My Father's World and Mine
My father was born on April 22, 1917. He died at age 91.
If we think of the really big inventions of the modern world, most of them were in widespread use at the time of his birth. Alternating current electricity was in most cities. The automobile, as represented by the Model T Ford, had begun to change American social habits. Mass production techniques were being adopted in American industry. Public health measures, especially cleaner streets in cities, had begun to take root in the United States. Drinking water was safe. The sewer systems worked. People in cities had telephones.
The jet airplane was still half a century away. Commercial airline travel did not yet exist. But the railroads were well developed, and people could get across the country in a few days. A sleeping car on a train made travel comfortable. But this has been true for half a century.
There was not yet a national highway system, but travel between major cities by car on paved highways was becoming a reality.
Commercial radio did not arrive until 1921. It spread very fast.
Movies were a major source of entertainment. Birth of a Nation was released in 1915.
Home photography was widespread.
With the exception of home digital technologies, which really only got started in 1980, and accelerated with World Wide Web in 1995, the urban world in 1917 would be familiar to us today. The basics of what we would call modern living were available to the urban middle class in 1917. We could go back to that era, and we could function.
Home air-conditioning did not exist in 1917. That really only became widespread after World War II. In terms of daily comfort, people in summers suffered in much the same way that they had suffered 500 years earlier. But the cheap portable fan pointed to the home air conditioner. People could go to the movies and enjoy air-conditioning in urban areas. The future was at least visible.
In 1951, we lived in Marietta, Ohio. That town is at the junction of the Ohio River and the Muskingum River. It was humid. We had no air conditioner. We had a large fan in one of the windows. So, in terms of basic comfort, things in 1917 were not fundamentally different from what they were in 1951.
The difference between 1817 in 1917 was monumental. There was no way that somebody living in 1817 could have predicted the lifestyle of 1917. The pace of economic change has slowed since 1917. Except for digital technologies, the pace of change has slowed significantly since 1967. Most of what we enjoy today we enjoyed in 1967, but it is cheaper today in terms of real income.
Life on the farm was very similar in 1917 to what it had been a generation earlier. For about half of Americans, life in 1917 would be considered backward by today's standards. But it was considered backward by urban standards, too.
The big differences between the world of 1917 and the world today has to do with communications, and especially digital technologies. Here, there has been a true revolution. But in terms of day-to-day living, this revolution has taken place in the last 20 years.
There is that old saying, "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Politically, that is certainly true. In the month my father was born, the United States went to war. Before the year was over, the top marginal tax rate in the United States was 67%. In 1918, it rose to 77%. The politicians in 1913 had insisted that it would never go as high as 25%. Politicians lied back then as much as they lie today. The voters were suckers then; the voters are suckers now.
What is recognizably different today is the fact that virtually everybody participates in what would have been considered upper-middle-class urban living in 1917. There are no people so poor in the United States today who would not have been considered upper-middle-class in terms of their possession of the technologies of modern life.
The quality of the consumer goods is vastly better today than in 1917. Telephones are cheaper. Telephone rates are cheaper. Entertainment is cheaper. Almost everybody has air-conditioning. Most families have at least one car, and the car surely a lot better than the Model T Ford. But, outside of digital technologies, the changes are essentially marginal, and they were created by per capita economic growth of 2% per annum.
What I am saying is this: the kinds of benefits that we enjoy today are not fundamentally different from a century ago. The quality of them is different, and their penetration into the entire population is different.
In other words, the biggest difference today has come in the last 20 years. That is the difference imposed by digital technologies, especially the World Wide Web. Here, there is no comparison with 1917. But, there is also no comparison with 1977.
In April of 1977, I had finally made the transition to an electric typewriter. I bought an IBM Selectric III. I had learned to use that device the previous summer when I joined Ron Paul's staff in Washington. Prior to that, I had used a manual typewriter. I had used that same typewriter all through college.
The design of that typewriter had not changed since 1958.
In 1980, I went to word processing. In today's money, the cost of the used minicomputer and a primitive version of WordPerfect cost me over $65,000. It cost me over $1,000 a month to maintain the system in today's money. I had to buy a repair contract on the used minicomputer. In one week, I doubled my output. It was the greatest increase in productivity I have ever experienced. Word processing made a tremendous difference.
In 1982, I converted to an IBM PC. It had a better version of WordPerfect, which cost $500. In today's money, that was $1,300. I had no hard disk drive. A floppy disk had 360K.
In other words, my life changed more between 1980 and 1982 than it had up until that time. I am a writer, and my world was totally transformed in a period of 24 months. Everything that has taken place since then is marginal. I still use a 1984 PC AT keyboard. I own seven of them. Only in the last few years have I switched to voice-activated writing for my articles. I still use the old system for my books.
My father-in-law used a typewriter from World War I until the day he died.
I started my newsletter business using a World War I machine that stamped out military dogtags. My wife used it to stamp out mailing labels. That was in 1975.
We have experienced more change in the last 20 years than my father experienced in his whole lifetime. But it has been confined to digital technologies, not physical technologies. It is Moore's law that has changed us, not the steady increase of 2% per capita per annum we have experienced since 1817.
The speed of change is rapidly accelerating. Again, it is Moore's law. The overall economy is no longer growing is rapidly as it did from 1817 until 2007. The last decade has been a major setback to economic growth. But digital transformations are changing the world around us.
This is why I think robotics and algorithms have sped up the process of economic change faster than anything else in history -- even the steam engine. I think this is not only going to continue, it is going to accelerate.
For the Third World, digital technologies are going to transform everything in the next 25 years. The Third World is going to cease being poor. I hope I live to see it. I checked several life expectancy calculators this week. A pessimistic one said I would live until 86. An optimistic one said I would live until 101. I don't intend to be writing four articles a day over the next 25 years, but maybe I will get to see India join the middle class.