compromise compare to living in a van? Do you prefer to live without any facilities whatsoever to hold out for a proper stove and oven?
At some great risk I’m going to explain this to you. One of my sensitivities is to the new 5G towers they’ve been putting up everywhere. Yeah I have EHS. Some places like Wichita with the huge amount of mid band. 5G is just not tolerable for me.
I’ve always had a problem with EMF. I used to work at Cisco and that’s when I had my first mental breakdown in a long time. It was a 1999 right when they started installing Wi-Fi in the buildings. I didn’t know that till many years later.
I have been looking at some places in Nebraska, but this is what I’m faced with.
EMF sensitivity is not a real thing, and there is nothing special about 5G radiation. What you actually need is psychological or psychiatric treatment.
It is real, for me. I’m not going to debate you on this topic because I’ve tested it every way I can to rule out placebo.
I am not woo woo crank and I approached this with skepticism and rigor. But if you want to investigate, more, look at voltage gated calcium ion channels like the l type calcium channels and TRPV1 channels.
In my opinion, people who have EHS will have changes in these genes that make them more susceptible to the electromagnetic waves causing calcium influx into the nerve cells. it just happens to be a coincidence that these same genetics will cause mood disorders. That is because mood disorders are environmental diseases.
And I have been in psychological and psychiatric treatment for over 30 years. I think I have not hashed this through with my therapist and doctors is just an assumption on your part.
I will say you need to see a therapist. If you think there’s any certainty that EHS does not exist, because that’s as bold as me, saying that it does exist.
Thanks. So I have two meters. One that measures radio frequencies up to 8 GHz. And I have another meter that measures the frequency EMFs like from households and that measures both electric and magnetic field separately.
The simplest thing I do is not to measure an area before I am in that area for an extended period of time. So say if I am sleeping in a hotel, I see how I feel and how I sleep, and sleep probably the biggest effect EMFs have on me so it is a good marker.
For example, if I stay at a friends house and sleep over, I’ll see how I sleep and I’ll take a measurement in the morning. I cannot tell you how many hundreds of times I’ve done this, but the correlation comes out every time, with household EMF the higher the electric field, I sleep in the worse my sleep is. The higher the the magnetic field the more pain I have and the more depression I have. So the fields seem to be having different effects on me.
With Radio frequency EMFs I do the same thing, but I have a few other tools since my meter does not measure over 8Ghz I really can’t tell how much 5G there is so there’s an app called “Coverage?“ that used to supplement the reading with my meter.
Radio frequency EMF nearly always make me manic and psychotic and my insomnia is horrible and my anger threshold is pretty much zero. my tinnitus will also become louder after a certain amount of time but that time seems to vary. I also get a lot of bladder pain.
Since for me, the symptoms do not start right away. It’s difficult to tell in an area if I’m going to be bothered by it unless it’s really strong. Since I’m homeless and drive around the whole country, I’ve been to places where EMFS were absolutely zero and I was literally cured of my mood disorder and insomnia, and where it was off the charts like in Phoenix where I have to take so much Klonopin just to drive through the city.
They’re probably the most important times I found where the times when I thought I was in a high EMF area and I slept great and it turns out I was in some weird pocket of low EMF exposure. For example, there is a park in the town that’s at a low level and it’s surrounded by trees. When I look it up on the Coverage? app, most of the 5G is gone. It sure enough when I took out my meter. The readings were exceptionally low.
I am not immediately bothered by things like using my cell phone, but the fact that my tinnitus is worse in my left ear where I use my phone, my whole life I don’t think is a coincidence.
But recently, and this is probably not as good as a placebo, but it sure told me a lot, I had a 24 hour Holter monitor put on because I have really weird blood pressure. They call it libel hypertension. I vary a lot during the day and actually at night it becomes really really low.
So this time when I had the Holter monitor on, I decided to go to places with high EMF and low EMF. And see what my readings were. Sure enough it correlated. My blood pressure was much higher like 160/98 in places with higher EMF. I also noticed something strange that I never realized before but my heart rate was lower when I was in high magnetic field and it was higher in an Area with high frequency EMF.
I just want other people reading this to understand I’m not some person running around trying to avoid EMS all the time. I mean they make my life shit but they’re not going to kill me. I’ve lived with my issues for 35 years and they haven’t killed me yet. If you met me, you wouldn’t see some better call Saul character that’s for sure.
If you ever get the chance you might like to camp out in a radio quiet zone there's at least one in the US - much of W.Australia is quiet (simply due to having a low population outside of the main city), and there's always the Murchison inner zone:
If someone put you into a sealed room and then turned a 5G cell phone access point on and off on the other side of the wall you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. You are suffering from delusions. If your healthcare providers are telling you anything different then they aren't helping you.
How much power is the access point using? How many people are using the access point? Is data being actively transferred on the access point? Do you mean 5G like in 5 GHz or 5G like in 8 to 36 GHz? How long does one need to sit there to feel the effect? Does mid band 5G pass through walls?
Numerous researchers have already come out with the issues and the difficulties of testing for EHS and they need to test it in the real world.
And I agree, there are probably more people who think they have EHS than people who do.
Those are just cases with no proven causation. Show me a randomized controlled trial with multiple subjects. Persisting in delusional beliefs is not a path to health.
Yes, I’ve tried that. Many of them are overly religious or want you to be a vegan or vegetarian or need to be this or that or something special. Or they don’t want people with a mental illness and have no money. Thanks though.
The hardest thing about his live is ignoring the massive production chain required to make all the things that make his life far better than one someone would have had a couple of centuries ago.
>I am somewhat surprised that there aren't more cheap-living communes in the US. A few thousand dollars could probably pay the living expenses of a few dozen people – assuming they are all on-board with such a materially minimalist lifestyle.
Even though the members live a minimal lifestyle of near-poverty, many monasteries are still not truly financially self-sufficient because their funding comes from an associated church's donations.
Amish communities may be an example of lower-cost living while being financially self-sufficient via selling crafts and furniture. (They're even financially independent enough to be exempt from paying and receiving government Social Security money.) It would be interesting to know of other communities that deliberately replicated Amish living (for cost/benefits) without being Amish.
One thing everyone forgets is that the Amish people benefit from police and national defence, like everyone else. Their simple, peaceful life would not be possible if they comprised their own sovereign nation in a region surrounded by hostile actors. With no military of their own, they’d be annexed instantly.
This means they aren’t truly independent. They’re dependent in a way they could never afford to pay for themselves. They get by as free riders while everyone else pays for them.
> One thing everyone forgets is that the Amish people benefit from police and national defence, like everyone else.
Leaving aside the dubious benefits of police, Amish pay the same taxes as everyone else- with the exception of Social Security and workers' compensation, which they pay through their church. Those taxes entitle the Amish to their share of the national defense buff.
> This means they aren’t truly independent. They’re dependent in a way they could never afford to pay for themselves.
That would seem to describe most, if not all, citizens of contemporary societies. Could you name someone who you consider truly independent? As the saying goes, "No man is an island."
This is only partly true. By opting out of most of the financial system and deliberately living on small normal incomes. They will pay very little tax and certainly not enough to pay for investment and healthcare national infrastructure projects which effectively underwrite the income they get from outside their communities. There’s no free lunch here. They do benefit from things they could not afford if they lived isolated from the mainstream US economy
I don't think it matters what they claim or don't claim. The way to evaluate the position is to imagine what the US would be like if 100% of its population lived in Amish communities, with an Amish lifestyle and religion+ideology.
Yes, this hypothetical country would be peaceful and immune to the (justified) criticism the US receives over its intervention in foreign wars. However, think of all it (and the world) would lose. The rest of NATO would have to invest way more in defence in order to hold off Russia and China. The rest of the world would have to invest a huge amount in R&D for things like medicine and technology. And the only thing keeping this hypothetical "Amish United States" from being invaded are the oceans.
It's hard to take these sorts of counterfactuals too far though. On the one hand I might say "then the drug cartels in Mexico could invade the Amish United States and enslave everyone" but then it would also be equally valid to say the cartels would never exist in the first place if it weren't for drug prohibition and the demand for illegal drugs in the US. Still, I don't see how one big Amish nation would defend itself from gangs moving in and stealing everything they've got and enslaving people.
The way to evaluate the position is to imagine what the US would be like if 100% of its population lived in Amish communities, with an Amish lifestyle and religion+ideology.
No, it isn't, and that's not how game theory works. No one is suggesting that everyone be Amish, and it seems fairly obvious that the Amish would act differently (e.g., invest in self defense) if that were the case.
If they act differently then they are by definition no longer Amish. They have a very strict interpretation of their religion that depends on wider society to preserve their independence. That’s the point!
> the QOL of someone that lived in the American West a hundred years ago
I don't think you have a good idea of what life was like in the 1920s, even in the American West.
Here is what Cheyenne looked like in the 1910s - http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/cheyenne1900s.html . People had cars then - and horses. Train service started in 1867. The local library started in 1886 so you could get books for entertainment.
You can see in the pictures there was even phone service.
Sears was making millions each year as a catalog mail-order company, so even if you lived in the middle of nowhere you could order just about anything for your house - including the house! In their 1920 book they wrote "Sears, Roebuck and Co. supply the needs of more than eight million families." https://archive.org/details/storyofsearsroeb00sear/page/2/mo...
So, go back another 50 years, to the 1870s of "Little House in the Big Woods". The family had venison, fish, pork, bear meat, squirrel, rabbit, "potatoes and carrots, the beets and turnips and cabbages" from their garden, red peppers, pumpkins, squashes, and yellow cheeses - all in the first chapter. Plus maple sugar, store sugar, honey from the bee tree, berries, pickles, milk from the cows, and made from all of those, "pumpkin pies and dried berry pies and cookies and cakes ... salt-rising bread" https://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/wildersewell-woods/wildersew...
Rather more than "the same 5-10 things repeatedly".
> So, go back another 50 years, to the 1870s of "Little House in the Big Woods".
It’s cute for sure but I don’t know if I’d use a novel for children as an accurate portrayal of the median subsistence living experience 150 years ago.
I wouldn't either, but it's meant to show that keiferski's views of 1920 are clearly wrong when a book that came out in 1932 was not laughed off as a wildly unrealistic portrayal of the 1870s.
Here is a glimpse of life in rural Oregon in the 1870s, as recorded in 1932: https://www.loc.gov/resource/wpalh2.29080415/?sp=7 . Her mother carded and dyed the wool herself, to make clothes. Peddlers would come by with bundles to sell, with "fancy shawls, printed goods, silks, and such other luxuries", sometimes sold for as high as $150/bundle. She bought a statue of Dickens from a peddler.
"The menu for a fine dinner would be: Chicken stew with dumplings, mashed potatoes, peach preserves, biscuits, and hominy." Dumplings and cobbler were staples. They had brown sugar and molasses. There was bread and milk, and teas made from local herbs. They had a schoolhouse. Most women wore calico (store-bought) and linsey-wollsey (locally made). Seems they had geese too.
For the big 4th of July event in Corvallis, her mother made 200 gooseberry pies.
Young women enjoyed the magazines Godey's, Peterson's, and the Bazaar.
This seems in decent alignment with the children's story. It does not seem like the spartan life keiferski suggests for some 50 years later.
It's not a personal failing but it's a huge dissonance with the themes in Walden. It's annoying when people hold up Walden as an example of personal independence but ignoring or not knowing the context in which it was written.
The average person a hundred years ago obviously didn’t have YouTube, or the internet, or GPS phones, or a million other consumer goods we take for granted today as a baseline. That was my point. Whether some middle class people had a model T car or a library card is kind of missing the point I’m making entirely.
Then make your point using real examples, not made up ones ignorant of history that end up blunting your argument.
Yes, Louis XIV didn't have internet service. Does that make the Sun King poor?
Clearly, no.
The usual way to do this through something like measuring the cost-of-living - the US started gathering this information during World War I. Your $100/month now corresponds to $6.50/month in 1920, says https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ , or $78/year.
We can look up actual numbers. From the Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics #357 at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31158004110184&se... dated May 1924 and covering the years 1918-1919 we can see breakdown of expenses for different places in the western US:
In Butte, Montana, the poorest family (1 out of 102 surveyed, with 4 people) made $900-$1,200 per year, and had $1,022.50 in expenses. (see page 14). Of that, about $900 was spend on food, clothing, rent, and fuel/light.
In the gold rush town of Cripple Creek District, Colorado (page 22) one family of 80, with 3 people, made under $900, and had expenses of $853.
In Trinidad, Colordo, 2 of 78 families (average of 4.5 people per family) made less than $900/year, and had expenses of $973.
And these are the poorest of the poor! They are in the city, which does affect the numbers - farm living can be cheaper, but surely not by a factor of 10.
So the idea that $78/year was in any way representative is clearly low-balling it by a lot, even if you only meant for a single person rather than a family.
The tables show a 1920 far different than the world you are thinking of. Look at the miscellaneous items for those in the Western states making at most $900/year, at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31158004110184&se... . 72% of them had life insurance, 11% paid membership to social clubs, 50% paid for movies, 89% got a newspaper, 78% paid for a physician, 22% paid for glasses, and so on.
If 1920 is your comparable, then in 2023 you also need to pay for those, on top of lodging, food, heat, and furniture, for your $100/month.
I have no doubt there were a handful of people in 1920 who lived on $6.50/month, perhaps living by themselves in the back-country of Alaska, but that will be on the extreme low end, far below the baseline of nearly everyone living in the American West a hundred years ago, and hardly representative.
> but with the nature of marketing and social pressure, almost no one is willing to make that kind of sacrifice today.
Maybe people prefer having pressurized clean tap water and sewer systems due to something other than marketing and social pressure. I know the women in my life would definitely prefer it compared to my grandmothers who had to travel to get water from the well everyday.
Did they purposefully misinterpret or was the original comment poorly thought out dismissal of modern life that ignores, very real things like medicine and clean water?
No, I’m pretty certain it’s just nitpicking and uncharitable interpretations that quibble over irrelevant details and miss the bigger point being made.
> No, I’m pretty certain it’s just nitpicking and uncharitable interpretations that quibble over irrelevant details and miss the bigger point being made.
Welcome to the Hacker News comment section.
I've lost track of how many times I've posted three paragraphs of thoughts and ideas and maybe some nuance, only to have someone leave a drive-by reply of "Ahh, but in paragraph 2, sentence 8, you said 'all' when in reality it's 'most'. Gotcha! Your entire comment is flawed!" I do this too though once in a while, so I guess nobody's perfect.
I think it’s more complicated than that though. Whether a nitpick or not in that comment, the money to sustain modern levels of infrastructure to support, clean, water, sewage, healthcare, et cetera are probably only possible because of the consumer economy more broadly.
The material costs are not consumer goods like clothing and food.
It is the infrastructure, moving mountains to move water, paving land to move food, laying wires for electricity and communication, train lines to move fertilizer, refineries, ports, universities to study medicines, etc.
$100 per month is not going to cover any of this, but I am pretty sure you are going to want the benefits.
My comment was from the viewpoint of an individual today. That’s what it says. It doesn’t say anything about society as a whole.
So, no, an individual is not paying for train lines and ports from their personal budget. Perhaps there are some people who spend 90%+ of their income on food, shelter, and electricity, but I’m fairly certain that the majority of costs are “unnecessary” consumer goods.
Taxes, home, healthcare, food, vehicle (or transportation), education, retirement savings. A portion of this might be discretionary, and it is very subjective, but I doubt you are getting anywhere near $100 per month in “necessary” consumer goods in the US.
Healthcare alone will blow through that, and not sure where you will draw the line on necessary and unnecessary for that.
People at some point in their lives might be spending a majority of their money on unnecessary items, but eventually, it will catch up to them (and potentially be made up by government subsidies).
Sure, and you are willing to forego the services of any healthcare professional? Because most people consider being able to go to the emergency room as “normal”.
My point was to dispute this overly simplistic assertion:
>but with the nature of marketing and social pressure, almost no one is willing to make that kind of sacrifice today.
Again, I thought it was obvious that I was talking about consumer goods, as the sentence before that one was about consumer goods. Why would marketing have anything to do with healthcare?
You’re trying very hard to completely miss the broader point and are instead nitpicking something that I didn’t even claim. This is entirely a waste of time.
It’s also why discussion culture has gotten so terrible on the internet, because instead of making obvious assumptions about my intent, people insist on critiquing little irrelevant pieces of it.
I don’t think this is nitpicking I actually disagree with you. I think it’s an empirical question how much money could be saved by disavowing only the frivolous consumer items that you’re talking
about. My hunch is, it’s less than you think.
>"Libertarians are like house cats: absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
I would like you for one day to stop, and each thing you use, break down the supply chain that is necessary to produce each step and part of that product, and then break those products that make each step of that process and so on until all you have is raw materials. It's highly likely you'll give up even before doing that on a very very simple item. But the inner connection between the crap you do need, and the crap you don't need isn't going to look like what you think.
Then I'd like you to do some research on tribes that lived outside of modern technologies. How many of those 'individuals' think of themselves like they are their own little gods, versus how many of them deeply understand they have on the members of their tribe to keep them alive?
This argument makes no sense to me - I didn’t live in a home with municipal water or sewer until I was 18 and living on my own.
For that matter, my current home is inside city limits. While we have municipal water, we are not connected to the city sewer system and instead rely on a septic tank.
It annoys me to no end that I’m not legally able to make major repairs to my septic system, as it’s only allowable under a grandfather clause in the city code. If, say, a utility truck ever drives into my back yard and over my septic tank, I’ll be on the hook for ~$10k to reverse the plumbing in my home, bury a sewer line to the connection at the street, and backfill the old septic tank.
“Best” of all is that in the six years I’ve owned this home, city workers have twice parked bucket trucks in my back yard without even speaking to me. One of those times resulted in my having to dig up and replace a portion of my septic system’s drain field. The city laughed at me when I asked that they pay for the damages. I could have taken them to small claims court over it, but the actual material cost wasn’t enough to justify it.
Of course there are utility easements encumbering the property, so I’m not upset about those being used. The easements are a defined area along the edges of the property, though - not carte blanche to drive all over my yard with heavy equipment. I spoke with the workers on both occasions, and they didn’t even know how to look up where the easements were.
NB: I see I went off on a tangent there, but I’m going to leave it. That sort of dispute is exactly the kind of thing that people who want to “just live” are trying to avoid. It’s one thing to voluntarily submit to rules in exchange for some benefit - it’s another to have rules imposed on you from the outside without consent, and then to have the “authorities” in the arrangement ignore the rules without consequence while simultaneously requiring you to carefully adhere to them.
This argument makes no sense to you because you refuse to accept pollution at scale exists...
Already you're bitching about "omg its so easy for other people to practically end my life by messing up the tenuous balance I have between getting fresh water and the flow of untreated shit I produce"
Yea, this is easy when there is a few people working with plentiful water resources then it all works fine. When lots of people show up, you are shitting in each others mouths and dying of cholera and begging these "authorities" to save you. Think for 5 minutes about the argument you typed out and you'll figure out why these other complex systems exist.
Not to be too snippy here, but I'm not sure you could possibly imagine anyone elses view but your own at this point... Start iterating over dozens of possible positions and you'll see yours is really a more extreme outlier.
And while not Amish myself, I was born in the middle of Amish country and have quite a bit of experience with populations that choose to analyze technologies before they accept them into their lives, and rejecting those they do not like. But the Amish have the same issue, they live in very low density populations. As their populations increase their members tend to leave for modern lives. Trying to live in cities without modern conveniences has lots of issues.
I dont think that anyone denies the difficulty of self sufficiency in the middle of a dense urban city.
I think the Ancapistani was providing context that this is not a universal truth. There are plenty of areas, outside of cities, where people live much more self reliant lives, and they are not third world hellscapes.
I’m definitely not saying municipal utilities are a bad thing - I’m sharing my experiences that show that they aren’t always necessary.
The comment I originally replied to said:
> Maybe people prefer having pressurized clean tap water and sewer systems due to something other than marketing and social pressure
I’ve lived in rural areas, small towns, and the “big city”. It’s not as binary a proposition as the original commenter was making it out to be. That’s all I’m trying to share.
The problem is when that becomes so habitual that it goes unnoticed. No one really feels grateful when they use tap water, and instead that mental space is occupied with anxiety about getting the latest iPhone.
> This was typical, to be expected a century ago, but with the nature of marketing and social pressure
It might be typical and expected but that doesn't mean it was desirable even then. People lived that way because they had to. It was always considered a difficult way of life. It's more likely that people gave it up as soon as they could when they had the chance.
I think there are two different concepts here. You can be materially minimalist, i.e. you can refuse to buy superfluous consumer products that are pushed by marketing etc. You will still need housing, healthcare and transportation (assuming that you have to drive to work). Those things have very real objective benefits and their widespread adoption can't be explained with marketing or social pressure. And you won't be able to get those for 100 dollars a month (correct me if I'm wrong). If you are foregoing those as well you're not just materially minimalist, you're basically going off-grid and abandoning civilization altogether.
You don’t need to go back that far. Even the quality of life circa 1950 would be very inexpensive to have today. But then you have less electronics, toys, clothes, food variety etc. This would cost more than $100 a month today, but it would be dramatically cheaper than the typical modern lifestyle.
With remote work, I’m not sure you really need transportation. If you do, a bicycle is $50. But again I’m not sure why you’d be commuting to a job daily in a car if the presumed objective is to have less expenses so you can work less.
We could quibble about the exact numbers, but my general point is just that quality of life expectations have increased so much, that if one can somehow "hack" this, living very inexpensively is quite doable – and comparable to how everyone lived not so long ago.
The variety of electronics, toys, clothes or food available to an average person has definitely increased and I agree that one can spend less and maybe even work less (depending on what line of work they are in) by avoiding them. That's true.
The problem is they are not the big expenses that improve someone's quality of life. Decent housing, health insurance/healthcare, education and transportation are the big spending items for most people, not toys or even phones. Most of the things you mentioned are affordable to almost everyone in the developed world, maybe in an inferior form (like a huawei instead of an apple, h&m instead of gap) but still available.
For an average joe who has two kids and has to be at work because most people can't and don't work remotely even today, "hacking" inexpensive living isn't so much about giving up on their huawei phone or h&m clothes. It's more about giving up on having a decent place to live, giving up on their children's education, not being able to commute to work, etc. And that's not quite doable at all.
Where could I have a heated, waterproof, space with running water and electricity for $100/month, or even close to that? Lots of people live in houses that were around in 1950, without significant changes, and none of them are paying $100/month for rent, water and electricity.
Nowhere, because that’s not the claim I made. Read my comments again. I said $100 (as a rough estimate) for a QOL comparable to a hundred years ago. Then I said a 1950s QOL would cost more than $100 but still be cheaper than most modern spenders.
Sure, go back to the post war era where countries right after the point we started building massive amounts of infrastructure debt to say 'look how good things are' with absolutely no understanding the situation was untenable. Houses leaked energy like mad, and we were already full bore pulling coal out of the ground to fuel that growth. And, jeesh, the chemicals we were releasing at the time were not pleasant at all.
You are looking for a golden past that didn't exist.
The other problem with this argument not noted above is that goods are ordered in many cases.
It would be possible to substantially reduce costs, but only by living among people who are objectively poor by current standards. Without passing any judgement, this brings disadvantages of its own.
Where could we live on the reduced income without also forgoing society with educated, liberal, cosmopolitan people? To me that’s the harder part to give up than an iPhone each year or cable tv.
>I’m not sure why you’d be commuting to a job daily in a car if the presumed objective is to have less expenses so you can work less
Because you need a backup plan for when you lose that job. Or your employer does not increase your wages and you need other employers to sell to to earn income that keeps up with your expenses.
Interesting that you say that about books - libraries were common (in the UK at least) even before the 1870 education act. It would be a cheap subscription and the subscribers would choose what filled the shelves, often with direction from newspaper reviews or publications from intellectuals of various stripes, eg, the Harvard classics bookshelf.
Re: communes, this is a great observation. Again in the UK, there was a lot of growth with these things in the 1970s and they often involved lots of labour saving arrangements like doing work in groups, for the group. Meals are a good example of this, likewise laundry, cleaning etc. Anecdotally I've always found it easier to do most work when others are doing it too. It seems like a nice way to live.
It sounds like a nice way to live, as long as it works as it should.
But communes usually failed because self-sufficiency is really, really hard. And also because there were political struggles - usually around power, status, and sex.
If you live as a couple you only have to deal with each other, and the kids, if there are any. That's often plenty for many people.
In a commune you get less stress from shared chores but more from living in a group of differing personalities. It's possible with maturity, but it only takes one Cluster B personality to make it toxic and unworkable.
I think we talk of a housing crisis, but the people who are living stably around me (i.e "not struggling") are living with ample space for themselves or their family. I think many are living in bigger houses and sharing less than ever (no multigenerational homes, less live-in renters and so on). (Sweden)
And that each person lives bigger or more alone than before is part of the explanation why even with modest population increases, the need for (new) housing continues.
I think it comes down to the same reasons people pay insane housing costs to live in major cities rather than buying a $50k house in the rustbelt. The former is often more net profitable due to job prospects, despite the higher cost of living. In addition to non-work amenities like social circles and dating pools.
Maybe you can live for $100/mo somewhere, if you can solve the part of actually getting the deed to some land and splitting taxes, cost of basic infrastructure, etc. with enough people. But could you earn an income to support this indefinitely? Would you find satisfying social relationships, friends, a spouse?
Perhaps in the American West you could get a job as a farm hand, where they wouldn't care so much whether you showered daily or had presentable modern clothing. Do those jobs still exist? Would they expect you to have your own transportation, rather than the old-fashioned style of providing worker housing?
At some point the gears of your life need to mesh at least a little with some other gears around you, unless you have built up a large capital fund by participating in society first and then wish to disappear from it altogether.
There are still lots of family farms out there, and they need workers of several stripes. Migrant labor for harvesting produce is commonly known, but there’s also a class of jobs out there where you basically act as an “apprentice farmer”.
A family we’re close to has a poultry operation. They have around 15 houses (as in “chicken houses”), probably fifty or so acres of hay, and various equipment and infrastructure to support it all. They do well for themselves, but absolutely cannot leave for more than a day at a time, because someone has to be caring for the animals and watching to make sure things don’t break.
They own a small home on the property that they don’t use for themselves. Instead, that home is part of the compensation for the “farm hand”. In exchange for doing whatever needs to be done around the farm during the week and coordinating any time away with them (so they can ensure someone is there to cover things), the farm hand gets to live in the house and is paid about $1,500 per month. They also get use of a pickup that belongs to the farm for both personal and professional use.
The house isn’t a shack or something either - it’s an older farm house, but it’s a three bedroom, two bath home that was remodeled not long ago and has a half acre or so of yard. It would be a great place to raise a family.
They’re having a lot of trouble finding people who they can trust to take that job. In the past couple of years I know they’ve hired three people, none of which lasted very long.
The first one did great for a few months but ended up getting drunk and driving a tractor through the side of a chicken house at 2am. They would have been willing to let that go with a warning if it hadn’t ended up costing something like $50k to repair once the cost of the animals that were killed or lost are considered.
The second was on heroin, though they didn’t know that at the time. Things went well until about six weeks in - he’d gotten paid at the end of the first month, spent it all on drugs, but had managed to keep that hidden well enough that he wasn’t fired for it. Two weeks later he ran out of money and decided the best way to handle that was to steal equipment and pawn it. Our friend discovered this when he noticed his chainsaw sitting on the shelf at a pawn shop in town. That whole ordeal ended up costing ~$25k. Most of the stolen items were recovered, but the house had been damaged pretty badly.
The third one was better, and they thought they’d found a long term employee. Almost a year in, they trusted him to the point that they finally felt comfortable traveling a few hours away for their wedding anniversary. The second night there, they got a call from the neighboring farm - there were “a bunch of cops” at their place. Turns out the guy had an outstanding warrant in another state. They had to cut short their first trip away in years and come home to deal with animals.
All of that said - farmers like that don’t see their long-term help as just “employees”. They feel responsible for their welfare, and end up seeing them as part of the family. It’s not at all uncommon for them to inherit substantial land and assets when an older farmer dies, nor is it uncommon for a “farm hand” to end up borrowing money from their employer to start their own farm nearby. The salary isn’t impressive, but you get a large amount of freedom, opportunity to learn an important and difficult to acquire skillset, and a support system.
In short… being a “farm hand” these days isn’t easy and you won’t get rich in that position, but it’s not just a job. In a lot of ways, it’s the way you enter the farming community.
> The house isn’t a shack or something either - it’s an older farm house, but it’s a three bedroom, two bath home that was remodeled not long ago and has a half acre or so of yard. It would be a great place to raise a family.
For raising a family on $18K/yr + free rent?
It's basically, everything considered, the equivalent of entry -level fast-food pay, but worse because its mostly in non-monetary form, for a job with much greater skill and responsibility demands.
Yeah, I bet its hard to fill.
> All of that said - farmers like that don’t see their long-term help as just “employees”. They feel responsible for their welfare, and end up seeing them as part of the family.
Even if its true, what that ultimately means is that, as employers, they expect employees to sacrifice obligated, contractual compensation for the hope of future non-obligatory generosity in am a patron-client relationship rather than a bargained-for-exchange market relationship.
>They’re having a lot of trouble finding people who they can trust to take that job
Let's be generous and say room and board in a rural farmhouse and use of an old farm truck is worth an additional $1500, you would still make more money working 40 hours a week at my town's McDonalds, and if it's like any farm I've ever worked at you'll be working at least twice as hard and twice as long.
That's not a job, it's exploitation, right down to the "slave for use and maybe, if we decide, at some unspecified point you may get something nice from us!" sales pitch.
The economics of it are very different here. The per capita income is under $40k per annum, and housing costs are quite high relative to that. I don’t have a median income figure handy, but I’m confident it’s much lower than the per capita. I’d have to check, but as of last year our McDonalds was paying $14 / hour.
The pay is on par with other entry-level/unskilled positions here, and the figures above are what they were advertising - I’m certain someone who was a good fit could easily negotiate upward. I know they also offer guaranteed raises at six months and a year, though to be fair, I’m not sure how much those would be.
> if it's like any farm I've ever worked at you'll be working at least twice as hard and twice as long
I called it a “farm”, but it’s definitely not what you’d normally think of when you hear the word. It’s some poultry houses and a couple of hay fields. The majority of the responsibilities for the job would be centered around making yourself available to check the birds multiple times per day.
Honestly… if I were single, I’d probably make a pitch to take the job while working remotely as a “day job.”
The experience that they have had trying to hire for the position at the comoens5 they are offering suggests that that is less true than you seem to think.
> I’d have to check, but as of last year our McDonalds was paying $14 / hour.
$14/hr is about $28k/year, which is $10k/year more than the cash pay of the job you are talking about. Sure, the house and allowed personal use of the truck adds some value, but especially for the house realistically less than the what the standalone rental value would be for the house otherwise, because the people taking a job paying $18k/year beyond rent wouldn't be renting a 3 bedroom farmhouse if it wasn't part of the compensation-in-lieu-of-wages of their job.
> Honestly… if I were single, I’d probably make a pitch to take the job while working remotely as a “day job.”
So, maybe their problem is advertising to people who need the pay of a primary job and not single remote-working tech workers looking for a side gig. (Certainly, the added value of the house would be less wasted on the latter group.)
Housing co-ops are somewhat in line with what you’re describing but cost more. The home is owned by a not-for-profit entity controlled by its residents. The ones in my area charge around $100 or more per month for food and $200-400 for the room (and most people buy food on top of that), but that’s still cheaper than most people spend and you don’t have to buy extra food. The challenge is that you need money in the first place to purchase the home.
I think the reason co-ops don’t aggressively reduce costs like you describe despite being frugal is that having more varied food and clothing, entertainment, and electronics are worth it for most people. I think people would have to give up quite a bit of personal space as well, which I don’t think appeals to many people.
>But you'd be eating the same 5-10 things repeatedly, wearing the same clothes, have a few books for entertainment, minimal or no electronics, no car, and so on
Where do I sign up? I'm already in line with wearing a few of the same clothes, having books for entertainment, no car, and eating the same 5-10 things repeatedly.
I still have a few electronics though, but I could make do with just a computer with internet access (don't really need a smartphone) - not even constant one, a few hours per day would be enough.
I wouldn't easily give away running water and heating though.
You could probably set up a business of "economical retreats"... Live in the old fashion for a week or so. Very low costs to the business owner, and an interesting experience for the patrons.
Call it "the simple life".
You'd need to arrange things for them to do as well.
Edit: perhaps not possible, as most people would lack the skills to e.g. wash clothes or cook manually. Maybe it could have instructors and classes too. All paper and verbal, no devices!
For four years, I ran something similar to this: an artist residency, in rural Appalachia. I charged a low fee to folks who came, and kept the experience fairly simple and self-catered.
However, it really wasn't sustainable. People who came invariably expected more — whether more infrastructure or more community or more subsidies/scholarships or more politics — and genuinely 'simple' folks were very rare.
The fees I charged barely covered utility/transportation costs, and were never enough to cover property taxes, much less paying me even a minimal salary. I could have raised fees, but that would have raised expectations and assumptions, too.
Furthermore, all my attempts to obtain professional help were a complete failure — whether getting a CPA/bookeeper (to manage the taxes I was required by the state to collect), an attorney (for making it a legal nonprofit to avoid those taxes), or an insurance broker (for liability insurance because people will sue you). Providers around here looked at my project and just said, 'Meh, I don't understand it. I'm not interested,' or quoted fuck-you prices, like $10K/year for liability! Providers closer to the city might have helped, but for even higher fees.
Sure, I could have — and did — do without all those things. But one realizes, the further one is off that branch, the more unstable things become.
Our society is built for either individual/family scale, or corporate scale. It's very, very difficult to find a place in between that will work for more than a short time. Try to run a project in the US that is not a business but not just an individual hobby: you'll find few options, outside of established structures like churches. And even those have much bigger budgets and organizations than you might think.
My read of the parent’s comment is that you aren’t paying for land.
You don’t need store bought fertilizer. I had a garden for a few years and avoided manufactured fertilizer for most of it. At an industrial scale, sure, it is needed, but not at an individual garden level.
No transportation needed other than your own two feet or what you can build. It’s not like you need to go into work every day.
You don’t need to buy animals for food if you can hunt and trap.
I’m not suggesting I agree with the $100/month limit, but things on your list are considered luxuries to the plan. Remember, you’re shooting for “QOL of someone that lived in the American West a hundred years ago” which wasn’t all that great.
I mean if you lucked out and were born wealthy in an urban area it was probably ok.
But half the population lived in urban areas and only half of those people had electricity. So 50:50 you end up on Schrute Farms with no electricity and an outhouse.
African Americans might also have something to say about how they were treatment during that time period. Still, you can't say that something hasn't been lost when previously, one person, working 9-5 M-F, including lunch, at a job that's not particularly spectacular, can provide a house, food, transportation, for two adults and multiple children, and if we look forwards a few decades, a college education for said children without lifelong crippling debt, and careers of their own.
Are antibiotics and vaccines and other healthcare “available material goods”?
I had two great grandmothers that lost the majority of their children as babies/toddlers.
I think a lot of people are not accounting for the costs of risks during that time. If everything went well, the rain was on time, no other nations attacked, no one fell ill, there were no birthing complications, then life was okay. But nature usually throws a few curveballs.
This is an empirical question that I feel you are trying to twist into a political one.
The sole question is can you on 100 dollars a month today live in a manner similar to what the average person in the 20s did
The empirical questions are what does 100 a month buy you today and what was the average lifestyle of a person in the 20s in terms of how much would it cost to buy that lifestyle today
Questions of how we got feminnism and better medicine since then is irrelevant and trying to distort a simple empirical analysis into a political one
Attempting to argue counterfactuals while negating the factors that occured to cause the world to exist in a particular state at a particular time isn't ever going to lead to a conversation you like.
The resource cost and availability that existed in 1920 were because of non-empirical decisions like politics and societies adaptations to new technologies. It's like you're taking a still frame of an avalanche and looking for a flat spot to build a foundation.
Is it possible to make a system that sustains itself? Right now I've got a worm farm going that produces viable compost pretty often, but the Berkely Method would be faster. I have four chickens that produce yards and yards of compost every 3 months and require about a cup of corn a day.
You'd need to scale the chicken operation to cover whatever your three month compost needs are and you'd need people to eat or use the eggs relatively quickly. You could produce, dry, and store the corn on site.
America had better tech except now everything is built to break otherwise the air backed monetary system would fall apart if planned obsolescence didn't exist.
The only reason costs are so high is because money can be printed at will so your savings will always be reduced.
Sadly most people don't learn anything about finance and think stocks and bonds are good investment vehicles and fractional reserve is great.
I guess if you go to a school that was designed to make you a factory worker then you will only learn how to be a worker and not the owner.
We really aren't doing that on any lasting timescale.
You can burn your furniture to stay warm, and congratulate yourself on how well you're doing. But it doesn't take long to run out of furniture.
The fact that "long" here means less than a century or so doesn't alter that point. It just turns it into a generational problem rather than an immediate personal one.
in fact more and more people are being affected by climate damage, food shortages, and pollution with lasting effects. But apparently most of suburbia won't notice until it starts happening there too.
Right now? Space to grow food. I grow tomatoes, lemons, basil, cucumbers, and strawberries in the basement. Most of that isn't good for chickens or worms, though. I'd need to scale my food production to a bigger variety for the system to feed itself so it does still take some input from me other than sweat equity.
The thing I started doing all of this for was renewable compost, though, so at least that goal is met. I also don't give away my yard trash anymore (leaves, clippings). They go into the compost piles and get spread across the yard a few months later. My question moreso centered around fertilizer - why do we keep needing synthetic fertilizer if we can produce renewable compost chains?
The topic of how he got or paid for the land actually doesn't come up in the video.
I found the whole thing pretty fascinating though, also in terms of what he believes about us here in Europe (we're not free anymore) or that USA government is moving towards making the Bible illegal, yet also having a lot of beliefs and knowledge that I consider exceptionally good, like not eating meat or animal products. I don't manage the latter myself but it would be the right thing to do and he just does it. Oh, and that his biggest mentioned expense is 90 dollars every month for a landline phone. Holy crap, for that you get 10 gigabit symmetrical around here if you're on the right fiber network, or otherwise the fastest Internet+phone+TV they can offer! Amazing he can make enough money raising horses to pay that bill every month on top of a few smaller expenses like dog food (it totaled up to 140/month, though I expect there's some forgotten/irregular costs). Who else has >50% of their living expenses be a phone contract!
> If you wanted to have the QOL of someone that lived in the American West a hundred years ago, it could be done today for probably $100 a month all-inclusive of food, clothing, and shelter.
No, not even close. People didn't live in tents without utilities in 1923. And they certainly didn't eat 1/3 of the calories of 2023 humans.
I am somewhat surprised that there aren't more cheap-living communes in the US. A few thousand dollars could probably pay the living expenses of a few dozen people – assuming they are all on-board with such a materially minimalist lifestyle.