In 1964 U.S. News Predicted the Future
usnews.com
usnews.com
1) U.S. Population: 395 million
2) “Trillions will have the place in the vocabulary that millions had 50 years ago and billions have today. Overall spending will be in the trillions. So will debt.”
3) “A population crowded into great strips of cities will be struggling to enjoy driving 200 million or more automobiles where there are 66 million now.”
4) “Supersonic transports that, within a decade or so, are to carry passengers across the American continent or to Europe in an hour and a half probably will be in the process of being replaced by rocket transports capable of cutting that time in half.”
5) “China within a half century will be pushing past 1.5 billion people and will face a desperate need for more space. If the world is to see a nuclear war, that war might be one fought between Russia and China for control of the wide-open spaces of Russia’s Far East.”
6) “An American in another 50 years long since will have been on the moon. Space will have become an element of supporting defense platforms, communications satellites, maybe launching platforms for ventures not yet dreamed of.”
7) “Hydrogen weapons will have proliferated among many nations of the world. China is sure to have them. France will, too. So will Germany. Israel and Egypt may. American officials place at 15 or 20 the nations that will have nuclear weapons before the end of his century.”
8) “If the record of the past is repeated, the dollar of 2014 will be an 11-cent dollar in terms of 1914 … In terms of today that value will have been cut by 67 percent.”
9) “The 60-hour week of 1914 that became the 40-hour week of 1964 probably will be the 30-hour workweek of 2014 – a six-hour day five days a week. Average family income, now $7,800 a year, is likely in another half century to exceed $20,000 a year in 1964 dollars.”
10) “Life in 1964 may appear as the ‘good old days’ when contrasted with the scramble for an existence in the crowded turmoil of a concentrated, automated and computerized world of tomorrow. It will be a world moving at rocket-like speed.”
$20,000 in 1964 dollars is $153,483.87 in 2014 dollars. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=20%2C000&year1=...
The population of china is currently 1.365B, according to [2].
A dollar today is equivalent to $0.04 in 1914 according to [1]. I should add at this point that there are a lot of different ways to measure inflation.
The number of passanger vehicles is around 250 million in the US today - how many of those are "cars" is up to interpretation. [3]
1: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...
Looks like they misread the baby boomer trend -- and didn't predict the effect of widespread, effective, legal birth-control, women entering the workplace in larger numbers, etc.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9828&page=43
The UN 30 year projections for the US/Australia/Japan group is around 5% error.
I wonder what aspects of today will be desirable to hackers of the future.
On the other hand, there are 113 million households and 155 million people in the work force, so 2 incomes isn't typical for a household (It's only possible for ...oops). Edit: (This ignores people collecting benefits or retirement payments, but I guess those aren't bleak signals. It makes the statement I had made about 1/3 nonsense though.)
Much of the care that makes medicine expensive simply wasn't available in the 1960s, so is a hard sell as a regression (you know, trauma care, the huge improvements in care for heart disease, the huge improvements in treatment of cancer, the panoply of drugs that treat conditions that may or may not exist, etc).
Real estate is expensive in many cities, but in towns, you can't sell a 2,000 square foot house, never mind selling it at a price resembling expensive. Real estate pricing is a symptom of other things going on in the economy, not a particularly huge problem all on its own.
Mean student debt runs less than $30,000 and activists won't even report the median. Pointing out what is wrong (if anything significant...) with this article might make for some good discussions: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/09/2...
None of that means I think that the U.S. system of paying for health care is sensible or that I am opposed to figuring out a better way to make education available or anything like that.
With regards to healthcare ,health care in other places in the world is just as good and much cheaper.
And about real estate: isn't finding a good job while living in a small town quite a big problem ?
[1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/two-paycheck-couples-...
For healthcare, I tried to frame it in terms of things not having gotten worse. That isn't anything to be terribly proud of, but an angry claim about health care in the U.S. declining since the 1960s needs an awful lot of evidence and should probably be quite specific. There are lots of reasons I think a facile comparison of expense isn't very interesting, but a big one is that high end medicine (test all the things) doesn't have much impact on things like medicaid or access to antibiotics.
And they are probably right - more affordable/equitable healthcare can be had while still having high quality medicine. And the problem with quality in healthcare is also a problem we can solve much of through better tools and procedures.
>Much of the care that makes medicine expensive simply wasn't available in the 1960s, so is a hard sell as a regression
So was it only that medical care that increased in cost, or was it all medical care?
>Real estate pricing is a symptom of other things going on in the economy, not a particularly huge problem all on its own.
I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean.
>Mean student debt runs less than $30,000 and activists won't even report the median
Is this supposed to be a low number compared to the numbers from 50 years ago? And your reference, while attacking the use of the mean as deceptive, intentionally conflates the amount of debt that a student has when he/she leaves university with the cost of education.
Real estate in general isn't all that expensive. The fact that desirable jobs are concentrated has driven up prices in some areas; if employment were better in general, those jobs would likely be (relatively) less desirable and it is likely the price pressure would relax. Coming at it from a different direction, the price of housing in San Francisco or Brooklyn simply isn't relevant to an awful lot of people (edit: which sounds dismissive of the problems it causes for people local to those areas; that isn't what I was trying to do, I was talking about the many millions far away from those metros).
The positions cast in that article are definitely the weaker part of it. But $30,000 of debt is not a huge liability to take on in order to gain access to a better career path. I don't mean to argue against reducing it, I'm just not convinced it is outrageous.
Most of the people I knew in college weren't paying for it themselves, a parent or other relative covered most of it. The students who were paying for everything always had the standard $27,000 in Stafford loans plus whatever else they needed in a different type of loan. I know many people who exceeded $50K in student loans. I'm not saying my experience is the norm, but the commonly posted student loan figures can be very misleading for either side.