America did seem to have a golden age. Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. Compare that to the new bay bridge. Or just look at how the US mobilized during WWII to produce an insane amount of weaponry in just a few years.
Think about the people that grew up when the telegraph was high tech. Then they got to see people flying in jets. Then nuclear energy. Then they got to see people walking on the moon. All in a single life.
The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed. And I think a big part of it is our government is woefully mismanaged. It mostly seems engineered to help other people in government. This may be why so many of the richest counties in America are the suburbs of DC, compared to centers of innovation or industry.
Yes, when you have low regard for human life and the environment you can move quite quickly.
> The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed.
The phone I carry has more computing capability than all of the computers used in the Apollo program combined.
I’m able to reliably establish video calls with people on the other side of the planet while walking my dog.
My photos are grouped by person using facial recognition.
Shooting 120 FPS 4K video is built into my 200 gram phone (20 years ago you rented a camcorder from blockbuster the size of a briefcase to record effectively 320x240 onto a VHS tape).
The text contents of the library of congress can fit onto a micro sd card the size of a fingernail that costs less than $100.
The pace of technology innovation is astounding. It’s moved so quickly that we’re disappointed when the exponential growth of transistors slowed down.
We're entering the age of fully dynamic production lines. 3d printing's true strength here is not printing the object, but the molds.
Medical science, genetics specifically. We've come a long way, but this field is still like computing was in the 1940s.
We barely understand genetic expression as a whole process, eg how the entire genome is effected by modifications, and changes.
Yet when we do, the changes will be astounding. The end of most disease, the ability to use organisms to do our bidding, nanotech isn't going to be metal, but instead, bio.
We're about to set boots on Mars, in a decade we'll likely have permanent residency there. Our first new planet.
With that comes the potential to move industry to space, mining asteroids, power generation, and more.
There are endless, massive changes coming, we're merely in a period where they are all coming together.
The next 50 years will make the last 50 look glacial...
Batteries, man. I am constantly astounded at how much power you can get out of a battery today. The fastest production car (0-60) ever made runs on one.
To drive that point home, the metal in a new car did not exist a decade ago. To someone not intimately involved with materials, that was mind-blowing
Let me counter a bit of the heyday argumner.
During this so-called “heyday” destroyed many inner cities, their street cars and created incredible pollution.
The EPA was founded in 1971 and environmental regulations came into place then.
This is incredible. To this day, no country has better air than the US. And that includss Europe. Maybe the US did do something incredible in the last few decades—it just happens to be a repair of nature.
In the meantime because of oh-so-useful infrastructure built during the time of Mad Men, Robert Moses and suburbs US is still unable to implement mass transit as they once had and maybe now we will have global warming due to the infrastructure created when the US was “building fast and breaking things.”
I don’t disagree with you—but I wouldn’t embrace the heyday as the pinnacle of achievement either.
Not to detract from your wider point, but this just isn't true. Here's at least one link that counters with data: https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries -- the USA is 84th "most polluted" in terms of Air Quality Index on that list of 106 countries.
Also just anecdotally, nobody that's been to both, say, Norway, and the USA can possibly think that the air quality in the two countries is even close!
Pakistan is #2 and the "second most polluted" -- so extending that, USA is 84th on that list and hence the "84th most polluted", with country #106 being Puerto Rico, which is the "106th most polluted", and therefore the least polluted as per that list. So if you must reframe it as "least polluted", then USA is the 23rd least polluted on that list.
First, there are ~200 countries, not 106. Second, Puerto Rico IS the USA. Third, "84th most polluted" out of a list of 106, is just a weird way to talk. It's like saying the valedictorian of a class of 100 is the 100th most underachieving student.
The US, mind you, is not helped by the forest fires of the last few years in this ranking. They really skew things in California and the US as a whole. These forest fires though can be attributed somehow to the building of the interstate system and therefore sort of does add to the wider point.
Europe is pretty bad because of the diesel engine cars. If you change that, air quality will improve dramatically.
Tragic sure, but what’s the point? Think of all the lives saved by not having to ferry people.
The point is that those people died due to labor practices of the time, not some tragic fluke accident.
> Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.
11 workers were killed building it. They estimated 35. [0] Can you imagine putting into a project proposal knowingly estimating X number of dead construction workers?
[0] https://www.ciconstructors.com/the-evolution-of-construction...
I don't know enough about the rest, but a cheap bridge isn't necessarily a great thing.
And I don't know that progress has necessarily slowed. A computer in your pocket happened in my lifetime, and indeed, within my memory.
There are a lot more things considered now.
And also in all these we may be forgetting one thing. Maybe handcuffing the government is not a good thing? Grover Norquist style drown the government in a bathtub honestly has been a disaster for us, and it's time we wake up to that.
And… is it possible? In this world, less than 5% are producing the actual products and the rest are working around and producing, basically, paperwork, which may be extremely important (such as Accounting, HR, compliance) but only to other people. Which, in turns, raises requirements in more accounting and HR and OSHA and…
Paretto’s corollary law was that 50% of the work was performed by the square root of the company. Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?
If I buy some sneakers, they'll be sewn by a low-paid worker in a poor country, shipped by low-paid sailors, trucked to warehouses by low-paid drivers, picked and packed by low-paid workers, and driven to my door by low-paid drivers.
It ain't Facebook programmers on six-figure salaries who are feeding the rest of the population.
> If I buy some sneakers, they'll be sewn by a low-paid worker in a poor country, shipped by low-paid sailors, trucked to warehouses by low-paid drivers, picked and packed by low-paid workers, and driven to my door by low-paid drivers.
We consider this normal, because it has been happening for quite a while and painted in a negative fashion lately (Trumpism/Nationalism) but the reality, if you had an island somewhere, and you where establishing a country, you can't ask all these people to do that without some power-transfer that you hold over these countries/populations.
This is also true in the military, where a tiny fraction are trigger pullers. It is worth picturing what an army with no logistics personnel would look like.
What makes you think the square root of the company neatly aligns with high-IQ people? There are plenty of smart people who use their intelligence to find ways to avoid work, or to get others to do work for them, or to just amass power/influence in an organization by increasing head counts and making busy work, etc etc. Why assume that “smart” equals “having the company’s best interests in mind”?
Sure, if you could organize them and direct them without too much overhead. And if they are perfectly compliant and don't want to do something else.
Profitability is a mediocre proxy for the usefulness of work, and so we have only a mediocre ability to allocate labor usefully in our profit driven economy. Some of the best investments of money and labor in terms of profitability are even things I would call counterproductive.
Propaganda equating these two groups is a very popular thing for the rich to do with their money. Some would say that's unproductive, others would say it's smart (as long as they're the only smart person doing it, once a bunch of the smart people start playing unproductive games to work the system things get worse for everyone).
Are we saying that there have never been excellent, efficient, large organizations in the past? I feel like history tells us that, at the very least, large groups of people working in tandem have accomplished pretty amazing things.
That is, I would say, not the impression I currently have of the U.S. government; but I do think it's a little overly pessimistic to say that it couldn't get there, or get measurably better, with even a generation or two of sustained effort from really smart people. Right? I guess I don't really know.
The two aren't mutually exclusive, right? Large groups of people working in tandem are accomplishing pretty amazing things, but they're not doing them in an excellent an efficient manner.
But I have an inclination to say that for an organization to to accomplish amazing things with consistency over the kind of timespan of a government or nation, the organism has to be self-sustaining.
Part of that is the capability to attract or create talented new members of your organization, and one way of getting that done is by having a reputation for, among other things, being an excellent and efficient workplace.
I've read and heard stories of places and groups like Fairchild Semiconductor, Bell Labs, the Manhattan Project; places where smart people have gotten together to do incredible things very quickly.
The one unifying theme is that they all lasted, at their peak, essentially one or two generations at most; they couldn't grow or sustain themselves.
NASA achieves amazing things, but it is not efficient as SpaceX has shown, But it has plenty of money, making it not necessary.
Plenty of retailers lack any semblance of excellence. But because workers are so cheap and they are efficient about their use, it does not matter.
My grandfather worked for GM in its heyday. He had stories of shuffling desks to make a VP happy, playing accounting games, project costs exploding, contractors being lazy and screwing things up (one brought a typical ladder to wire a warehouse that was 70 feet high), meetings over the placement of newspaper boxes, etc.
My company loves to talk about being agile. They leave out a bureaucracy on par with the government (and I worked in the government before coming here) when it comes to resource management.
I don't think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society. It is just a lot of lurching and stumbling in a general direction.