For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered.
This isn’t to say history was stagnant, or that life was only grim and blank, but the well-being of average people did not perceptibly improve. All of the wars, literature, empires, and exploration took place on a scale too small to register, too minor too much improve the lot of ordinary human beings. In England before the middle of the eighteenth century, where industrialization first began, the pace of progress was so slow that it took 350 years for a family to double its standard of living. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the state of technology and the luxury and quality of life afforded the average individual were little better than they had been two millennia earlier, in ancient Rome.
Then two things happened that did matter, and they were so grand that they dwarfed everything that had come before and encompassed most everything that has come since: the first industrial revolution, beginning in 1750 or so, in England, and the second industrial revolution, beginning around 1870, mostly in America. That the second industrial revolution happened just as the first had begun to propagate was an incredible stroke of good luck. It meant that during the whole modern era from 1750 onward, human well-being accelerated at a rate that could barely have been contemplated before. Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the 1950s the average American would roughly double his or her parents’ standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good.
At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, though, this great acceleration began to taper off. The shift was modest at first, and it was concealed in the hectic up-and-down of yearly data. But if you examine the growth data since the early seventies, and if you are mathematically astute enough to fit a curve to it, you can see a clear trend: The rate at which life is improving has slowed.
If you are like most economists, you are not greatly troubled by this story. The machinery of innovation, after all , is now more organized and sophisticated than it has ever been, human intelligence is more efficiently mobilized by spreading education and expanding global connectedness, and the examples of the Internet and artificial intelligence suggest that progress continues to be rapid.
But if you are prone to a more radical sense of what is possible, you might begin to follow a different line of thought. If nothing like the first and second industrial revolutions had ever happened before, what is to say that anything similar will happen again? This line of thinking would make you a supporter of a 72year-old economist at Northwestern University named Robert Gordon, and you would probably share his view that it would be crazy to expect something on the scale of the second industrial revolution to ever take place again.
“Some things,” Gordon says, “can happen only once.”
Gordon’s argument is that the forces of the second industrial revolution were so powerful and so unique that they will not be repeated. The consequences of that breakthrough took a century to be fully realized, and as the internal combustion engine gave rise to the car and eventually the airplane, and electricity to radio and the telephone and then mass media, they came to rearrange social forces and transform everyday lives Mechanized farm equipment permitted people to stay in school longer and to leave rural areas and move to cities. Electrical appliances allowed women of all social classes to leave behind housework for more productive jobs.The introduction of public sewers and water sanitation reduced illness and infant mortality. The car, mass media, and commercial aircraft led to a liberation from the narrow confines) of geography and an introduction to a far broader and richer world. Education beyond high school was made accessible to the middle and working classes.
These are all consequences of the second industrial revolution, but it is hard to imagine how those improvements might be extended: Women cannot be liberated from housework to join the labor force again, travel is not getting faster, and educational attainment has plateaued. The classic example of the scale of these transformations is Nobel-laureate economist Paul Kurgan’s description of his kitchen: The modern kitchen, except for a few surface improvements, is the same one that existed half a century ago. But go back half a century before that, and you are talking about no refrigeration, just huge blocks of ice in a box, and no gas-fired stove, just piles of wood. If you take this perspective, it is no wonder that the productivity gains have diminished since the early seventies. The social transformations brought by computers and the Internet cannot match any of this.
But even if they could, that would not be enough. “The growth rate is a heavy taskmaster,” Gordon says. The math is punishing. The population is far larger than it was in 1870, and far wealthier to begin with, which means that the innovations will need to be more transformative to have the same economic effect. “We need innovations that are eight times as important as those we had before,” he says.
Among those who are worried about growth―or, rather, the lack thereof―there is a science fiction streak. I don’t think I have had a single conversation about long-term economic growth that did not involve a detour into the matter of robots, and what they will mean for society.
I called Erik Brynjolfsson, an expert in the economics of technology and an optimist about future breakthroughs, at his office at MIT to try to get a better sense of what a robotized society might look like. It turns out the optimist’s case is darker than I expected. “The problem is jobs,” he said. Sixty-five percent of workers occupy jobs whose basic tasks can be classified as information processing. If you are trying to find a competitive advantage for people over machines, this does not [47](1. bode 2. bid 3. bide) well: “The human mind did not evolve to multiply triple-digit numbers,” he told me. The robot mind has. In other words, the long history of Marx-inflected literature and film that claims that office work is dehumanizing may have been onto something. Those jobs were never really designed for the human mind. They were designed for robots. The existing robots just weren’t good enough to take them. At first.
At opposite ends of the pay scale, however, there are jobs that seem safe from the robot menace, Brynjolfsson said―high-paying creative and managerial work, and non-routine physical work, like gardening. As for the 65 percent of us who are employed in “information processing” jobs, Brynjolfsson said, the challenge is for us to integrate human skills with machine capacities―his phrase is “racing with machines.”
There is a whole set of behaviors that depends upon an expectation that things will always get better: our laissez-faire-ism, our can-do-ism, our cult of the individual. For that reason, we think of the darkening social turn that happened in the early 1970s as having something to do only with the social energies of the sixties collapsing in on them. In Gordon’s description, however, something more mechanistic was happening: the second industrial revolution had simply [run its course, and so, in many ways, had its social implications.
It is at about this point in the discussion that Gordon will grin mischievously and say: “So, how do you like your smartphone now”?
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