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the annual rate of growth in the Western world from AD 1 to AD 1820 was a mere 0.06 percent per year, or 6 percent per century.
Transportation among all the Great Inventions is noteworthy for achieving 100 percent of its potential increase in speed in little more than a century, from the first primitive railroads replacing the stagecoach in the 1830s to the Boeing 707 flying near the speed of sound in 1958.
Why think that's 100 percent of potential?
The percent of the nation classified as urban grew from 24.9 percent in 1870 to 73.7 percent in 1970.
1987, Robert Solow quipped, “We can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
The best business you can go into you will find on your father’s farm or in his workshop. If you have no family or friends to aid you, and no prospect opened to you there, turn your face to the great West, and there build up a home and fortune.
Seven-eighths of the 1870 population was white and the remaining eighth black, with virtually no representation of other races. The 1940 population was even more homogenous, with nearly 90 percent white and most of the remainder black, in sharp contrast to the 15 percent in 2010 made up of races other than white or black (primarily Hispanic and Asian, but also people reporting being of two races).
Census numbers probably overstate this homogeneity though because the didn't include mixed race options. White ethnic and religious groups were also far more homogeneous in 2010 than in 1940.
The percentage of the population below the age of 25 was an amazing 59 percent in 1870, contrasted with 43 percent in 1940 and 34 percent in 2010.
only 3.0 percent of the 1870 population was 65 years old or older, as compared to 6.8 and 13.0 percent in 1940 and 2010, respectively.
Consumption expenditures in 1870 were about 76 percent of GDP. Multiplying this ratio by the per-capita GDP estimate cited at the beginning of this chapter yields implied consumption expenditures per capita of $2,808 in 2010 prices.
1869, 51.9 percent of consumer expenditures were for perishable goods, 15.7 percent for semi-durable goods, 9.3 percent for durable goods, and the remaining 24.1 percent for services, mainly rent.
New York City tenements. However, these were not typical of living conditions among the urban working class in other cities.
In seventeen of the twenty-five largest American cities in 1890, multifamily dwellings made up less than 5 percent of the housing stock.
In New York City in 1867, horses killed four pedestrians per week.
in the fall of 1872 horses in cities throughout the northeast caught a virulent strain of horse flu and could not be used for work: City life came to a standstill … Streetcar companies suspended service, undelivered freight accumulated at wharves and railroad depots, consumers lacked milk, ice, and groceries, saloons lacked beer, work halted at construction sites, brickyards, and factories, and city governments curtailed fire protection and garbage collection.
Throughout this book, we trace the gradual transition from unpleasant to pleasant work.
Is today's work pleasant ?
As early as 1879, the U.S. census found that ice consumption in large cities amounted to two-thirds of a ton per person per year.
Gail Borden, whose entrepreneurial career was worthy of his contemporary, Horatio Alger: “According to legend, he had been shocked by the Donner Party disaster,”21 in which a group of pioneers snowbound in 1846 in the Sierra Nevada resorted to cannibalism for survival. Borden was determined to perfect a method for reducing or “condensing” food so that it would provide nourishment in a relatively small package.
However, just because new forms of food merchandizing were being developed does not imply that all working-class shoppers flocked to them;
It kinda does. The fact that 15,000 locations opened in a few years and the companies operating them became huge implies that a lot of people were flocking to them...
rise in the infant mortality rate from 17.1 percent in 1875 to 20.3 percent in 1900:
Doctors blamed mothers for feeding babies bottled milk rather than breast milk and sometimes listed the cause of an infant death as “bottle feeding.”
The immediate response to the campaign inspired by the book was a halving of meat consumption. Even in the late 1920s, meat packers were still struggling to boost meat sales back to anything approaching their pre-1906 heyday, as shown in table 3-2. This was not only because of the lingering effects of The Jungle, but also because of the higher costs incurred by federal government inspection of all beef carcasses or products that entered into interstate commerce.
More generally, the new regulations furthered the speed of consolidation of food processing into a few large companies, for smaller companies could not afford to comply with the new laws.
In 1844, the Ladies’ Hand Book declared that “the female who is utterly regardless of her appearance may be safely pronounced deficient in some of the more important qualities which the term ‘good character’ invariably implies.”
Boston’s estimated 1890 population of 450,000 was actually smaller than the 600,000 people who had entered the city in the preceding decade and the 500,000 people who had departed.
In 1900, there were only 8,000 motor cars registered in the United States, but the number skyrocketed to 468,000 in 1910, 9 million in 1920, and 23 million in 1929. Most astonishing, the total power created by automobiles exceeded that of all farm animals as early as 1910.
Thus the average person in the 1911–20 decade traveled only 379 miles by rail, whereas the average person in 2010 traveled 2,571 miles by air.
in the 1880s, when more than 100,000 horses nationwide were engaged in pulling 18,000 streetcars on 3,000 miles of track.
After the Model T became ubiquitous, its unique network of dealers and service stations selling tires, batteries, spare parts, and the cars themselves created the same sort of networking advantage that Apple and Android enjoy today in their smartphone duopoly.
The first few years of the twentieth century saw political gridlock about paving rural roads, in part because of the free-rider problem. Residents of one county worried that if their county paved its roads, residents of an adjacent county would take advantage of them without paving its own.
This makes no sense… if I live in one county I can't just go "take advantage" of the roads in another county because they're better... I need to use the roads near me because they go where I to go. It's basically irrelevant whether the roads two counties over are better or worse.
they surveyed twenty-six “particularly run-down houses” and discovered, to their surprise, that only five of these homes had bathtubs, but all twenty-six had automobiles.
There was no entertainment available to the average family in 1870, except for a few traveling musicians or circus performers or in-home board or card games.
Or reading, gatherings with friends, playing music, etc. This makes it sound like everyone in the country was just sitting around crying in their corn pone and waiting for the circus to arrive.
Though rates had dropped significantly by 1940, a three-minute call to San Francisco from New York was $46 in 2005 dollars, and the same call to London was a lofty $242.
Rates remained persistently high into the later twentieth century. A three-minute call to San Francisco did not drop below $10 until 1966, and the London rate finally fell below $10 in 1981.
Edison did not originally intend the phonograph to be used for entertainment and rather viewed it as a business device, an early ancestor of the Dictaphone; he referred to it as the “talking machine.”
It was not until 1925 that the technology of microphones and vacuum tubes had progressed far enough to achieve accurate music reproduction on records.
Until 1948, all records were recorded live, from beginning to end, with no editing.
Though the generators, antennas, amplifiers, and receivers were ready to create commercial radio as early as 1913, World War I intervened and required a postponement.
the Federal Communications Commission threatened broadcasters with a new era of regulation to force them to broadcast more cultural and public service programming instead of so much light comedy and music
Responding before any significant regulation occurred, Sarnoff hired Arturo Toscanini to create an entire orchestra and conduct it, and the NBC Symphony was given its own separate studio in the RCA building,
Thus thanks to his wealth and fame, Edison received credit for the motion picture, even though he played virtually no part in its invention.
The studios distributed “cue sheets” of suggested music, but the organist or pianist had full license to improvise, so The Birth of a Nation could sound quite different in Toledo from how it sounded in, say, Seattle.
Out of every 1,000 births, the number of lives saved by improvements from 1880 to 1950 was 188, and the additional number saved from 1950 to 2010 was a mere twenty-one.
well, infant mortality can't go below zero so obviously we couldn't come close to matching the 1880-1950 reduction.
life expectancy at age 10 declined steadily between 1790 and 1850, remained on a plateau until 1880, and only then began to improve. Life expectancy at birth also stagnated between 1850 and 1880, only to march steadily higher after that year.
Whereas life expectancy at birth increased at twice the rate during 1890–1950 as during 1950–98 (0.32 years of annual improvement versus 0.15 years), the relationship was reversed for life expectancy at age 70 (0.03 versus 0.05 years annually for the two intervals).
“In 1900, nearly 18 percent of males born in the United States died before their first birthday; today, cumulative mortality does not reach 18 percent until age 62.”
almost all of the decline in the infectious mortality rate had been achieved by 1955, which is before the share in GDP of medical care spending began its inexorable rise from 4 percent in the mid-1950s to 17 percent by 2010.
The percentage of urban households supplied with filtered water grew slowly at first, from 0.3 percent in 1880 to 1.5 percent in 1890 and 6.3 percent in 1900. But then came the great rush of construction of waterworks, bringing the urban percentage up to 25 percent by 1910 and to 42 percent by 1925.28 According to the first Census of Housing (see table 4-4), by 1940, fully 93 percent of urban households had running water, and 83 percent had sole use of an indoor toilet.
clean water technologies have been labeled as “likely the most important public health intervention of the twentieth century.”
set up opium dens, spreading addiction to the native population.
I'm not sure that's how opium addiction works...
postoperative sepsis infection caused the death of almost half of patients undergoing major surgery. “A common report by surgeons was: operation successful but the patient died.”
