I'm taking that into account. HDTV's, laptops, iPods, etc, don't take many man hours to produce. My point was that the man years of labor necessary to support a comfortable, modern standard of living are actually quite few.
sure they do. esp when you take into account inventing and bringing to market all the sustaining innovations (making hard drives smaller, better screens, software, etc. -- plus the operational overhead of coordinating all these millions of people's effort) needed for your iPod, laptop, etc. the number of man hours is staggering.
Per item produced, the man hours are not that staggering. Here's my back of the envelop calculation:
A laptop costs about $1,000. Assume a $15/hour wage. That's about the average for most the electronics producing world, and it represents a balance between the wages of the engineers and the wages of assemblers. Make the generous assumption that 100% of the cost is labor. That adds up to 66 hours of total labor for my laptop. I probably own about $3,000 worth of goods total, and have no desire for anything more. That's about 200 hours of total labor - or 5 months. That will easily last me 5 years or more.
Cable TV is about $100/month. Let's call it $25/week or $3/day.
Yuppie beans are around $3/pound, so $1/day should do for protein. Carbs in the form of rice or potatoes are cheaper. Veggies and fruit are about the same.
In other words, food can be about as expensive as cable tv.
Food is considerably more expensive than cable tv and cell phones.
you're changing the topic. the point is that people's baseline expectations keep rising.
your point is spurious because you reason that because a month's worth of food costs more than a month of cable tv, one should not sacrifice cable tv for food
But the definition of "afford" has changed in 20 years, too, right? Part of the reason so people have these things is because of credit (and, more importantly, debt).
I reckon many people (including plenty who shop at Whole Foods/Wild Oats rather than a food bank) can't "afford" their lifestyles, either, but cheap credit (which may be coming to an end) makes it seem that way.
