It does look good: hurtigruten.us
A century ago, it was "as rich as an Argentine", but now it's "as rich as a Norwegian". $23 per hour minimum wage! I guess that's US$ too, so that makes it nearly NZ$30 an hour. I never earned that much in my life.
Maybe I could get a job on the boats, as a deck hand or something.
The world is absurdly wealthy these days. Okay, in absolute terms, it's hopeless, but compared with historical living standards, there are 6 billion of us better off than ever.
The number of happy-person days is vast. 100 years ago there were about 1 billion people for whom a similar proportion of happiness existed on the average day.
The number of creative achievement days is vastly higher still. 100 years ago, nearly everyone eked out a subsistence existence with creativity at a low level. The number of patents per day was low. The economies of scale poor. Children could expect to live lives fairly similar to those of their ancestors, exigencies of the day such as wars notwithstanding - each generation had wars to wage so that was normal too.
Now, 6 billion of us can easily support millions of inventive people who sit around all day figuring out great ideas, scientific developments and how to do things better. 100 years ago there were Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and some others tinkering with the industrial revolution and Albert Einstein figuring out the finer points of how things really work. One could keep up with developments. Now the vast tsunami of output is impossible to keep up with.
We are about 1000 times better off than then in total and the pace is increasing. It is the greatest change in biological history with Google, QUALCOMM, and swarms of others replacing and extending our brains as the industrial revolution replaced and extended our muscles.
That was going to be a brief comment on the Norwegian cruises, but I got carried away!
Any recession is not going to slow that process, just as the Biotelecosmictechdot.com put a ding in personal balance sheets for a lot of people but only slowed the cyberspace revolution from hysterical irrational exuberance to torrid.
Mqurice |
