I think that’s a valid point. However, isn’t it possible that a big part of the difference is that advances in transportation and refrigeration have allowed salmon and lobsters to be transported all over the country, broadening the market and increasing demand?
Suppose we compare the price of a 78 turntable + 10 records with the price of a CD player + 10 CDs. Normalize by the minimum wage.
I bet that you’d have to work fewer hours at minimum wage today to get the CD package than you would have had to work to get the 78 package. And I bet you would end up with something that’s more reliable and has better sound quality.
Again, I bet that you would have to work fewer hours at minimum wage today to afford a basic but deluxe desk. (I’m not sure roll-top is a good comparison, since those are not very popular these days).
While this is true to an extent, it really points in another direction: that more money is necessary to be “rich”, depending on where you live, as a result of high realo estate prices. Being a millionaire is pretty meaningless as a measure of wealth these days (at least in some locations) because you gotta live somewhere, owning your own home is so expensive, and retirement/medical is such a big financial risk.
It is not only perfectly possible to live an ordinary middle class life with house and retirement savings fund and be a “millionaire” – it is arguably necessary. $500,000 for a house and $500,000 in a retirement fund doesn’t make you “rich” these days, not by any means.
I don’t agree at all. A life scavaging for clams isn’t exactly one of luxury - the life of a fisherman was always one of notorious danger, hardship and back-breaking labour.
My point here was that 50 years ago there was plenty of stuff to buy. Different stuff, but lots of it. The savings rate was better not from lack of merchandise but probably due to direct experience with the Depression. Anything electronic is indeed far cheaper today. Heck, I got a transistor radio for my bar mitzvah, now they come free in my MP3 player. I bet none of us has even counted the number of radios in our houses.
Basic deluxe is an oxymoron. As prices for good stuff rose, there was room at the bottom for Ikea type stuff. I’m not talking about higher class mass market stuff, but about stuff handmade.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing, since as more people buy houses more people need furniture, and better efficiency gives basic furniture to more people for less. I wouldn’t want to go back, not when I can buy Ikea bookcases for less than it would cost for me to make them myself.
What do you think about quality of life issues? Regardless of whether staying home with kids is a good idea or not, more women 50 years ago had the option. Doesn’t that count in any definition of wealth?
True. Plus, the variety of vegetables I have access today is much greater than what I had 50 years ago, when it was canned food or nothing much of the year. The variety of restaurants at different price points is much better also. When I was a kid we had Chinese, we had Italian, we had a hamburger place (pre McDonalds) and we had diners. And this was suburban New York. And we had Chicken Delight. There is far more variety today at reasonable prices.
It does count as wealth. If I compare a middle class family from 2007 with one from 2004, by most objective measurements, the more modern family is wealthier. Much of that is a function of the fact that our technologically advanced society can produce more with less.
But you didn’t have to be a fisherman: the point was that these food sources were so abundant that the average person in a coastal community (farmer, minister, basket-weaver, whoever) could go fishing or oystering for a little recreation on a day off and bring home gallons of fat tasty seafood.
Or they could buy it very cheaply and locally from the fishermen who did make their living collecting it—so cheaply that, as I noted above, it was common to use the stuff as crop fertilizer.
No, AFAICT that’s only a little part of the difference. The chief reason we can’t go pick up five-pound lobsters at the local beach anymore is that massive overfishing severely depleted the seafood stocks, and human pollution and habitat invasion have made much of their former habitat unusable. The bulk of this change took place long before modern refrigerated transport.
We definitely do have a lot more material wealth in some ways than our ancestors had, but most of us have no access to the kind of ecological abundance that they took for granted. We’re richer in some ways but poorer in others.
So the total U.S. lobster consumption is significantly lower today than it was 100 years ago?
Do you have a cite for that? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I am a little skeptical.
Not today, no. But the overfishing that decimated American lobster stocks, and made the crustacean an expensive commercial delicacy instead of a cheap local staple food for coastal dwellers, did result in reduced consumption of American lobsters. As this article notes,
That’s an article from 1938, btw. It wasn’t a modern expanded market with refrigerated transport that made lobster a rare and expensive delicacy. Lobster was already being sent all over the country (canned, not refrigerated) back in 1889 when it was still comparatively cheap. It was unsustainable commercial over-exploitation, and habitat destruction, that caused the lobster population to crash; same for Atlantic salmon, oysters, and other “gourmet” foods.
I’m not saying that the increased global availability of regional food items (canned or refrigerated) shouldn’t be counted as an increase in material wealth. I’m just pointing out that to the extent that commercial over-exploitation chokes off the natural abundance of what used to be an easily available local resource, it also counts as a decrease in material wealth.
That’s a good point, and it is true in other ways. My wife gave me a gold chain when we got engaged 30 years ago. She brought it to the jeweler with a batch of other things from her family. It is now 10X as expensive as it was then (well above inflation) to the point that she would never have been able to afford it. In fact, this is something that wouldn’t even be made anymore. (It went right to the safe deposit box. Like lobster, there are some things so scarce and expensive to be out of the reach of the average person now, though in most cases there are cheaper substitutes.
You could afford a time machine?!
It would be interesting to see how standards of nutritional availability have changed over time - my guess is that, in North America at least, food of high quality has never been easier to obtain or cheaper, albeit not through recreational foraging.
As for eating fish and shellfish, you may find this interesting:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FoodConsumption/FoodAvailSpreadsheets.htm#mtfish
Click on “fresh fish and shellfish”. You will note that in 1909, 4.3 pounds were consumed per capita; that grows more or less steadily to 11.5 in 2005.
So whether or not a person living on the coast was able to scoop up giant lobsters and tasty fish for free or cheap, in point of fact the average person now eats more fresh shellfish and fish than in the past.
Yeah, and my high school paid for it too. 
(too bad it was an inaccurate one. I’d really have liked to go to the HoJos in orbit, and wear those cool suits.)
But 1909 is not “the past” of marine abundance that I’m talking about. Reread the quote in my most recent post, where the author notes that by 1905, the Maine lobster industry had already shrunk to less than a quarter of its 1889 production. The linked article mentions similar effects in many other fish catches. By 1909, commercial over-exploitation and overfishing had already transformed many food fishes and shellfish into expensive delicacies.
Note also that “fresh” in the context of your link, AFAICT, includes everything like McDonald’s fish sandwiches and frozen fish sticks as well as fresh-caught fish: i.e., any fish or shellfish food item that isn’t canned or cured. In fact, several pounds of the difference between the 1909 and 2005 numbers is attributable to the consumption of shrimp, most of which is frozen, and about 90% of which is imported:
Again, I’m not trying to argue that today’s increased nation-wide availability of fish and seafood, even frozen farmed shrimp and Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, doesn’t constitute an increase in material wealth. I’m just pointing out that the loss of an abundant wild supply of high-quality local fish and seafood for people in coastal regions also constitutes a decrease in material wealth.
Seems like an awfully specific sort of “wealth” though. To my mind, the ability of Maine residents in the 1880s to pick up large tasty lobsters on their own is hardly the equivalent, or even an appreciable counterweight, to the ongoing huge increase in the availability and cheapness of food in North America (and the substantial decrease in the amount of human labour required to create that food), let alone other indicia of wealth - such as access to health care, drop in infant mortality, availability of transportation, consumer goods, etc.
To my mind, a better argument is qualitative - as in ‘having an unpolluted and non-depleted environment has a non-economic value that is nonetheless quite real’. Trying to make an economic argument of it is I think subject to the objection that the form of “wealth” involved is pretty trivial - I doubt that the amount of lobster casually picked up by holidaymakers in Maine was ever a really significant economic factor.
I agree with this. Anyway, I would guess that the proportion of Americans who can enjoy a nice lobster dinner in exchange for doing a few hours of work is higher now than in the 19th century.
Well, it’s just one example. There are plenty of similar examples of ways in which the average pre-industrial American had more access to a natural abundance of wild food sources, including many that are now considered rare luxuries, than the average American today has. It’s not just about lobsters.
So what? I wasn’t attempting to claim that Americans today are on average or on the whole less wealthy than their pre-industrial predecessors. I was simply pointing out some particular ways in which our lives have been impoverished by modern society and economy, even as they’ve been enriched in other ways.
I think it’s impossible to compare.
For example, for an American, the land their house sits on is the most expensive thing they will ever buy, and chances are they will spend a huge chunk of their lives working to pay for it.
However, where I live in Cameroon, if you want to build a house or start a field, you just walk out into the bush and clear some space. Local building materials (mud brick, thatch) are basically free and easy enough for a layman to make. There are some restrictions, of course (traditional leaders can reappropriate land, and the government probably doesn’t recognize your claim), but basically your living space- as elaborate or simple as you wish it to be- is free for a few weeks of labor. Likewise, while farming is hard work, it’s very seasonal. Most people grow their own food. This means for a few weeks of hard labor, they can deal with being unemployed for the rest of the year. Most people have all the time they need with their families, friends, and interests. The very thing that most Americans dream of having.
How does that compare to working 40+ hour weeks in America and paying most of it in rent? Impossible to say, really.