Are You Better Off Now Than You Were 10 Years Ago (Tell Me After You’ve Finished Binge Watching Downton Abbey)

Former Reason editor Virginia
Postrel has a provocative column up at
Bloomberg View

Are you better off now than you were 10 years ago? For
middle-class Americans, a common answer to this version of Ronald
Reagan’s old question is no. Nor are they optimistic about the
future. The recession may be over officially, but a lot
of smart people are convinced that broad-based
improvements in the standard of living are largely a thing of the
past.

This is wrong, writes Postrel, or at best woefully incomplete.
It ignores huge increases in the standard and quality of living
that just don’t get picked up in conventional economic metrics.

On a flight across the country, you watch the playoff game on
live television, listen to some favorite playlists as you catch up
on work, then relax with some video poker. Arriving home, you
delete the game from your DVR and consider your options. Too tired
for an intense cable drama — which you prefer to experience in
immersive weekend marathons of at least three episodes each — you
stream a first-season episode of “Duck Dynasty” from Amazon.com,
then run last week’s “Elementary” from your DVR queue. While
watching, you check IMDB.com to see where you’ve seen that
familiar-looking guest star before, then you jump to your Facebook
and Twitter feeds. You finish the evening with “SportsCenter,”
recorded just far enough ahead that you can skip most of the
commercials.

Little of this
customized entertainment would have been possible a decade ago —
and almost none of it shows up in the income and productivity
statistics that dominate our understanding of the economy. A form
of progress that large numbers of people experience every day, the
increase in entertainment variety and convenience represents a
challenge to the increasingly conventional wisdom that American
living standards have stagnated, at least for the middle class.

Postrel isn’t arguing that paying $8 a month for Netflix
streaming cancels out sluggish growth in wages, but she
is saying “The value of customized entertainment
isn’t trivial to economic well-being.”

That’s for sure.
Read the whole article.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Reason TV recently interviewed Postrel about her great new book,
The Power of Glamour, and her career, including her time at Reason.
Watch by clicking below or go
here for downloadable versions
(including an audio
podcast).

 

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/03/are-you-better-off-now-than-you-were-10
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