Is the “Long Boom” of Technological Advancements Over?

The book’s title, Slouching Toward Utopia, references the phrase “slouching toward Bethlehem” in William Butler Yeats’ beloved poem “The Second Coming,” which itself is a riff on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Both poems are parables about destruction. We can see where this is going.

One of DeLong’s many arguments is that the “long boom” (my term, not his) that began around 1870 ended a decade ago – in 2010 by his reckoning. Before questioning this thesis, let’s first understand it.

Why 1870? “Inventing invention”

What happened around 1870, DeLong contends, is that we set up institutions that systematically promoted new ways of doing things. Before that, we invented things, but there were no organized and well-funded efforts to innovate. He claims that, around that time, we “invented invention.”

DeLong also believes that our philosophy or attitude toward invention changed. We acquired “a burgeoning understanding that there is a broad and deep range of new technologies to be discovered, developed, and deployed.” This philosophy replaced the earlier admiration of “great amateurs” who made scientific or engineering discoveries out of curiosity, the desire to better mankind, or the need to make a profit.²

I’ll unpack the phrase, “invented invention,” in a moment. First, let’s look at the difference between the pre-1870 and the post-1870 invention ecosystem. During the first Industrial Revolution, individual craftsmen and experimenters did most of the creative work; because the effort was not organized on a large scale, inventions dribbled out of these great amateurs gradually, over a century. But the second Industrial Revolution was a burst of change that came almost all at once. As the Gordon wrote, “every aspect of life experienced a revolution.”

The years from 1870 to 1914 saw one radical innovation after another in quick succession. Considering how long it took humans to come up with a practical bicycle, the airplane came awfully soon afterward. As the comedian Louis C. K., whom I quoted in the epigraph, said, when flying in an airplane we are sitting in a chair in the sky. Only 18 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, there were no cars, and bicycles were primitive gadgets that only interested thrill-seekers.³

But 66 years after the Wright Brothers’ little flight, we flew to the moon. Think about that for a second. Sixty-six years is a brief moment in human history (my grandfather saw both events as an adult). The years 1903-1969 were not exactly technological slouches. And I expect even more out of the next 66 years. There are more of us to contribute new ideas and discoveries, scientific knowledge has spread far beyond the West and its offshoots, and communication is much faster (the investment manager Stephen Sexauer calls it “Gutenberg 2.0”), enabling us to stand on the shoulders of more and taller giants.

Read the full article here by Laurence B. Siegel, Advisor Perspectives.