Hey they were close! We make 30-40k in (2024 Dollars)
This is so uniquely depressing. They were accurate on my annual wage in 2024 yet they assumed I’d be working less than 40 hours 😭
I think you misread that, because $40,000 in 1966 is roughly $385,000 in today’s dollars.
Edit: conversely, $40,000 in today’s dollars would be $4,176.25 in 1966.
Pretty sure that’s the joke
That was the joke. I make $40k today.
I got that wage, but not accounting for inflation…
But instead, we decided to make a very small number of people extremely rich.
By the year 2040, you’ll eat bugs on your way into your 16 hour job making 13 Bezos bucks an hour and you’ll love it because the serotonin patches and nightly dream implants (implant so that you dot wake up while your frontal cortex is being used to mine doge coin).
I hope you don’t mind, I just went to your profile and clicked “favorite”
😄
The best part is, for every 10 commercials you watch in your sleep, you get up to 1 dream back free at the end of the month!
The “up to” makes this particularly depressing. And realistic.
Well, naturally they have to deduct for uninsurable dream content like trees and sunshine. That kind of dangerous content needs to be distilled before it reaches you by choosing a secure dream provider. We’re trying to protect children here.
For reference, $30,000.00 in 1966 would equate to over ~$285,000.00 in 2024’s USD.
Here’s the thing. We could have that right now, today, we’re there, they’re right. Computers and just useful software (fuck AI) alone have increased productivity so much that one guy with fancy Excel can do the work of what used to take 98 people (7 banks x 14 person abacus teams). And that’s just one regional bank. Before email, corporations had internal mailing departments, now there’s dirt cheap and super convenient email. There are untold numbers of shell scripts out there quietly replacing whole ass departments of people. Soft automation alone, no robots needed, has increased human productivity to an absolutely bonkers degree since these statements were written. Thanks to the Friedman doctrine and Reagan and Thatcher and their ilk, all the benefits of that productivity got turned into a benefits for the asset holding class, while the middle and lower classes got lectures on the morality of hard work.
People used to physically carry boxes of paper checks out to planes to be shipped between banks.
Flawless .
People talk about the age of abundance - we’ve been living it for decades. Money is created out thin air, automation and industrial have done the rest.
Marx called it 100 years ago. Thomas Piketty nailed it down a few years ago : Surplus goes to assets owners - the more assets you own, the more surplus you accumulate and it’s effective are compound over the time. Until you have a handful of people people who own all the asset, which is where we are now.
As a kid, my dad used to tell me stuff like that. He believed it too. He worked 2 jobs 6 days a week all his life to die in relative poverty.
People make wealth issues generational. It’s not. It’s a narrative to divide and conquer.
It’s the rich vs the poor. It’s always been.
