More on Dad's America

My father lived from 1901 to 1963.

The country went through more basic changes in that time than it had before or than it has since. Those were the years in which productivity and life expectancy increased most rapidly.

The one was caused largely by electrification, the telephone, and the commercialization of the internal combustion engine; the other resulted principally from water purification, the spread of indoor plumbing, and the availability of reasonably uncontaminated and unadulterated supplies of meat and milk. 

Most people are surprised by the above statements.  Surely, they say, the pace of change and improvement is more rapid today than it was a hundred years ago.

This view is what might be called a computer-centric one. Certainly, computers are marvelous. They are to be found everywhere, except, quips Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, in the productivity numbers. 

Despite computers and the robotics they spawn, the rate of advance in output per unit of labor and capital input is far more sluggish than it was when my father lived. The commonplace is often more important than the marvelous. For example, in terms of its effects on economic growth, the washing machine is probably more important than the computer. At least thus far.

In my father's day, not only was efficiency increasing more rapidly than it is today, wages were rising about as rapidly as that efficiency (especially, between the 1930s and the 1960s). By contrast, in recent years, wages have lagged even the cripple-gaited pace of productivity gain. As a result, although income inequality decreased dramatically in my father's day, it has worsened sharply since.

Of course, social inequality has behaved differently from economic inequality. My father's America was a deeply racist country. It remained so until the revolution in civil rights that began in the 1960s. Still, while the country is much less racist than when my father lived, racist attitudes unquestionably survive and underlie much of the failure to take fiscal actions to fight worsening economic inequality.

Nostalgia is a notoriously deceptive emotion. Doubtless, things were not quite so good in my father's day as the above suggests. And, to be sure, the country is a lot richer now than it was then.

But it was getting richer faster then than now. And that's perhaps why the overall mood of the country, if fallible memory serves, was more buoyant and optimistic -- at least for the last twenty-five years of my father's life--than it is today.