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Notes -
For completeness he has this quite fantastic followup post where he expounds https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1819867003966148655?t=nxw_B_ejIP_ZsG_GhBVdMw&s=19
I think he's not describing hedonic treadmill stuff. People don't really continue working 60 hour a week jobs alternating between Walmart and driving Uber just because they consider Steam games a burning need.
This relates to how economists measure inflation. As technology advances and as people's consumption habits change, economists need to be able to compare the value of different goods across different baskets of goods. I don't know exactly how they do this, but they do have some ways of dealing with the problem he describes. I'd be interested to know how well they do so.
In theory, if you had the perfect measure of the price level, the fact the government bans apartments under 10,000 square feet and you're forced to buy e-textbooks that have no value other than as a means of acquiring an education, would be accounted for with an appropriate increase in the price level, and real incomes, reflecting that reality, would still be easily comparable to worlds that didn't have these problems. The productivity improvements of that society would only count as productivity improvements if people really were better off despite these limitations.
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