Megan McArdle writes:
As the Boomers age, they will consume fewer of the things that we produce efficiently, and more of the things that we provide relatively inefficiently.
Here is more, and I hereby take Megan to be a robot pessimist.
It is a revealing question to ask which sectors a person considers technologically stagnant. Baumol claimed it is the performing arts, but TV and the internet have belied this; it is true that those media are not *live* performance but that is substituting objective aesthetic judgment for what consumers really care about. People love Dexter, whether or not there is someone actually in the box. For stagnant sectors, I will nominate:
1. Haircuts, you might as well get them in Mexico
2. Automobiles (given the overall extent of technological progress, are they really so much better than in 1957?), although the $2500 car may change this
3. Spicy food, it seems best in relatively poor countries
I’m not yet sure about teaching. It seems to be a candidate but people are learning an awful lot from blogs these days; don’t fixate on delivering the old service the way we always have.
Your picks? Keep in mind that something has to be stagnant in relative terms, to date it sure isn’t computer chips but they raise the bar for the average. I expect pharmaceuticals and webcams to make it much easier to care for old people, but only on a per year of life basis; the number of years lived and thus total cost will rise too.
I’m suspicious. The history of predicting technological change on any kind of longer time horizon has been hasn’t been particularly good.
Re#2: Care to crash in a car without seat belts, crumple-zones, or air bags? Engines are much more complicated, but are also more efficient and less polluting, for whatever that’s worth.
Have you DRIVEN a car from 1957 or even 1977 recently? I’m guessing no.
Even the cheapest cars are better in every way than cars were then. They are safer. They are quieter–road noise and wind noise alone meant it would never have been possible to listen to jazz or classical music in a car, let alone talk on a phone. It takes significantly less effort to use the brakes or turn the steering wheel now than it did 30 or 50 years ago–enough that you would now find it difficult to actually stop a 70s automobile, even a light one. Cars under 20k produce more horsepower than even the best racing cars did in the 70s. When was the last time you got stranded because your car actually physically broke down? That used to happen all the time–failed electrical systems, bad parts, bad gaskets, lost pressure, bent rods. None of that happens now.
The problem with haircuts is not that the market is stagnant, but information about the market is difficult to come by. Women easily pay several hundred dollars every six weeks to look their best if they can find someone who can do that for them.
Tyler is fully aware of the improvements in automobiles over the years, but his point is that if cars had mirrored the overall level of technological progress during the last 50 years, perhaps we should have something far better than the current crop. Something along the lines of self-driving cars or maybe ones that fly.
I nominate commercial fishing and other natural-resource-heavy sectors. More than 75 per cent of fish stocks are fully or overly exploited, and it’s not clear whether aquaculture technology will be able to improve this situation.
“As the Boomers age, they will consume fewer of the things that we produce efficiently, and more of the things that we provide relatively inefficiently.”
Isn’t this just another way to describe luxury goods?
On the theme of cars, how about cab drivers. Sure you can call them with your cell phone, but most of the time you are either near a land line or its easier to hail one.
Airline travel is also stagnant. Sure booking is easier, but it does not seem were more efficiently providing flights between cities over time.
On the food question, I think that tech advances actually make food marginally worse, unless one makes an effort to have “good” food. Refrigeration means that meat is shipped “dead” in advanced countries, versus shipped live to point-of-sale as it often is in places like China. The various eco-foodie movements are addressing these points, but since they won’t scale beyond “enthusiast” level quantities, food grown and shipped in “Third World fashion” will remain premium products in advanced countries.
(One odd effect of this is that chicken at KFCs in China is clearly better than it is in the US.)
The trick will be to combine technology with “organic” ideas in a way to get prices down, although some would object since avoiding technology is often part of the marketing and self-branding strategy that goes with the food.
Expensive Universities with highly paid professors. 1) fewer kids being born. 2) people don’t have the money to send their kids there. 2) Online Teaching! One good online teacher can provide a lecture for infinitely many students. Where’s YouTube University?
Almost every aspect of our society changes, even that most recalcitrant element, government. To find a segment that does not change technologically, one has to remove all incentive to change which is difficult or occupy a niche that is so unglamorous that a company has little competition.
My pick is septic systems. They haven’t changed that much and there will always be a need for septic technology because public water is not an option in many rural locations. There is no particular incentive to develop new designs because a septic system lasts for 30 plus years. It isn’t as though you are doing to run out and buy the latest model.
Foobarista, I see your point, but I don’t think it’s quite right to say that technology has made food worse. It has certainly made worse food available, but the good stuff is still around and there’s now an option between cheap & poor quality and expensive & good quality. [Insert standard stipulations about relativity and subjectiveness of "cheap," "good," etc.] Cheap & bad may have crowded the market, but that’s more of a result of people’s preferences than the technology itself, not to mention that the process that lead to cheap & bad also often makes things plentiful.
Refrigeration may mean food is shipped “dead,” as you say, but it also means it isn’t shipped rotten. And a “third world” chicken may be deliciously fresh in Beijing, but I couldn’t get a clementine there fresh or otherwise with “third world” techniques. I guess I’m just saying that the ability to get a wide variety of mediocre food isn’t necessarily worse than a small selection (and quantity) of “good” food.
I think of it rather like mechanized weaving. Factory-produced cloth isn’t as nice as the hand-made stuff, and it may have lead to people wearing a lot of clothes that were “worse” than they did previously, but there was a lot more opportunity to get clothes that never existed.
As to the original point about spicy food, I think it’s best in poor countries because many poor countries are in tropical climates, and tropical climates lend themselves to spicy food for historical reasons. I don’t think if (e.g.) Jamaicans all got rich they would produce spicy food any less efficiently than they do now.
I suspect strong spices were originally used to cover the unpleasant taste of rotting foods so we are more likely to find spicy food in poor countries. We only grow to like spicy food when our palates get used to strong spices, and start losing the ability to differentiate more subtle flavors. People who love Thai traditional massage usually don’t get much a kick out of Swedish massage. Similarly, people who love real Thai food usually find Swedish food bland.
It’s a fact that the richest countries have the least spicy food. Almost all of Europe, the US, and Japan have practically no spicy food. Korea is probably the richest country that indulges regularly in spicy food.
Retail is too labor heavy. Last major invention was cash register. Change is still made manually.
Not at my local Albertsons – it has an automatic change-making machine for coins. The checker just pulls out your bills. And grocery stores everywhere are starting to install the self-checkout lanes where you scan your own groceries.
The technology isn’t quite there yet – I frequently need a human checker to come over and punch buttons on my machine when it chokes for some reason – but it’s only a matter of time…
I’d suggest as technologically stagnant the author’s attitude about hot food and poor countries….Harrumph.
I’m sorry, you completely misunderstood his comment about spicy food. See the title, “Which sectors will prove to be technologically stagnant?”
His point was that rich countries are not better at making food, especially spicy food, in the way that rich countries are better at making computer chips or complicated financial modeling. Technological progress has not brought great inventions in spicy food. See also his claim 1, which is that haircuts too, are no better in richer countries.
The author’s “attitude about hot food” is that he loves it. He likes
the cuisine of all sorts of countries. He was not claiming that hot
food is caused by poverty; he was arguing something rather the reverse, that hot food is an example of something that does not have to do with wealth or technological invention or the increase of productivity, something that I think you could agree with.
Airline travel. No faster in over 45 years. Maybe slower due to delays.
But a fraction of the price (something like 20%, IIRC), in real dollars. When I was growing up, middle-class families simply didn’t fly. It was too expensive.
Retail is too labor heavy. Last major invention was cash register. Change is still made manually.
Laser scanners, point-of-sale terminals, bar-code scanners connected to inventory databases, and (most importantly) the back-end use of containerization to feed big-box retail all point the other direction. Not to mention the fact that about half of my retail purchases are now made via Amazon or other online vendors. “Change” is something you get from vending machines and fast-food franchises. Everyone else gives you a little slip of paper.
I wonder if the correlation with spicy food isn’t based more on climate and latitude rather than per capita GDP. My favorite spots for hot food include Mexico (esp. Yucatan). China (Sezchuan), Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), India (Kerala), Singapore and Thailand (esp. Bangkok). More temperate countries, such as in northern Europe, Russia, the US and Canada may have very good cuisine, but not so spicy. Sounds like a good topic for a Ph.D dissertation. And yes, vindaloo is to die for….
Not just haircuts, but most personal service, household help, and nursing care are all things that are increasing consumed as people grow older and have not seen much improvement due to technology in the last 30 years
One fascinating thing is how “lumpy” progress is. Cars can’t do anything much different now than they used to, but specific bits of them work *way* better. A lot, but not all, of that has to do with better electronics. (It’s not like crumple zones and collapsing steering wheels have much to do with electronics, but airbags and GPS/cellphone thingies to call for help and stability control and ABS all do.) Similarly, air travel is fundamentally the same as in 1970 in terms of the technology of the jets, but getting a ticket is radically different and much nicer.
How about cooking at home? Lots of cool gadgets out there, but it seems like it’s fundamentally the same technology since the 70s at least. After microwave ovens and nonstick skillets, what big technological improvements have we seen there? Would a good cook from 1950 have a lot of trouble making a good meal with modern kitchen equipment?
Personal weapons are kind of stagnant, right? If you want to defend yourself from violence, you’re almost certainly better off with rather old technology (in terms of a handgun you could have bought 50 years ago) than anything newer. (Please let’s not turn this into a gun control thread!) Where’s my phaser locked on stun, so that my toddler can’t do more than give himself a nasty shock?
It seems like the way homes are built is pretty stagnant, but I’m not sure if that’s just reflecting my own ignorance of how they’re built now, as opposed to 30 or so years ago. Drywall and plywood sure doesn’t *look* high tech.
It strikes me that comparing other fields to computers is roughly like plotting the progress of various fields on a log chart. That straight line continuous progress just looks *awful* there….
the way in which we finance higher education tuition. I work in Financial Aid and while the delivery methods have improved since the higher education act of 1965, the application process and regulatory burden have become more complex and time consuming. I’d love to know if there is an analysis of the efficiency of the education department’s Federal Student Aid programs.
I’d probably suggest the IRS, but I’m not as familiar with this particular bureaucracy.
Performing arts aren’t stagnating, they’re just shifting like much of the rest of media from a one-to-many model to a few-to-few model. Much as a lot of the time people used to spend reading newspapers designed for a mass audience is now spent reading blogs written by friends for an audience of a few dozen, much of the time they used to spend watching TV or theatre is spent playing World of Warcraft or Runescape.
“I’m not yet sure about teaching. It seems to be a candidate but people are learning an awful lot from blogs these days; don’t fixate on delivering the old service the way we always have.”
Clearly there are less expensive, more efficient ways of learning now available. The problem is that are powerful interests with the license to certify that learning — and they will not certify it unless the old teaching service is delivered (and paid for) the way we always have.
We already have the new ways of learning — what we are missing are new ways of recognizing and giving credit for that non-traditional learning.
“IMHO education is improving and changing rapidly but schooling is stagnating. IMHO schooling is for credentials and is a test of human ability and character and so it needs to change little.”
The education/schooling distinction is useful. Now that I’m a working professional and need education and information far more than additional credentials, I can (and do) take full advantage of modern information sources. The difference between software development now and 20 years ago is like night and day. If I want to learn about a new technology, I can have more references, samples, white papers, presentations, tutorials, etc than I can use at my fingertips in seconds.
But the idea that ‘schooling’ needs to change little because it’s a test of character and endurance–that might be fine if it weren’t so damned costly to students (and growing ever more so). Years paying large sums to sit in lecture halls and then, for most students, many more years spent digging out of the student-loan financial hole.
It seems like the way homes are built is pretty stagnant, but I’m not sure if that’s just reflecting my own ignorance of how they’re built now, as opposed to 30 or so years ago. Drywall and plywood sure doesn’t *look* high tech.
I respectfully disagree. First off, the actual construction is a lot faster due to advancements like pre-fabricated roof trusses. A single family home can have a roof put on in less than one day. Similarly, floor joists have come a long way. Squeaky floors are a thing of the past. Also, consider the advancements in insulation, windows, and the invention of Tyvek house wrap. There are also massive improvements in electrical and HVAC systems resulting in higher efficiency and more comfortable environments. Kitchens in particular are centers of ever advancing technology. Between the countertops (Corian and Zodiaq/Silestone), the appliances, the cabinetry, and plumbing fixtures they are NOTHING like they were even 10-20 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. This of course doesn’t even count the advancements in architecture and use of space that have taken place. Quite simply, new houses are far more livable than older ones, as well as being more quickly buildable.
The general pattern of comments here is kind of interesting:
First, someone nominates a sector, generally one they are not extremely familiar with, as stagnant and unchanged from 30-50 years ago.
Second, multiple other people who are familiar with that sector chime in and mention the myriad improvements in that time frame.
Regarding the service sector, which was mentioned as stagnant – I’m not so sure. Think about how a cleaning lady cleans your house. How is that different from 30 years ago? Has technology changed that process at all?
Well, all the technology improvements in cleaning appliances (vaccuum cleaners), chemical cleaners, shoes, clothing, transportation, even technological improvements in house construction, carpet, and paint probably makes that job faster and easier. You still need labor for that and similar jobs, but I bet that an hour of labor goes a lot farther today than it did in 1970.
Yes. Years ago I actually saw a map where someone colored in countries where “hot” peppers were widely used in cooking. The tropics were a solid belt of red and everywhere else was white. Don’t ask me about the methodology, but I know the authors had credentials. Their theory was that the physiological effects of capsacin (?sp) are a counterirritant to actual heat and make hot climates more tolerable.
For the correlation between the tropics and poverty see Jared Diamond.
thank you for this article
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