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Miserable stuff. Ordinary Americans in 2016 might have creature comforts that weren't available to John D. Rockefeller, but this does not somehow translate to being "richer than" Rockefeller.

Rockefeller's wealth can be seen 100 years later, in forms that no creature comfort can surpass: media and political power, generations of rich and powerful children, and countless buildings and institutions named after his family. None of that is meaningfully offset by the fact that it's easier for me to keep ice cream cold, that I can travel to France a little bit faster (but a whole lot less comfortably), or that I can watch content produced by his progeny online whenever I please.

But would you give up all your access to anything modern, for the rest of your life, in order to have the power and influence that Rockefeller had? Primitive medical treatment, limited communications to others that aren't in your vicinity, no modern entertainment?

Example: Last year I went to my doctor, who informed me (based on a readout from a machine that analyzed a blood sample) that I needed to exercise more, lose weight, and change my diet in certain aspects in order to live a bit longer (I had high cholesterol). And this year at my annual checkup I found out my changes worked, and cholesterol is way down. This is something that wouldn't be knowable back in Rockefeller's time.

Yes, in a heartbeat. Besides, the man lived to 97, and by 1916 the majority of excess deaths happened by early childhood.

(Also, why do we talk about 1916 like they didn't have instantaneous communication? They'd been telegraphing across the country for nearly 60 years by that point! It certainly isn't text messaging, but I think I'd survive.)

> But would you give up all your access to anything modern, for the rest of your life, in order to have the power and influence that Rockefeller had? [...] no modern entertainment?

So let me get this straight, you would trade the power to shape the modern industrial world for the power to amongst other things, watch cat videos on demand?

Imagine, the power to end segregation fifty years earlier than before, the power to bring women's rights to the forefront decades earlier, the power to stand up for the oppressed, the sick, and the poor and actually have the elites in government and industry listen to you? To give that up so one can have cellphones and video chat?

It's possible that you do regard creature comforts to be of primary importance, but I'd ask you to reconsider. Rockefeller lived in the 1900s, not the Bronze Age. It's not such a downgrade from the current era that one should discount all that you can do with the power of being the richest person in the world. Don't you have any social causes you support?

So you’re saying this scenario is like time travel? To be rich as Rockefeller in his time but still have your current brain?
Basically, otherwise what's the point? You'll just be a different person in a different time.
Try getting around without a real toothbrush. Or toilet paper. That's probably 80% of Rockefeller's life.
Lucky for u to be still able to afford the doctor. Also lots of ppl don't have shelter security. Many are just one incident or bad luck away from being homeless.
> Rockefeller's wealth can be seen 100 years later, in forms that no creature comfort can surpass: media and political power, generations of rich and powerful children, and countless buildings and institutions named after his family.

Calvin Coolidge was US President from 1923 to 1929, which would have been a powerful position to have. And yet this influential individual could do nothing when his son got sick:

> The general story is well-known: while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds, sixteen-year-old Calvin, Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin, Jr. was dead within a week.

* https://coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-of-c...

This is because antibiotics were not yet invented/discovered.

There are things that even money and power and influence cannot help with.

Only a fool would trade modern life for the mentioned "power".

Best thing today is: I can ditch the "power struggle" stuff and live a happy, healthy and fulfilling life.

Unless I fall for the mental manipulations used to draw people as pawns into "power struggles".

Except that if your elected officials decide to act in a way that would jeopardize your creature comforts, you can...tweet about it? Meanwhile, he'd just get new officials installed, and ensure that he maintained his comfort.

See the difference?

I don't use Twitter, I chose to be happy
If you can have a happy life without thinking about power struggles, it's because you were born on the winning team.
What the author misses is that we perceive our welfare by measuring it against our peers. The people of 1918 had no idea what inventions were coming in 100 years and even if they could postulate some of them it was purely in the realm of science fiction for them. Not to mention, imagine the excitement of witnessing stuff like refrigeration, transoceanic flight, television, radio, telephone, mass mobility all come online during your lifetime.

Of course knowing what one knows today one might be tempted by the creature comforts that our complex society affords us but personally given the choice of being born John Rockefeller or being born myself I'd be kinda tempted by the former. It's hard to overstate how status contributes to one's perception of well being. Rich people 100 years ago did not feel deprived because they had no YouTube. They had parties and shows and concubines to keep the boredom out. Come to think of it even knowing what I know about the 21st century I'd probably take the Rockefeller deal... maybe I'm unusual.

EDIT Alas there is a 21st century version of the earth that I would not trade for the riches of a robber baron. But that version of the earth does not exist nor is it likely to come into being in the next few decades that I might have. Such earth has no Twitter but instead has peace and prosperity across the world no matter the continent. Has no climate crisis to resolve and cancers and similarly devastating diagnoses are mere inconveniences akin to sniffles. In this utopian earth the ecosystems are being cherished rather than exploited and economic improvements don't come at the expense of future generations. In this alternative earth the pursuit of knowledge and art are the most well respected pursuits and those who are best remembered are ones who most contributed to such endeavors during their lifetimes. In other words, complete fantasy and utopia. But that would be a world I'd refuse to trade for the Rockefeller status.

So yeah, tell me again how to do that robber baron thing?

I would 100% take the lifestyle of a 2022 SWE over a 1918 Rockefeller (or maybe a better reference is 1889 when he was 50). It's not even close by my way of reckoning.
You’ll have better healthcare, hygiene, and pretty much better everything. Status is for the birds. Who gives a shit.
I think in due course you'll get to see how impotent a lot of modern medicine is when faced with certain maladies especially those that come with advanced age, e.g. cancers, strokes etc. We're far better at telling you what you're going to die of vs 100 years ago but not really all that much better at keeping you alive.
The overall statistics argue that we are meaningfully better: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2020-2021/LExpMort.pdf
What about a 2022 fast food worker? 2022 data center monkey making 60k / yr?
Absolutely! In the 1920's the son of the president of The United States died from an infected blister he got playing tennis. That's a fear I don't have. I love music, and even a fast food worker has better access to recording than Rockefeller did. I probably listen to more music in a year than Rockefeller heard on his lifetime. In 1911 hundreds of people died when temperatures went over 100 in North East New York. We build a city in the middle of the desert where temperatures reach 110 almost every year and fast food workers in Las Vegas are not dying by the hundreds.
TBF Las Vegas has a much lower summer humidity than New York.
I would prefer to live in 2022 USA no matter my profession than anyone in 1918. Antibiotics, computers / internet, cancer therapy, airplanes, you don’t have half your kids die of random stuff before age 18, the list goes on and on
It's not that he misses it, that's his point. Comparing wealth to people 100+ years ago as measured by technology is better than comparing it to people living today. I don't know how convincing this is as an argument though against higher taxes. Probably not that convincing.
He isn't missing the point, he's saying that by definition means it's all in your heads. You are better off, the only reason you don't feel it is because you are lying to yourself.

Not you specifically, just in general.

One of the major problems of modern-day life is that we are constantly bombarded with indicators of our status - in particular how low it is compared to the elites.

You might think that you could merely escape this by getting of social media, but in reality it's in the physical world too. Every single advertisement is trying to create a void in the viewer, in an attempt to get you to purchase their product. Every billboard, every TV ad, every time you walk into a supermarket... Even if ads don't work on you 99% of the time, the 1% that filter through to your subconscious can really wreck you.

John D. Rockefeller might have been poor compared to our times, in the same way that Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan was. But they didn't have the constant reminder of all the ways they were lacking. The average Roman soldier was 5'5", and I doubt many of them felt short. I've heard stories of men getting leg-lengthening surgery to go from 5'10" to 6'0", which if you don't know is an agonizing procedure of slowly getting your bones pulled beyond their maximum ability to stretch, which takes weeks or even months to even get back to being able to walk.

The all-too-easy answer to this is to just say "Well, comparison is the thief of joy, so just don't compare yourself". But if you want to compete in the job marketplace, or to be considered on dating apps, or just in general to participate in society it's almost a necessity to compare yourself to your peers. Obviously we should all be like the Buddha and not be drawn to comparison but it's a hell of a lot easier to do that when you're the guy on top.

I don't think I've ever found a single person, in real life or online, who never compares themselves to another person. So we should accept that equality in status (and not just in pure-stuff) is an essential ingredient to a happy, functional society.

> if you want to compete in the job marketplace, or to be considered on dating apps, or just in general to participate in society it's almost a necessity to compare yourself to your peers. Obviously we should all be like the Buddha and not be drawn to comparison but it's a hell of a lot easier to do that when you're the guy on top.

This is so perfectly and lucidly expressed that I'm replying to it just to "bookmark" this quote.

The real generation-proof measure of wealth and power is the number of people who are at your beck and call.

And most people don’t have nearly the reach Rockefeller did, even if they materially live better than him by some or most (all?) metrics.

You have people you can summon to bring you food, give you rides, buy your groceries. Services that bring you all sorts of entertainment, video games, anything.
> The real generation-proof measure of wealth and power is the number of people who are at your beck and call.

No need to be as rich as Rockefeller (or Warren Buffett): just make enough to qualify for having an AmEx with concierge service.

True, though I'm thinking more along the lines of "build me a railroad between these cities" and "I own this list of politicians".
An interesting corollary to extrapolate is that even a billionaire today might have a “destitute” living standard according to people hundreds of years from now. It’s fun to imagine why that might be.
It's easy to imagine a utopian future where aging and mortal disease is conquered, climate change and sustainability are figured out and molecular machinery can produce any consumer level products in an instant at trivial cost. In such a future (if it ever comes) a Bezos or a Musk is a pauper with no access to such transformative inventions.
And you still wouldn't be content with life.
One way to think about it was that lack of access to modern health care, safe drinking water, and timely access to global knowledge (etc), were not moral issues in 1916 because they didn't exist or were not technically feasible. And this is with the acknowledgement that we aren't entirely up to standard in these areas. Wealth could be measured against what any given age considers to be an reasonably achievable quality of life.
"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" - John Milton.

Seems a lot of people agree, what with the popularity of portal fantasy and isekai reincarnation stories. Magic does make living in them more convenient than real history.

Still, getting glory as a bona-fide warrior "hero" is a different kind of happiness than modern urbanite... But it is still a kind of happiness. Some of us might prefer it.

The house I live in now was originally built for factory workers. It’s worth a lot of money now because the ‘factories’ nearby are all pharma and biotech. The place my great grandparents lived when they came here from Romania with nothing is now an expensive condo. So I guess they were doing better than they thought.
Yep, housing is one of the few things whose relative price has increased, primarily because the planet is the same size now but there are more people.

In other areas, people were absurdly more wealthy in 2016 than in 1916 -- in terms of the quality of food, transportation, healthcare, nearly all household goods, services of most kind except domestic/household staff, and of course all the technology that didn't exist at all then.

Think about it this way: the planet is the same planet, but an hour of work at an average job should on average buy you an hour's worth of stuff-made-by-labor (of average skill/value). As human productivity grew due to better equipment, better materials, better science, and more efficient operations, the amount of stuff an average hour of work produces is way higher -- and thus the average worker can afford more/better stuff for the same amount of time worked.

Some work got way more productive, some got a little more productive, and a few things (like domestic help) are exactly the same level of productivity as before. And so some things, we have absurdly cheaper or better things, but others have gotten slightly more expensive instead.

Would you rather be a person at your current level of wealth in 100 years or Elon Musk? Assuming you get to take your friends and family with you.

100 years for me is probably a yes - just on the chance to indulge my curiosity and also because at Musk-like levels of wealth I think you're past what I'd be interested in doing with money and gotten to the "more money more problems" stage.

200+ years is a no brainer.

The author could have thought about this claim for like two seconds and realized how ridiculous it is. Rockefeller and multiple generations of descendants can live off his wealth. Clearly he was able to buy more with his money than an ordinary American can buy.
Buy more quantity of fewer possible things to choose from, which is worse than having more choice. I think this is the crux of the author's argument.
He had maximum available choice for his time.

Yea, everyone has an iPhone but who can faff off to Paris whenever they want?

The richest person on earth couldn't 1916. Again this is the point.
Asinine to reduce "wealth" to "quality of middle class consumer goods available", as if a Soros or a Trump's top priority is having the most accurate wristwatch. Rockefeller was able to, for instance, insert multiple of his family into high political office. He had a retinue of servants available that freed his time essentially to his complete discretion. He was able to personally finance and set the priorities of multiple educational institutions. His charitable foundation had / has its fingers in multiple social movements for good and ill, maintaining influence in what is likely to be perpetuity.

But you've got air conditioning and MRIs, congratulations (Rockefeller lived to be 97 without those btw).

Rockefeller loved to 97, but his daughter died at 13 months of a disease that doesn’t exist in America or Europe anymore. Childhood mortality was high, and we’ve substantially reduced that in 2022.

I can’t speak for Rockefeller or for you, but the pain of losing a child is worse than anything I can imagine. If I could trade influencing some election for the lives of my children, I will always pick my children.

"Honestly, I wouldn’t be remotely tempted to quit the 2016 me so that I could be a one-billion-dollar-richer me in 1916."

I wouldn't trade my current circumstances for Elon Musk's or Jeff Bezos' current lives. Does that somehow make me richer than them? And I'm currently eating the likes of potatoes, oatmeal, and pasta.

- A/C is nice.

- I certainly can't afford to fly anywhere.

- I pretty much don't care about package delivery times most of the time.

- Radio is nice, as is Youtube (don't have a TV anymore). But back then you could count on everyone and their uncle to carry a tune or play an instrument. These days most of us can't make our own music to enjoy anymore, and are fully dependent on radio or streaming.

- Most movies aren't worth watching. The live theater experience is great though, even when it's done by amateurs.

- Being expected to carry around a phone kind of sucks, especially for those like me who don't connect to data services. No, I can't check my email on my phone.

- I just spent 2/3rds of my life savings replacing a car I crashed with a used car that gets worse gas mileage than the old car. It would be nice not needing a car to commute with.

- "Thai red curry or Vindaloo chicken or Vietnamese Pho or a falafel". As stated above, I'm out of luck for that anyway. I can't even justify buying the better tasting pasta sauces anymore. Still, I get it. But the funny thing is I don't crave tastes that I've never tasted before. So I don't see access to ethnic foods as that much enriching.

- I do think the bare bones Comcast internet connection is worth the $53 per month it costs.

- I've been to a primary care physician once in the past couple of decades. An emergency room twice, a broken bone clinic once, and about twenty years ago needed my head stitched up from a snowboarding accident (which wouldn't have happened had I lived long ago). I've always healed fast from cuts without needing antibiotics.

- That era was the nadir of medical childbirth.

- Fluoride is quite nice, but haven't been to a dentist in 8 years.

- Regular specs have always been fine with me.

- Birth control is nice.

- But they had ragtime, man.

- Manually syncing all of the non-connected clocks to DST is annoying.