Huh?
That's not increasing by a factor of 10 or 100 every year or two.
And most of that is infant mortality, if you take that out, life expectancy has barely increased.
If it had increased by a factor of 10 (picking the lower number) every other year (again, picking the lower number) since 1950, my life expectancy would be 6.8 x 10^33 years (or 68, with 32 zeros after it). And, I assure you, I don't expect to live that long. ;)
A logarithmic change can look linear if you zoom in enough. Zoom OUT a bit though and you get this...
...
Looks pretty exponential to me ;-)
1) I was zoomed out pretty far--back to 1820. I think the lifespans of the last 200 years is much more relevant to today's than the ones from 20,000 BC. If you look at causes of death, I'd bet none of the top 10 from back then would crack the top 100 now.
2) Regardless, you said:
They're all increasing at factors of 10 or even 100 every year or two.
It's not even close. If you want to argue it's increased by a factor of about 4 (from 18 to 78) over the course of 20,000 years.. okay. Your chart shows that. So I will live to be over 300 in approximately the year 22,000. Oh wait, I won't live that long.
Technology improvements lead to that exponential decrease. We don't have nearly those same technological advances in, say, food production.
No we don't as food has not been brought over to the "IT" side of things. You don't currently turn on a computer and have it build you your food so we plod on and do what we've done for last 20,000+ years and make it ourselves (mostly). That being said you only have to look at the new 3D food printers to realise that it won't be long before nanoscale machines will be able to build you any food from the molecules up in seconds once a decade or two have past. It's hard to imagine just like it would be hard for a 1980's person to imagine someone taking 10,000 photo's on one trip and then sharing them all with the entire world with the click of a button but it will happen. Once an existing process is replicated in the realm of "IT" it is able to access it's exponential increase in development and things just go bonkers. You can see it all around such as photo's (physical to data), paper (physical to data), communication (in person/mail to data), shopping (going to a store to online shops), power generation (big coal plants or fire to solar + batteries) and on and on. The big thing next up is biology, with the introduction of big data and neural net processing together with nanoscale manufacturing we're soon going to be able to have machines fix things inside out body very efficiently.
Raw materials still cost money. As I said, until we get to a post scarcity society (which we might, once we have some of these ideas you're dreaming, as long as we invent nearly limitless energy also), there is physical barriers and scarcity that necessitate the cost of things.
I don't see it as realistic to say my $22,000 annual spending will be $22 (yes, twenty-two dollars) in five years.
Societally, based on what money is, it doesn't even make sense. There will always be a certain cost of living that's related to inflation, until we (if we) hit a post scarcity society. Until then, the type of decrease you're talking about isn't possible.
I'm sure you've read MMM's or Jacob's musings on how much more productive we are now than 50 years ago. I can't remember the exact number but I think it was something like you could work 1 day a week or so and that would provide you with all living expenses of a 1950's person (I paraphrase of course). Point is, in the future there will still be things to be bought however our bare minimum "needs" such as food and shelter might be very, VERY cheaply taken care of if that's all the person wants. If they want more fancy stuff then off to work they go (and I'm sure most will).
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I do remember Pete's article on it, as
I wrote it.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/07/08/early-retirement-cant-work-or-id-have-heard-of-it-before/ ;)
That article was based on hard data and statistics. We do have way more leisure time also (about 4 more hours per week versus people in the 50s).
It has nothing to do with wild fantasys of logarithmic growth in areas that don't currently support that. Short of wild fantasies, it's not realistic to talk about removing all expenses in a matter of years.
Even your examples aren't realistic. You posted:
My results so far:
- Mobile phone bill: Was $420/year, now is $0/year as I convinced work to pay for it (could also potentially use the newer MVNO's to get it to $45ish a year?)
- Car bill for driving to work: Was $2500/year for car, petrol and related expenses, now it's $0/year as I ride to work and have sold the car
- Used to pay upwards of over $1,000/year for electricity, now with solar panels (which have already paid for themselves) our bill is around $70/year
1) That wasn't the expense going away, that was you offloading it to someone else (your employer). The cost still exists, and is getting paid.
2) You'll still have related expenses (chain oil, tire tubes, etc), but sure, by switching types of transportation you drastically reduced the cost. But you didn't keep the same lifestyle. It's not like driving a car got 100% cheaper, you changed. You can argue that change is a good thing, or not, but it's not materially comparing apples to apples. If you had a car that cost $2500/yr. and now have a car that cost $5/yr a few years later due to technological improvements, that would be a crazy exponential increase. Switching to biking isn't an exponential increase at all.
3) Again, you shifted the cost. It went from from an ongoing expense to an upfront one, and you have got a return on your investment. It has paid for itself (as all investments eventually should, even at 1% an investment pays for itself after 100 years). That doesn't make it exponential growth. If I invest 1MM in stuff that gives me 100k/yr (10% return), after 10 years I can say it has paid for itself and now gives me 100k/yr, but that doesn't make it free money, it's return on investment.
None of those have to do with exponential increases.
Furthermore I'm not saying all your expenses will be cut by 100 in 5 years
That's exactly what you said, only you were a factor of 10 times more ridiculous:
Why can't all our expenses be 1000 times cheaper after 5 years?
Shifting my current $22,000 annual spending to $22 annual spending, keeping the lifestyle the exact same, is complete fantasy. Sorry.
I'm all for outside-the-box thinking.
A thread on thinking about your expenses, and cutting what you don't need? Awesome. Trying to figure out how to eliminate, rather than just reduce an expense? Terrific!
But couching it in techno-mumbo-jumbo by invoking Moore's Law, talking about exponential increases, and just making up things that don't make sense, like lifespans increasing 10 or 100x every year or two? Yeah, that's just silly. :)
