The Rate of Change in United States

Imagine you are a typical inhabitant of the United States in 1870.11 You live on a rural farm; you produce most of your food and clothing yourself. Your only sources of light are candles, whale oil, and gas lamps if you’re lucky. If you’re a man, you face gruelling physical labour, sometimes from the age of twelve onwards. If you’re a woman, you face unrelenting toil as a housewife: one calculation found that in 1886 “a typical North Carolina housewife had to carry water 8 to 10 times a day. . . . Over the course of a year she walked 148 miles toting water.”12 You rely on horses for transport. Mostly your life is one of isolation: the telephone doesn’t yet exist, and the postal service doesn’t reach your farm. Life expectancy at birth is thirty-nine years,13 and modern forms of leisure are unknown. The tallest building in New York City is a church steeple.

Now, suppose that one morning, you wake up and it’s fifty years later, the year 1920. Your standard of living is in the process of rapid and dramatic improvement. The electrification of America is well underway, reaching close to half of American households. If you are lucky enough to have electricity, the lighting it provides is ten times brighter than the kerosene lamps that preceded it and a hundred times brighter than the candles that preceded those. People are beginning to use telephones, which enable instant communication. Mass-produced cars are beginning to replace horses, with nearly a third of the population owning a car. Life expectancy is now sixteen years greater, at fifty-five years. You are less likely to contract cholera or typhoid thanks to routine disinfection of drinking water. Skyscrapers are beginning to rise in New York City.

Next, suppose you wake up fifty years later again, in 1970. As a typical US inhabitant, you again see an enormous difference in your life. Most households finally have an indoor flush toilet. You live in a spacious suburban home with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and central heating. Your household owns two cars, and if you want you can fly around the world on an aeroplane. You have a television, and on this TV you just watched a man land on the moon. You have penicillin and new vaccines, such as against polio; life expectancy is sixteen years longer again, at seventy-one. Your work is probably much less exhausting, and with a forty-hour workweek, vacations, and retirement, you have ample leisure time.

Finally, imagine waking up fifty years later again, in 2020. Comparatively speaking, this time your life is not all that different. Among your household appliances, the only difference is that you now have a microwave. Your television is bigger and higher definition, and you have a wider range of shows to watch. You still use cars to get around, though they are now safer and easier to drive. Life expectancy has increased but more moderately, by only eight years, to seventy-nine years. Of course, there has been a revolution in information and communication technologies—you now have computers and the internet, tablets and mobile phones. But technological progress that meaningfully impacts your life has been confined nearly exclusively to those spheres.

From 1870 to 1970, there were extraordinary advances made in a wide number of different industries. This included information and communication technologies such as the telephone, radio, and television, but it also included advances in many other industries, such as transportation, energy, housing, and medicine. Since 1970, there’s been substantial progress in information and communication technologies, but in all those other industries, progress has been comparatively incremental. Since 1970, the pace of progress seems to have slowed.