Another interesting piece on Ribbonfarm, the personal blog of Venkat Rao of The Gervais Principle fame.
It does not really matter if you generalize beyond income to various in-kind quality-of-life elements like a clean environment or access to healthcare. If you are not measuring prevailing levels of freedom you are measuring nothing relevant. Until people start answering $0 to the fuck-you-money question across the planet, you can be sure that they do not perceive themselves to be free enough to properly pursue quality of life.
The back-story here is a hypothesized future where the technological revolution reaches its long-promised goal of nearly entirely eliminating the need for most human work. In the era just after the industrial revolution, humans were still needed to control the newly-create machines and perform to intellectual tasks; Venkat’s future posits no similar use for human labor; only engineers are needed to make the machines and to make them go.
We’re already seeing the early stages of this hypothesized future: mechanically-produced goods (e.g., food, electronics, and other mass-produced items) drop in price over time, while labor-intensive services (e.g., healthcare and education) grow in price over time. The major difference between the two categories is worker productivity; the productivity of a farmer has increased hugely since 1700, while the productivity of a professor has not changed nearly as much.
If human labor is no longer cheap compared to “stuff” in the developed world, then prices will continue to increase in any industry where costs are dominated by some highly educated person’s time, relative to prices in automated industries. Measures of inflation that include both, like CPI, will make less and less sense.
I fully expect the actual production cost in human labor terms of the necessities of modern life — food, water, shelter, electrical power, basic medical care, internet access, and local transport — will eventually reach a floor quite close to 0.