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The ratio of vehicle fatalities per 100 million miles traveled hit its peak of forty-five as early as 1909 and by 1922 had already fallen by half to twenty-two and again by half to eleven by 1939. The rate in 2008 was only 1.3, smaller by a factor of ten than in 1939
Managers refused to put light bulbs in toilet rooms, hoping to discourage workers from reading instead of getting back to the job.
Female librarians, nurses, and teachers all became subject to supervision by male supervisors.
Over the seven decades between 1870 and 1940, the real wage grew almost a full percentage point faster than productivity, 2.48 versus 1.51 percent per year. But after 1940, the relationship was reversed, with productivity growth of 2.25 percent outpacing real wage growth of 1.56 percent by a difference of 0.69 percentage points.
Though most states in the north had compulsory school attendance and child labor laws by 1890, they were only erratically enforced. Southern states deliberately did not pass similar legislation in hopes of obtaining a competitive advantage over northern textile plants.
But in 1876, the total number of high school graduates was only 20,000 per year in a population of 45 million. The ratio of high school attendance to elementary school attendance was only 6 percent. Only 1 percent of the college-age population was enrolled in institutions of higher learning in 1870.
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
Although Henry Ford adamantly opposed installment buying, by 1919, two-thirds of Ford cars were sold on the installment plan, financed not by the Ford Company itself, but rather by local finance companies that cooperated with Ford dealers.
Even today, the United States rates among the highest of all developed countries in the incidence of fires and deaths from fires. On average during 1979–92, the death rate from fires in the United States was 26.4 per million, as contrasted to 5.2 in Switzerland and 6.4 in the Netherlands.
Between 1949 and 1983, reduced electricity use for a refrigerator of given size and quality amounted to an effective price reduction of –1.66 percent per year, which cumulates to 76 percent over that thirty-four-year interval.
sales of room air conditioners leaped from 48,000 units in 1946 to 2 million in 1957.
energy requirements of a standard-sized window unit declined by two-thirds between 1953 and 1983.
there are 7,000 separate units of government in the state of Illinois.
Even though nonstop service from Hawaii to the mainland had been achieved in 1935, and by 1948 Pan Am and United were each flying four daily flights on the route, there was a mysterious seven-year lag in developing an aircraft that could fly exactly the same distance from Los Angeles to New York.
Surely this is not a total mystery
by 2005 the average household spent more than eight hours a day watching television,
By 2005, television, as a primary activity, consumed nearly half of all free time
If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside. —Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine
The Cray-1 system was a supercomputer that held a world-record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second and had an eight megabyte main memory.
Iphone 14 has roughly 10,000x as much power
50 percent more new drugs were approved by the FDA between 1940 and 1960 than in the fifty-one years that followed,
The percentage of doctors classified as specialists rose from 24 percent in 1940 to 69 percent in 1966.
A study last year found that white women without a high school diploma lost five years of life expectancy between 1990 and 2008,
39 percent of the U.S. excess is due to administrative expenses, 31 percent to higher incomes of medical practitioners, and 14 percent to additional procedures (e.g., extra tests); they are unable to allocate the remaining 16 percent of spending differences to a specific cause.
an article from Seventeen magazine stated, “being a woman is your career, and you can’t escape it. There is no office, lab, or stage that offers so many creative avenues or executive opportunities as that everyday place, the home.”
Women were vigorously discouraged from seeking jobs that men might have wanted. “Hell yes, we have a quota,” said a medical school dean in 1961. “Yes, it’s a small one. We do keep women out when we can. We don’t want them here—and they don’t want them elsewhere, either, whether or not they’ll admit it.” … In 1960 women accounted for 6 percent of American doctors, 3 percent of lawyers, and less than 1 percent of engineers. Although more than half of federal government employees were women, they made up 1.4 percent of civil-service workers in the top four pay grades.
In 1960, 94 percent of doctors were white men, as were 96 percent of lawyers and 86 percent of managers. By 2008 these numbers had fallen to 63 percent, 61 percent, and 57 percent respectively.
the changes created by the Internet revolution were sweeping but were largely completed by 2005.
That's a bold statement
future growth in the disposable income of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution that is likely to be barely positive and substantially slower than growth in the labor productivity of the total economy.
I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. I cannot discover that anyone knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is and what is not possible. —Henry Ford
time required to paint a car from a few weeks to a few hours,
A few weeks?
This is why there was so little economic growth between the Roman era and 1750, as peasant life remained largely unchanged. Peasants did not have an incentive to become educated,
Umm, I'm not lack of incentive was the whole reason for low rates of peasant education.
Within communications, progress started with the 1983 breakup of the Bell Telephone monopoly
Progress did not start then.
Measured another way, the share of total employment accounted for by firms no older than five years declined by almost half from 19.2 percent in 1982 to 10.7 percent in 2011.
another measure of the decline in dynamism, the percentage of people younger than 30 who owned stakes in private companies declined from 10.6 percent in 1989 to 3.6 percent in 2014.
declining “dynamism of American society” as indicated by the declining pace of startups, job creation, job destruction, and internal migration.
A set of remarkable forecasts appeared in December 1900 in an unlikely publication medium—the Ladies Home Journal. Some of the predictions were laughably wrong and unimportant, such as strawberries the size of baseballs. But there were enough accurate predictions in this page-long three-column article to suggest that much of the future can be known.41 Some of the more interesting forecasts follow:
“Hot and cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of the air just as we now turn on hot and cold water from spigots to regulate the temperature of the bath.” • “Ready-cooked meals will be purchased from establishments much like our bakeries of today.” • “Liquid-air refrigerators will keep large quantities of food fresh for long intervals.” • “Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there is a battle in China a century hence, photographs of the events will be published in newspapers an hour later.” • “Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today.
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Among his 1949 predictions were these: These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price.… [I]f we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be
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Driverless Cars. This category of future progress is demoted to last place because it offers benefits that are minor compared to the invention of the car itself or the improvements in safety that have created a tenfold improvement in fatalities per vehicle mile since 1950. The most important distinction is between cars and trucks.
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One resolution is that the replacement of human jobs by computers has been going on for more than five decades, and the replacement of human jobs by machines in general has been going on for more than two centuries.
Far from occurring overnight, the shift to robots and job-destroying artificial intelligence is occurring at glacial speed.
The techno-optimists predict much more rapid productivity growth as jobs are destroyed, and that the counterpart of exploding productivity growth is to be an age of persistent mass unemployment.
The opposite vision extrapolates from the most recent decade and predicts “more of the same,” consisting of growth rather than shrinkage of employment combined with the same historically low rate of growth of labor productivity observed during 2004–14.
the techno-pessimists are optimistic that job growth will continue and that new jobs will be created as rapidly as technology destroys old jobs.
Between 1929 and 1945 incomes at the top grew more slowly than at the middle and the bottom, creating the shift toward greater equality that Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have called “the Great Compression.” Between World War II and 1975, incomes at the top and bottom grew at roughly the same rate, and as a result, the compression lasted for about three decades.
Many low-skilled immigrants disproportionately take jobs and enter occupations already staffed by foreign-born workers—for example, restaurant workers and landscape services—and thus their main effect is to drive down wages of foreign-born workers, not domestic workers. The previous literature has noted the fact that among high school dropouts, wages of domestic and foreign-born workers were almost identical up to 1980, but by 2004, foreign-born workers earned 15–20 percent less.
Frank Levy and Peter Temin provide a complementary interpretation that places more emphasis on a change in political philosophy from what they call the “Detroit Consensus” of the late 1940s to the Reagan-initiated “Washington Consensus” of the early 1980s. The main point that Levy and Temin add to our preceding summary is that highly progressive taxes, with 90 percent marginal tax rates for top-bracket earners in the 1940s and 1950s, sent a signal that high incomes were unacceptable.18 Beginning with the Reagan tax cuts, that element of the policy support of the great compression began to
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The analysis of the rewards earned by workers who have different amounts of educational attainment starts with the basic proposition that the earnings of workers is determined by their productivity—that is, how much they produce from an hour of work.
College completion for households in the top quarter of the income distribution rose between 1970 and 2013 from 40 percent to 77 percent, whereas for those in the bottom quarter, it increased only from 6 percent to 9 percent.
The higher earnings of those with a college and postgraduate degrees reflects their higher productivity on the job. For the economy as a whole, this implies that aggregate productivity growth depends positively on the growth of educational attainment.
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The United States currently ranks eleventh among the developed nations in high school graduation rates and is the only country in which the graduation rates of those aged 25–34 is no higher than those aged 55–64.
