The Slowing Pace of Progress
One technological feature of our times Ozzie and Harriet would find extraordinary is the gadgets we throw out. In 1954, it took the average worker 562 hours of labor to earn enough to buy a color TV. The machine was so expensive that only a few families owned one, and if it broke, as it frequently did, you got it repaired. By 1997, the average worker earned enough in just 23 hours to purchase a 25-inch-screen color TV, and if it broke, as it infrequently did, it most likely went in the trash. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the ranks of "electronic home entertainment equipment repairers" will continue to decline by at least 1 percent a year through 2008, owing to decreased demand.
In the history of technology, what most distinguishes the present age is not the creation of great new inventions but our genius for re-engineering and manufacturing previously existing machines and gadgets with ever greater efficiency, so that their price declines even as their quality improves. According to calculations by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the average worker in 1997 could earn enough to buy a new Ford Taurus in just 1,365 hours, whereas his counter-part in 1955 needed to work 1,638 hours to afford the celebrated but much inferior Ford Fairlane. Stoves, dishwashers, refrigerators, washers and dryers, window air conditioners, and most other accouterments of modern middle-class life have fallen in real price even more dramatically since the 1950s. Even homes themselves are cheaper, with the price per square foot dropping from 6.5 times the average worker's hourly wage in 1956 to 5.6 times in 1996.
In their time, Ozzie and Harriet lived much better than the average American family; now their standard of living would be average, or even below average if one accounts for the improved quality and lower price of the familiar electrical devices and appliances that filled their home. That the mass of American families now has access to television at all, let alone one in every bedroom, is in itself an amazing achievement, as is the ability of the global economy to provide millions of American teenagers with their own cars, computers, and stereos. But this democratization of access to existing technology, while it has obvious and mostly salutary social implications, is hardly the mark of a great age of invention. Perhaps another Thomas Edison is hard at work, using nanotechnology or bioengineering to invent new machines that are truly revolutionary and transforming. But he or she has not succeeded yet.
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