16/06/2022
Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
ou’re a typical American in 1870. You live on a rural farm. If you’re a man, you likely began a lifetime of manual labour as a teen, which will end when you’re disabled or dead. If you’re a woman, you spend your time on labour-intensive housework. If you're Black or any other minority, life is even harder.
You’re isolated from the world, with no telephone or postal service. When night falls, you live by candlelight. You defecate in an outhouse.
One day, you fall asleep and wake up in 1940. Life is totally different. Your home is "networked" – you have electricity, gas, telephone, water, and sewer connections. You marvel at new forms of entertainment, like the phonograph, radio, and motion picture. The Empire State Building looms over New York, surrounded by other impossibly tall buildings. You might own a car, and if you don’t, you have met people who do. Some of the wealthiest people you encounter have even flown in a plane.
These transformations, documented in the economic historian Robert Gordon’s 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, emerged thanks to a "special century" of unusually high economic growth between 1870 and 1970. And it wasn’t just a US story – the industrialised nations experienced dizzying transformations during the early 20th Century.
