My grandmother was born in 1896, a world of gaslights, horse-drawn carriages and long, handwritten letters sent by post.
By her 50th birthday, nearly every home in her city had electric lights, a radio and a telephone, and nearly everyone got around by car – all things that had barely existed if they had existed at all at the time of her birth.
As far as anyone could see in 1946, Americans could keep riding a wave of growth, not just in shared prosperity but in freedom, opportunity and expansion of civil rights.
And that’s the way Americans still expect the world to work.
Only, what if what my grandmother experienced was a one-of-a-kind historical exception that never happened before may never come again?
What if the income inequality, slow growth and political divisiveness that we think of as a temporary disease in the present era is really the way things are going to work from now on?
That’s the gloomy picture presented in some recent scholarship, including “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” by macroeconomist Robert J. Gordon, which was reviewed in The New York Times by Paul Krugman.
Gordon says the information technology “revolution” has already done what it’s going to do and will not ever change our world the way the coal-fired power plant and internal combustion engine changed the 20th century.
When I think about what my grandmother lived through, I can see what a real technological revolution would look like.
The Wright Brothers’ first flight took place when my grandmother was almost 7 years old, and by her 50th birthday there were trans-Atlantic and transcontinental commercial flights. World War II had just been won with the use of heavy bombers, including two that dropped atomic weapons.
She had seen talking pictures, although she didn’t care for them and had little interest in owning a television, which were appearing in some homes in 1946,
I was born in 1962, and by my 50th birthday, everybody I knew had computers connected to the Internet, turning almost every home into a reference library, publishing house, movie theater and broadcasting studio.
But otherwise, things were not all that different from the life my grandmother knew before I was born.
I still light with electricity, listen to the radio and talk on the telephone (only now I can carry the phone in my pocket).
When I want to go somewhere, I still drive a car, which has a lot more plastic in it than the one my grandmother drove in 1946, but it’s still the same invention.
Men walked on the moon just after my seventh birthday, but that hasn’t changed my world the way the Wright brothers’ first flight changed my grandmother’s. Within a few decades of Kitty Hawk, she knew people who had flown in airplanes. I still haven’t met a single soul who’s been to space.
My oldest daughter is approaching the halfway mark to her first 50 years, and despite of all the talk about a technological revolution in her lifetime, she hasn’t seen a fraction of the change my grandmother lived through.
Aside from my daughter’s smartphone, there is virtually nothing in her life that my grandmother could not recognize if she accidentally slipped through the space-time continuum from 1946 to today.
That wouldn’t have been the case if my grandmother’s grandmother had made the same 70-year trip through time to 1946.
Maybe it’s just as well. There are probably unintended consequences to zipping around in flying saucers like the Jetsons, but it’s important to remember that just because people keep telling us how fast technology is changing our world doesn’t mean that it’s true. It may have been true in my grandmother’s world, but not our’s.
The problem is that our politics is one of the inventions brought over from the 20th century, developed by people who either lived through the transformative period or grew up close enough to be influenced by the people who remembered it first hand. Any politician who isn’t as optimistic as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan is written off as a crank.
America is supposed to be growing explosively at all times, fueled by ingenious technology that unleashes productivity gains and shares the benefits widely. If that’s not happening, it’s somebody’s fault.
Take your pick: You can blame liberal tax policies, conservative tax policies, illegal immigration, mass incarceration, over-regulation of banks, under-regulation of banks, greed or a lack of family values.
All of them have been put forward as the key to bringing back whichever version of the old days that you miss.
But like gas lights and buggies, the age of technological transformation may be gone for good, and will be something any of us will only see in a museum.
Greg Kesich is the editorial page editor. He can be contacted at:
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