The amount of stuff people used to just get done in the 20th century constantly boggles my mind.
It feels like everything is so hamstrung and bottlenecked today by comparison.
It feels like everything is so hamstrung and bottlenecked today by comparison.
In the 20th century, new building materials was one of the new technologies of the day so it makes sense that a lot of time and energy was spent doing things related to buildings/construction. The end of the 20th century and the 21st are dominated by technology and software being the growing method of productivity. Plus now we have software and math that (probably) shows moving a building 90 degrees is going to cause 10 new problems we didn't even consider in the 20th century.
It's all about opportunity cost. In the 20th century we built a ton of buildings that stored and manipulated giant volumes of paper documents and physical files. Now we have databases and virtual filesystems so we don't need giant clerk offices or document storage buildings. Giant data-center buildings might be the most apt comparison on some level.
It's also related to "The pinnacle of {technology} happened right as it was superseded by {other technology}". (Well, duh. People stopped trying to improve {technology}, so no improvements happened.)
“In economics, the Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture).”
I guess in a way we perform majestically-large relocations of digital storage buildings all the time now, which as you put it is roughly equivalent.
Tons of stuff gets done all the time. All around us. A lot of it is unremarkable because it’s so commonplace. Where I live, most of Seattle’s most vulnerable buildings have been retrofitted for earthquakes with nearly no fanfare. It’s an enormous task, but it happened gradually and in compliance with regulations. It doesn’t fit the narrative of getting stuff done I’m some big show of accomplishment, but it certainly fits the narrative of the original tweet.
I was thinking of it in contrast with all the subway projects that don't happen and cost ten times as much now, and things like that - think Collison's lists.
San Francisco's subway from SOMA to Union Square to Chinatown opens in 2022.
Yep. The downtowns of entire cities were elevated dozens of feet. Rivers were reversed. Tunnels were blasted through mountains because it was the most direct route, initial cost be damned.
In the 20th century, renumbering the addresses of an entire city was so inconsequential that in some places it happened multiple times. Today, that could never happen. People just don't have the will to do anything big anymore, unless there's a buck in it.
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens’ blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency." — Daniel Burnham (1846-1912)
I feel as if I'm always swimming up a river to get things done, "well so-and-so wouldn't approve", "what about XXXX", "YYYY wont be ready until March, etc. etc."
People used to grow up needing to milk the cows every day. There wasn't time to waste, get going and get it done. Regulations were more minimal and everything was contractual.
Today, you need permits to change a kitchen sink, you'll get a ticket for not wearing a seat belt, etc. etc.
We used to call those "salmon days." You spend all day swimming against the current, only to get screwed in the end.
1) "What we have to lose"
2) "What we have to gain"
You'll make more money selling 10 humidifiers to a typical consumer over a 20 year span at $40-$60 each, than what you could ever max them out on for one humidifier that will last that full 20 years. If you're the business in question, it's illogical to pursue any other path unless you're making a conscious choice to give up profit to specifically build something of vastly superior quality.
It's obviously not because we can't do it. The great majority of consumers won't pay for it and or can't afford it.
It's cheap-rotational-product-as-a-service. Most consumers don't have the purchasing power to buy a $500 humidifier (and or don't want to save up to do so), and they want to allocate their money elsewhere at a given time, so the $39.95 plastic cheap humidifier that'll last 2-3 years wins every time (that way they can buy 10-12 things that last a few years for $40 instead of one per year for a decade).
Or put another way, it's payday loan consumerism.
The logic is that customers will prefer your product and you'll take market share from competitors.
But that logic only works if you're small. If you have 2% of the market and making a better product would allow you to take 5% of the market, you do it. If you have 30% of the market and making a better product would allow you to take 33% of the market, at the cost of having a longer interval between repeat business, eh.
So the real problem is that we have too much consolidation and vertical integration. It's too hard to start a new company that goes from zero to 5% of the market in the first year by making a better product. So that's not what happens anymore.
And it's in the interest of the consolidated incumbents to sell you a new device every three years, not to sell you a 20% more expensive device that lasts for decades.
Although I wonder if an upstart couldn't still disrupt this in some markets. The Korean automakers took a big chunk of the market from out of nowhere by offering triple the usual powertrain warranties. What happens if you design a washing machine to last for decades and sell it with a 30 year warranty?
It's impossible for a consumer to asses the "quality" of an item at the time of purchase. We infer quality from reputation, price, and warranty, but there's no direct measure of it available. There's barely even a definition of quality. Even if we ignore the metaphysical aspects of quality, we are left with messy problem.
Price correlates to quality only in as much as the least expensive thing is most likely to be the worse thing, but imagine if we used price as our only measure of quality? The strategy people would arrive at is to charge the most for the least-- which is pretty much where we are now already.
This incentivizes products that work great for a little bit-- which is again exactly where we are now.
My point is only that we've arrived at a crappy capitalism stalemate. I'd love to make high quality products for high quality people, but, that market isn't out there due to... human nature.
On the other hand, since it’s now so cheap to produce stuff, there’s no real reason to make it last longer any more.
I also feel like the marginal cost of labor is much lower now with everything being machined. If labor costs $1000 it’s easy to justify $200 in materials. If labor is $10, not so much.
Sadly, I can't come up with much else.
... But we are still doing this, today. Though not excactly by hand-crank.
I believe most of our modern electrical/clinical/construction/etc. standards have saved many lives.
I work in Aerospace and most of our regulations are written in blood, as they say.
I prefer to paraphrase A Few Good Men: "We follow rules, or people die".
[1] https://www.mammoet.com/news/mammoet-moves-historic-building...
Today, we have so much experience with building things, as if every invoice is ready to be sent to order every piece of a building, that we don’t have experience with repairing.
Moreover, insurances tell us that a desk or a telecom switch devaluates 25% per year, so we value the existing furnished building to basically scrap value after 5 years. But insurances evaluate at the resale price. But an equipment in-place and working has at least 90% of its purchase value for 3-10 years, if not 125% of its purchase value, since it would cost a lot of maintenance to scrap and re-plug a new one.
If insurances/accounting rules admitted that equipments are worth 90% of their purchase price for 3 years, we would put more value into repairing things. Our replacement culture is rooted in the way we perform accounting.
I've given serious thought to not having internet at home, because I grew up and spent nearly half my adult life without it, and it sure sure seems that I got more done in those days.
I don't think people quite understand all the fifth oder effects and dependencies that are at best ignored, at worst totally unknown.
It's a choice.
I agree but I think they will settle down to a similar place in the coming decades.