The Speculist: Would You Take This Trip?

Jane Galt published a great post this week with an implicit challenge. How much money would you take to be sent back to 1973 to live?

[L]et's say we could find someone who makes $29,931 today, and remembers the 1970's. Do you think that if you offered to send him back to 1973, with 4% more than the 1973 median income, he'd take you up on the deal? What if you doubled that, to 8%? What if you sent him back to 1973 making 15 or 20% more than the median wage, so that he could keep the wife at home and still enjoy a modern level of household income?
Personally, I wouldn't take the deal . . . and not just because I'd be the one stuck at home trying to make the Harvest Gold drapes match the new Avocado refrigerator. 1973 means no internet. No cell phones. No cheap air travel to exotic foreign climes. No computers. No blessed asthma drugs (see my co-blogger's memoir for just how much this means). Three television channels and nothing good on any of them. Expensive books. Air pollution. Shorter life expectancies. More crowded housing. About the only thing more available then were Manhattan apartments, and that was because the muggers were cramping everyone's style. Yes, we all wish we'd done like my parents and bought a co-op in 1973--but that's because we want to live in it now, not then.
I'm not sure you could pay me enough to go back to 1973, in fact. I think I'd rather be a journalist living now than a multi-millionaire living then.

Some people might be tempted to take the deal because of the uncertainty of our times – the Terror War and everything. But those people have forgotten how uncertain those times were. Part of the deal would have to be that you'd forget the intervening years. No going back to 1973 to invest in Apple computers. You'd have to live life like everybody else at that time – not knowing how everything comes out. Not knowing, for example, that the Cold War would end without bloodshed or bombs. Would you take the deal?

Like Jane, I wouldn't go back even to be a multimillionaire. Two of the more famous millionaires of that time – Howard Hughes and Elvis - didn't fare so well. But that's not the reason (those guys had other problems beside living in 1973).

I've got a lot of reasons to be thankful for living in this time. One is my son Thomas. There is little chance that he would have survived had he been born during the early 70's. He was born only about a month premature, but the medical issues that he had could not have been solved during that time. Had he by some miracle pulled through in the 70's, he would have been left mentally handicapped and maybe blind. He has neither problem today.

My father-in-law would have died four years ago had he not gotten modern care after his stroke. That care included implanting a pace maker/defibrillator. The defibrillator has gone off twice since then. Each time it saved him from a full blown heart attack.

My mother is about to undergo eye surgery this next month that will include implanting lenses into her eyes. My mother - who has worn coke-bottle thick glasses since she was four-years-old – will now require glasses only when she reads. This will be a remarkable lifestyle improvement for her.

Then we have all the promise that the future holds. Whether it's the private space race or anti-aging we have a lot to look forward to.

Jane's post was inspired by the bias of the consumer price index against new products. The CPI doesn't reflect the deflation of the price of new products (like cell phones) between the time they are introduced and the time they are finally added to the index. Anyway, read the whole thing.

H/T to Instapundit.

Comments

Worth reading, thanks.

I'd surmise that most or all who read your blog would agree with you. Go back?

Good heavens - I'm reading this from a portable computer using a radio to communicate with a global computer system in real time. With funky graphics and not a bunch of green-screen terminals. Go back to using typewriters and rotary dial-phones and without even Fed-Ex? Crazy talk.

Posted by: bdunbar | September 24, 2006 12:54 PM

The key is, do you go back with knowledge of the futue you left behind or not. If the answer is yes I'd go in a second. If the answer is no there is not a chance.

Posted by: rjschwarz | September 24, 2006 02:28 PM

I just spent the weekend at the PA Ren Faire. This kind of backwards lifestyle makes 1973 seem very futuristic.

I agree with rjschwarz - if we can't take knowledge with us, then there is no value to us.

What if the deal included being able to choose a younger age body to inhabit when you arrived in 1973? Would you make the trip if you were faced with an end-of-life in 2006 vs a new start in 1973? (choose any age)

What if the condition was that you were able to go back without today's knowledge for a period of exactly one year? After the duration, you wake up "now" again with full awareness of the 1973 experience? (either 1 year passes in today's time, or zero time passes in the present) Would you go? As a vacation from modern life, or as an adventure into the past?

Posted by: MikeD | September 24, 2006 08:55 PM

I had a similar thought about the great increase in things available to us over the last 100 years, and thought of roughly the same question, but thought of it in terms of being king of England, say, in the 1800's, or an average guy now. The only advantage to being king is power. THink of medical care, food, travel, communication, etc, then versus now. I'd rather be the average guy now than the king.

Posted by: pjw | September 26, 2006 10:46 PM

I had a longer comment on this subject but it got lost in transmission. I'll be more parsimonious this time.

I think most readers of this blog would generally agree that it would take a tremendous amount of money, if it were possible at all, to convince us to go back to 1973. Even if we had the option of arriving in the 90th percentile of 1973-era wage earners, it would be a nearly impossible sell, particularly if we would be denied knowledge of anything that was to come.

The more interesting question might be the opposite one. Not what could someone pay us to get us back thirty-three years (for me, that would take a time machine and a very large Italian with a blackjack, because I wouldn't go willingly), but what would you pay to go *forward* thirty-three years, sight unseen, on a one-way trip? With no knowledge of what the world will be like in 2039, would it be worth it to you if would emerge 4% below the 2039 mean for wealth and income? 8%? 20%? What if you were faced with the prospect of landing at the 10th percentile, at least among the Western world (if such distinctions continue to have meaning 33 years hence)?

One's answer might be revealing because it would reveal the nature of one's view of the law of accelerating returns, which most of us here accept in some form or another. If you believe that the benefits of accelerating returns will be generally distributed, then accepting a position very low on the 2039 economic ladder might actually look like a bargain for you. However, if you believe that the law of accelerating returns legitimately only describes an aggregate phenomenon, and that the gap between the top and bottom of that ladder might conceivably widen just as quickly as the accelerating returns themselves materialize, then committing yourself to land that low on the 2039 ladder would look much less appealing.

To make it fair, one should also take current status into account, too ... obviously someone who's in the 8th percentile today wouldn't think as hard about accepting a position at the 10th percentile of 2039 as someone who's in the 95th percentile today. So for the sake of argument, let's say these were your choices: 90th percentile of today, or 10th percentile of 2039. Where would you put yourself?

Posted by: Gramarye | September 27, 2006 11:19 AM

The Speculist

Live to see it.

Would You Take This Trip?

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