Life Improvements Since the 1990s

Life Improvements Since the 1990s(gwern.net)

424 points by janhenr 4 years ago | 462 comments

I think he kind of missed the elephant that is modern communication technology has reduced the marginal cost of skilled services enabling pretty much every object designed in an office and manufactured in a factory to benefit from a broader array of engineering and design professionals and methodologies. The average product and service that the average actor in the economy interacts with is designed and optimized to a far greater degree today than they were historically.

Look at the bottle of Elmers glue on the table. Today the glue probably works better (barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy) and comes in a bottle that uses half as much plastic. Something like a bottle revision that would have formerly required expensive salaried employees to come up with multiple options, send them to the supplier, supplier has to respond to each with details and quotes, etc, can now be accomplished in a fraction of the man hours thanks to email and CAD being ubiquitous in the entire supply chain from marketing, to engineering, to the vendor's contractor who will actually design the tooling. Sign off might take days instead of weeks. This sort of efficiency improvement allows more engineering, design work, or other optimization to be done to every good and service in our economy allowing it to penetrate into even the most thin margin use cases. From farming to high finance products and services are substantially more influenced and optimized by specialist professionals than they were in 1990. Increase efficiency like this throughout the national and global economy is how lawnmowers and A/C units can be sold on sale for $100 and still make a profit. (yes I know that example isn't perfect but you get the point).

dougmwne 4 years ago | |

I had a moment like this recently with, of all things, a snorkeling mask. It was one of those full face masks with a big snorkel sticking out the top like a unicorn's horn that popped on the market a few years ago. It is a marvel. It took all the downsides of the old masks and ingeniously fixed them. Full mouth and nose breathing so you can breathe naturally and comfortably, an airflow pattern that pulls dry air over the lens and keeps it fog free, a wide-angle lense for a better view and less claustrophobia, and an ingeniously designed system of valves that keeps water from flowing into the snorkel and uses your exhalation to push any leaked water in the mask out the bottom. All together, it eliminated the underwater panic I would usually have to fight through while snorkeling and made me feel like a dolphin. No way a product like this could have been made without the collaboration of a lot of very skilled professionals.

nradov 4 years ago | | |

Be careful with those. Diver's Alert Network states that full face snorkeling masks can cause dangerous hypercapnia unless they have tight seals and working one-way valves.

https://blog.daneurope.org/en_US/blog/are-full-face-snorkeli...

david422 4 years ago | | |

That's got to be some person with a snorkeling hobby and they are just thinking "there's got to be a better way than this".

treis 4 years ago | | |

These are somewhat dangerous as the additional airspace allows CO2 to build up. I haven't seen good studies either way, but there's lots of anecdata out there of people reporting symptoms.

tcpekin 4 years ago | | |

The real problem with these masks is that unless you are quite good at equalizing with your jaw, it will be hard to relieve pressure if you dive down more than 6-8 feet or so.

ghaff 4 years ago | | |

Those types of masks actually existed in the 1960s though I'm sure the newer ones are more sophisticated. My mother had one of those.

rootsudo 4 years ago | | |

Alright, you have me sold - link me to the mask?

MontyCarloHall 4 years ago | |

The downside to broadening the talent pool for design/manufacturing is that it means workers now have to be among the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living. It no longer suffices to be the best in a local region.

If each local region needs its own widget factory, then to become a top widgetsmith you only have to compete with the local widgetsmith talent pool. Just as there can be many high school star athletes across the world, there can be many top widgetsmiths within their local widget factories across the world, even if each is likely mediocre relative to the global pool of widgetsmiths.

Now the widget market has globalized. To become a top widgetsmith, you now need to be the best in the world. There is no room for locally optimal widgetsmiths when the market can globally optimize, just as there’s no room for most star high school athletes at the NBA.

The upside is that the entire world gets much better widgets. The downside is that you can only make a good living as a widgetsmith if you’re the absolute best in the world. Local markets lead to redundancy, which is globally inefficient but locally optimal.

inglor_cz 4 years ago | | |

"workers now have to be the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living"

This is extra pronounced for singers, actors etc., but not as much for people such as software engineers. A mediocre programmer that implements functionality that you need is much more valuable for you than a star programmer immersed in his UltraFastXMLParserForHaskell library and does not take side jobs.

wolverine876 4 years ago | | |

> that it means workers now have to be the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living. It no longer suffices to be the best in a local region.

Yes, though for most jobs there is far more demand than can be met by the best in the world. When someone needs a lawyer or software developer, they are very unlikely to hire the best in the world.

BurningFrog 4 years ago | | |

The upside I think of is that this enables more specialization and "division of labor", which is one of the basic drivers of prosperity.

BuckRogers 4 years ago | | |

Very well put. Excellently stated. That's one of the concepts that many have thought about, because we all feel the effects, but aren't exactly sure how to articulate. I'm going to be thinking about that comment!

It definitely applies to software. It's why trades are a much better career option, local will never not matter in that case. The best 'star high school' welders and electricians are always going to be desirable, as no one is flying in the best in the world for every little job.

Most of us, except the best in the world among us, messed up going into software. The script completely flipped on this since I was a child in the 80s and was dreaming of becoming a programmer as I am now.

Jeff_Brown 4 years ago | | |

It's noteworthy that you're talking about the market for products, not services. Services generally don't scale like products do. We need more plumbers than toilet manufacturers.

ajmurmann 4 years ago | | |

A big question to be is if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox applies to this type of labor.

njharman 4 years ago | | |

Yep.

That is why society is (has to) move into post-employment era. It's no longer required or even beneficial for everyone to be employed and/or employed to the extreme degree they are now (~50% of waking hours).

dalbasal 4 years ago | |

"From farming to high finance products and services are substantially more influenced and optimized by specialist professionals than they were in 1990. Increase efficiency like this throughout the national and global economy is how lawnmowers and A/C units can be sold on sale for $100 and still make a profit. "

You can find examples of this, but overall, I dispute the generalization.

I think quality/price improvements have been monumental in some areas, stagnant in others. Computer related products have gone crazy. It's not more for less though, it's "much more for a little more." The market grew a lot and a produces a hell of a lot more. Even that isn't the norm though. More for less, even less for less, are uncommon.

Farming and manufacturing.... None of the capitalisation, gene patents and such of recent generations is anything like basic green revolution tech, in terms of productivity growth. Farming is different. It uses less labour, more capital, but it's not producing much more efficiently. The price of farm produce isn't falling, quality is not rising. Same for most manufacturing, especially basic manufacturing. Most of the last generations' gains were made by employing cheaper employees in cheaper places, not reinventing manufacturing techniques. So, low end, high volume manufactured goods got cheaper, but a car still costs what it costs. Good quality appliances generally do too.

The quality of housing has gone up, but prices are often very high.

Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.

Medicine... same. More and better, but more expensive.

There's a pattern here that's more complex and interesting than the average.

dntrkv 4 years ago | | |

> Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.

There are many thousands of people on this forum that have gotten a free education and in turn, one of the best careers in history from that free education that would never have been possible until recently.

I'm seeing more and more people (that aren't designers and engineers) are forgoing classical education and making a great living for themselves just by utilizing the freely available information on the internet.

stevenhuang 4 years ago | | |

> Even that isn't the norm though. More for less, even less for less, are uncommon.

At least in the embedded space, this is definitely not true. The norm is approaching more and more features for less.

thaumasiotes 4 years ago | | |

> Computer related products have gone crazy. It's not more for less though, it's "much more for a little more."

I thought we liked Raspberry Pis on HN.

aiisjustanif 4 years ago | | |

I’m assuming you are referring to the US.

wolverine876 4 years ago | |

> Today the glue probably works better (barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy)

Regulation might do that and there is much more going on:

Regulation also protects health and safety of customers and workers (especially important with chemical products) and prevents fraud, and it corrects market distortions that damage businesses, including instituting changes that the nature of the market prevents any one business from implementing, and opening up competition.

Other things limit technological innovation, including incumbents with market power who profit more from eliminating competition than from improving their products.

Jeff_Brown 4 years ago | |

> missed the elephant that is ...

Definitely a big deal, but mostly invisible on the demand side. You're talking about improvements to the supply process; the article is about what consumers experience.

tootie 4 years ago | |

I think he missed a lot bigger elephants. Things like the massive reduction in global poverty levels or eradication of polio. The global decrease in crime. We reversed ozone depletion and massively decreased the mortality rate for HIV. This post is more like a list of cool products we have now when we have monumental human development achievements no one is talking about.

inglor_cz 4 years ago | | |

Polio is not eradicated and with Taliban taking over Afghanistan, likely won't be anytime soon.

minikites 4 years ago | |

>(barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy)

Can you really not think of any benefits of regulation to correct for pervasive market failures?

Filligree 4 years ago | | |

Of course there are benefits. It’s still true that it compromises the main goal of the glue—compromise is the point.

dalbasal 4 years ago |

This reminds me of a golden age blog post, when lists turned out to be an understudied literary device. I'm a fan of "dumps." Some interestingly debatable ones here:

"Intellectual Property Maximalism rollback: copyright terms have not and probably will not be indefinitely extended again to eternity to protect Mickey Mouse, and in 2019, for the first time since 1998, works entered the public domain"

I think the easy indicator may be the wrong one here. Defined more broadly, the public domain is not being enriched. For example, the web was a lot smaller in 1999, but it was a much more public domain. Today's web and post web internet is more centralised, controlled and therefore private property. Google could crawl pages, links, forums, because they were public, and use that access to create a search engine. Content, connections and signal are, today, proprietary. You can't order the world's information if that information is facebook's, only facebook can.

Or patents, more stuff of the last generation is patented than the previous'. Does that mean we invented more or we patented more? What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public.

Old copyright expiry deadlines might be a symbolic lead indicator, but they're determining the location of a fence post in county scale land dispute. A tiny, legible, part of the whole. In real terms, Disney's copyright portfolio is worth more, not less.

anticodon 4 years ago |

Environment: air quality in most places has continued to improve (and considering the growing evidence on the harms of air pollution, this may well be the single most important item on this whole page), forest area has increased , and more rivers are safe to fish in

Because almost all the industrial production that pollutes water and air moved to third-world countries, where people suffer from pollution. Same for thrash that is taken to China, India, Indonesia for "recycling", but is actually burned in fires or thrown into the ocean. I wouldn't consider it an improvement due to advances in technology.

nwah1 4 years ago | |

He referenced the Environmental Kuznets Curve. This provides a mechanistic understanding of what is happening. It isn't that modern industrial civilization requires a certain amount of pollution per unit of production which can be offloaded.

Rather, pollution is largely something that occurs in the production process in locations where desperation for production is so high that they are not willing to put in any personal effort or social policies to curtail it at the expense of production.

However, once you become richer, air quality and so on moves higher in our collective list of priorities. Production can occur without pollution. It is just more expensive, and requires care.

elproxy 4 years ago | | |

The Environmental Kuznets Curve is problematic though, see for instance: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2020/10/9/response-to-mcafe...

denton-scratch 4 years ago |

To me, the article seems panglossian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide).

Some of the "upsides" (e.g. improvements in patent regime) just aren't there. Some aren't as wonderful as they are described.

I'm in my mid-sixties; I'm very much a candidate for the "things were better in the old days" brigade.

But I do think many (most?) things have improved. Housing is better; healthcare is immeasurably better (unless you can't afford it); and mobile telephony has improved the lives of at least a billion people worldwide.

Because I'm not miserable old git, I'm not going to list downsides.

[Edit] OK, I'll list one: permanent war.

rthomas6 4 years ago |

But are people happier and more fulfilled? Are they more able to have a meaning-filled life surrounded by people with whom they have close and lasting relationships?

What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?

iambateman 4 years ago |

I often ask people: “if you could be 20-years old in 1991 or 2021, which would you pick?”

An incredible number of people pick ‘91. Some people even ask to go back to the seventies.

This article explains why I would much rather be young now rather than before.

MontyCarloHall 4 years ago |

With the exception of a few (very important) services (e.g. college tuition, healthcare, childcare), increases in income have actually outpaced inflation for most other goods and services over the last 20 years [0]. This is something I almost never see discussed; almost everyone seems to believe that real incomes have totally stagnated.

That said, given current inflationary trends, it will be interesting to see if this still holds up in a decade or two.

[0] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cpi2020.png?x...

Fricken 4 years ago |

We are social animals. Other people make me happy. Other people make me miserable.

Quality of life depends far more on the integrity of a person's human relationships than these trivial material gains.

I can remain bright eyed through all kinds of horribleness if I believe my suffering is meaningful and valued.

steve_adams_86 4 years ago | |

This is crucial.

I used to be very excited about technology and I really believed it could fundamentally improve humanity in some way(s).

Now I'm excited about prosocial things, interconnection, anything which allows humans as a social animal to truly connect, find meaning, and uplift each other. Everything else is likely a distraction.

This is the hard part though. Technology lets you make incremental progress, occasional breakthroughs, and rarely has any major setbacks that aren't purely monetary. Humans having healthy social lives at the micro and macro scale is something we arguably understand and can affect much less than technology at the moment.

wyldfire 4 years ago |

> Car Theft is rarer, and in particular, we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our car radios

> Remember when physically detaching your car radio to avoid leaving it in the car was considered a 100% normal thing to do?

Why is it rarer, I wonder? I do recall having a detachable faceplate on my car radio. I sold that car in ~2010 or so but stopped bothering with the detaching long before then.

> All Day: because you won’t be yelled at for tying up the (only) phone line

... missing phone calls because I was occupying the phone line. My university claimed to have been "wired" but it was always "going to be enabled 'next year'".

namdnay 4 years ago | |

For car radios it’s because they no longer exist in their previous modular form. Now a car infotainment system is tightly coupled to the exact car model itself (because you also use it to manage lots of other stuff, and it’s tied to various controls (wheel, touch, central console etc)

ghaff 4 years ago | |

>Why is it rarer, I wonder?

There are various ani-theft technologies that can kick in if an infotainment system is removed. Electronics are also just cheaper in general so there's less value in stealing them.

wolverine876 4 years ago | |

> Why is it rarer, I wonder?

All crime is down significantly, except murder and gun crime in the last year or two.

lotsofpulp 4 years ago | |

> Why is it rarer, I wonder? I do recall having a detachable faceplate on my car radio. I sold that car in ~2010 or so but stopped bothering with the detaching long before then.

I imagine the value of a stolen car radio has plummeted since the combo of smartphone + CarPlay/android auto/3.5mm aux jack/Bluetooth is ubiquitous in any car made in the past 10 to 15 years.

skinkestek 4 years ago | |

Norway had a lot of car infotaintment theft as late as a couple of years ago.

I think some Eastern European gang perfected a way to smash windows and grab the valuable parts because at some point arrests were made and after that I haven't heard about it.

sumanthvepa 4 years ago |

My kitchen is definitely antediluvian by this standard. We still have a gas stove. The induction stove after week of use has been relegated quietly to the attic by the wife, and has stayed there for years. I suspect Indian cooking doesn’t lend itself well to the use of induction stoves.

Etheryte 4 years ago | |

There are many dishes that you simply can't make without the heat of a gas stove. Mostly I would say you won't find these in the western cuisine though, so it explains how the author might miss this point. Modern gas stoves are pretty much as safe as any other appliance, but I can see why someone who doesn't see a need for one might avoid it.

globular-toast 4 years ago | |

Induction stoves are good for boiling water and nothing else. And I mean boiling, not simmering. I'm going back to gas very soon and can't wait to start cooking properly again.

tristor 4 years ago | | |

Pretty much agreed. I thought induction was going to be the miracle technology that would make a kitchen both highly productive and capable while increasing safety standards markedly over working with open flame. I was all in on getting a high-end induction range to replace my older radiant electric range, and thanks to a friend's advice I decided to buy a freestanding single-burner induction cooktop to try it first.

I found that induction is a VERY VERY uneven heating source, in fact it's the most uneven heating source. When using it with traditional cooking methods and implements that are also usually quite uneven (like cast iron) it becomes a complete travesty. Additionally, typical cooking techniques that are intended to address unevenness of heat like pan flipping doesn't work with an induction cooktop because when you lift the pan it shuts off.

I ended up getting a dual fuel gas range (gas cooktop, electric oven with convection) and I love it. Gas is just the best way to cook, period. I wish it weren't so, because it's not energy efficient and it can be a safety hazard, but it just straight out works better than anything else.

11thEarlOfMar 4 years ago |

Interesting. My first thought was, 'HIV is not a death sentence', and looked for the section on medicine. Randomly:

- Mapping the human genome has led to many applications of genetic medicine.

- Polio was eradicated in India.

- Cancer death rates declined 27% since 1999...

nostrademons 4 years ago |

I don't think the author has kids, but as a new parent the 2020s have numerous improvements over the 1990s:

Click & go stroller & carseat systems are magical. Used to be that if your baby fell asleep in the car, you'd have to wake them up to undo the 5-point harness, transfer them to stroller, buckle another 5-point harness, undo it when you get to your destination, and then deal with the screaming baby. Now the carseat base stays in the car, you unclick the carseat, pop the whole thing into the stroller, get to your night out, pop the carseat on an inverted high-chair, and the kid can sleep the whole way or join you at the table.

Cheap plastic has dramatically reduced the cost and increased the safety of toys. Also, electronic toys & learning aids are super cheap now - my kid's got a Mandarin/English pictionary where you hover the pen over the pictures and it tells you the word for it in either Mandarin or English, and it cost < $20.

High-end preschools are better. There's been a lot of research on how to support children's social & emotional development that's now made its way into the classroom.

Traveling is generally better. There've been large improvements in travel cribs like the Pack'n'Play or Lotus, many hotels have them stocked, and there's the aforementioned improvements to carseats. Also airfare is cheaper. My kid went on more plane trips before he turned 2 than I did in my whole childhood.

There've been vaccines developed for many common childhood illnesses. No more rotavirus, no more chickenpox.

The big bugaboos for parents today are housing and work. You need 2 incomes to buy a house now, which makes everything else much more pressed for time. But if you can ignore that, there've been a lot of conveniences invented to help improve the efficiency of that constrained time.

duderific 4 years ago | |

There is a huge downside to the cheapness of toys though. Every house with little kids is now swimming in cheap plastic junk. Even if you take a hard line with your kids, they'll still get piles of garbage on birthdays, holidays and anytime family comes to visit.

When I was 7 years old way back in the day, all my toys could fit in a small bin about 24 x 24 inches.

80% of the crap in our house never gets played with, just sits in the bottom of a toy box taking up space.

jscipione 4 years ago |

More of a criticism of the Harvard Innovation Lab photo than the article, but the "1980's" desktop computer pictured is a rough facsimile of the Macintosh Classic released October 15, 1990. This machine represented the one of the first products produced by the Apple Industrial Design Group which had replaced the iconic '80s Snow White design from Frog Design.

betamaxthetape 4 years ago | |

I don't want to detract from the article, but that picture is a bit odd. You've got a Macintosh Classic (or Classic II, which shares the same case) with the Apple logo and model name covered over (why?).

Then there's the keyboard / mouse combination. The keyboard is an Apple Keyboard II [1] (or a minor variant - there were a few different models, with adjustable height and different switches), which came with the Macintosh Classic and uses the ADB connection. But the mouse is a Macintosh Mouse (M0100) [2], that uses the DE-9 connector, a connector that the Classic / Classic II did not have.

I know this is being pedantic, and in the end it doesn't matter, but it does annoy me that the computer / keyboard / mouse combination presented would not work together. Like the above poster, I expected better of the Harvard Innovation Lab.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards#Apple_Keyboard...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_mice#Macintosh_Mouse_(M0...

johnwalkr 4 years ago |

Large grocery stores are amazing. A well-traveled person from the 70s would have their mind blown walking into a Canadian Superstore.

webmaven 4 years ago |

> remember how advertisements always had to say “no batteries included”?

Hmm. Perhaps this is a regionalism, but I remember the phrase as being "batteries not included":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batteries_Not_Included

bewaretheirs 4 years ago |

This one has if anything gotten worse rather than better:

> Car Theft is rarer, and in particular, we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our car radios

Yes, car radios have been made harder to steal, but now our car windows are smashed to steal laptops and other valuables. And catalytic converter theft is also rampant.

perardi 4 years ago | |

And catalytic converter theft is also rampant.

Well that sure seems to be true.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/catalytic-converter-thefts-n...

“According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, the pandemic has seen a rapid rise in catalytic converter theft. In 2019, an average of 282 catalytic converters were stolen every month; in 2020 the average had risen to 1,203—and that's just an average. In December alone, 2,347 catalytic converters were stolen.”

And anecdotally, living in Chicago: I know of so very many people who have had their convertors stolen. The wonders of outdoor parking.

JimTheMan 4 years ago | | |

I wonder how much this is an American phenomenon. I've been reading about it on here quite a bit, haven't really heard any news of it in Australia.

It feels unreal to read. Like, crime must be higher in Chicago/LA etc than I realised.

blfr 4 years ago |

Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter” and we have things pretty good now when it comes to food yet people seem to be poorly dressed and obese. Many other technological and social improvements also feel hollow to me for that reason: they're not making our lives meaningfully better.

rthomas6 4 years ago |

The big changes, I think, are smartphones and widespread LGBT acceptance. Everything else just seems like incremental improvements to existing technology.

cmrdporcupine 4 years ago | |

Smoking in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and other places where you wouldn't even think about it now. Coming home after a night out stinking like stale cigarette smoke was the norm, even if you didn't smoke (which you may as well have).

_bfhp 4 years ago | |

I'd submit two more:

An incredible amount of whistleblower leaks made it possible for citizens to know what horrible things their governments are doing. There is a real check on state power when the press has such a reach now, and you can publish (or dump) materials anywhere online even if you don't trust the press.

Frozen/convenient dietary alternatives to enslaving and killing animals are now easily available and it's no longer conventional wisdom that veganism will kill you or make you a stick figure person. Not likely considered incremental by those living beings!

dougmwne 4 years ago |

We can add camera drones to this list. They would have been a sci-fi fantasy in 1990. Now you can get incredibly stable and clear aerial footage for a few hundred dollars that would have required a film crew, a helicopter a pilot and a flight plan a few decades ago.

sokoloff 4 years ago |

Driving maps/planning is wildly better, not just a little better.

I can remember in the early 90s going to AAA to get paper maps for upcoming trips, buying a Rand McNally almanac for the car, etc.

First getting mapquest and then later in-car GPS and later Waze has been super convenient.

jjav 4 years ago | |

But is it better? Buying maps and planning a road trip is satifying. Blindly following the voice on waze, not really. Worst part is getting there and not knownig how to get back without waze because I was zoned out of the surroundings.

Although the one part that is unequivocally better is the real-time traffic/incident info to reroute around trouble.

sokoloff 4 years ago | | |

I think it is. I can recall driving alone trying to steal quick peeks at the paper map. Safer (but more difficult) was doing map-based navigation in light aircraft.

Database-backed GPS transformed both of those to be easier and safer to use while traveling.

AlbertCory 4 years ago |

Without denying any of the improvements cited here, some things, even in computing, are no better:

1) Printers still suck. By that I mean, mainly, reliability. I try to print something from my Mac laptop. The printer is connected, has paper, and displays no error messages. Nonetheless, nothing happens. There's no apparent way to figure out why. There wasn't in the 90s and there still isn't.

2) Software quality is, if anything, worse. It's clear that no unusual cases are ever tested for; only the most common browsers and a few of the recent releases of the OS. Error cases are handled no better than they ever were.

3) What else?

bhelkey 4 years ago | |

> 1) Printers still suck. By that I mean, mainly, reliability.

Laser printers are a step forward even if they leave a lot to be desired. Also, somewhat anecdotally, the amount of times I need to use a printer has significantly fallen since 2005.

dionidium 4 years ago |

Seeing the "War on Drugs Lost" and "War On Smoking Won" sections back-to-back highlights how much stuff like this depends on how you define success. Of course, far more people smoke cigarettes in 2021 than consume illegal drugs (or legal marijuana), but we won the battle on the former and lost the war on the latter? Second, a lot of our worst addicts now live in tents in open-air drug markets that exist on a scale that would have been unimaginable in 1991. Is this what progress looks like?

sdevonoes 4 years ago |

There are tons of live improvements from my point of view, but the few downsides that exist today make it worse in overall. The main downside I see is:

- big tech companies are becoming so powerful that they will interfere in our daily lives through tech (because tech is everywhere) and there is little we can do about it we want it or not.

You cannot escape Google/Microsoft/Facebook/whatever. You just can't (unless you go full offline, but then the tech live improvements since the 90s go away as well).

dntrkv 4 years ago | |

> You cannot escape Google/Microsoft/Facebook/whatever.

This is such nonsense.

There are more alternatives now than ever. Name any service provided by FANAMNGS (or whatever acronym we're using today) and there are many alternatives. Shit we even have viable alternatives to iPhones and Androids.

Now if you need AWS level quality of service, you're gonna have to use a service provided by a company that has the means to provide that level of service. The difference is, 20 years ago, that level of service was just not available to your average person/company.

If you're talking about social media, then yeah, social media NETWORKS rely on having everyone on the same platform. It's easier than ever to host your own Geocities equivalent, if that's what you wanna do for some reason.

sdevonoes 4 years ago | | |

So, I'll give my point of view:

- all the employers I ever had either used Google or Microsoft suite of tools (e.g., gmail, office, etc.)

- my family uses WhatsApp, and they give a damn whether Facebook becomes Big Brother or not

So there you have two aspects of my life (big ones) where I cannot escape the big corporations.

sixothree 4 years ago | |

I got Pong as a kid (specifically Telstar Marksman) and I have been 100% all in since that day. Every doubling and incremental change has been exciting to me.

The way technology today is implemented repulses me. The surveillance, gamification, addition psychology all seem so unrecognized by the public but have made me less interested.

But for me the biggest grievance is the poorly working software. So tired of it. So so tired.

throwaway-x123 4 years ago |

Life improvement is more free time. Free time is time free from necessary work. This includes free time from cooking, cleaning, etc, life support activities at home, too. In total, the number of working hours on average is higher than in 1990, I think, for full time workers. For some workers the work day increased to 12 hours/day, from 8 hours. It is unlikely the worker will be able to use his free time after long work day so even with non-work productivity improvements, he may not see the improvement. It might be that just 1 hour of additional free time is a better life improvement than anything. Universal cable, he list as a life improvement, is hardly worth longer work day.

I want to say that IMO: the workday should be lowered. It is possible to produce all necessary things for living in just 2-4 hours/day, including houses, cars and many more. See productivity growth. Free time can be work too, but it should not be seen as necessary work, everyone should be able to make a choice: work necessary time (2-4 hours/day) or longer. If you think something worth your free time, OK, work at your free time. But what happen is that you try to tell me that I have to work each day 8-12 hours/day so you can have an universal cable or a new video game, etc. Not cool.

nradov 4 years ago | |

There's nothing stopping you from having more free time. Move to a low cost area, get a part time job, and live a frugal lifestyle. However most people have different priorities, and prefer to chase social status and material comfort at the expense of free time.

throwaway-x123 4 years ago | | |

Why frugal lifestyle? Was it frugal lifestyle in 1970? From 1970 productivity increased a few times, so the work day can be reduced a few times.

I've spent some time looking for a part time job, there is none/rare. Also part time wage likely will not be enough for life support.

Almost no one have a choice in how many hours to work so we do not know what people prefer.

andrepd 4 years ago |

> EU: the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive

A funny point considering the absolute unmitigated disaster that is the Eurozone both in concept and implementation x)

> Keurig & other Single-Serve coffee machines

Another unsustainable waste of materials. Just use ground coffee please.

> Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”

Yes, it has been outsourced to countries with dirt-cheap labour. I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing.

jacob019 4 years ago |

I like how the EU is listed under technology.

nivenkos 4 years ago | |

And then brings in legislation like the Cookie notices and Link Tax, but does absolutely nothing to protect and drive the European Tech industry (where is the European FAANG?), allowing monopolistic American corporations to ship all the high-paying jobs to the US.

Europe had ARM, a whole slew of microcomputer companies (and still the Raspberry Pi foundation today), Nokia, Linux, MySQL, etc. - all largely sold off or destroyed. Such a loss of potential.

the-dude 4 years ago | | |

Isn't this openess forced upon the EU by their strongest ally?

the-dude 4 years ago | |

Well, they are technocrats after all.

lostlogin 4 years ago | |

Perhaps ‘technology’ is defined as ‘anything but can fall off’?

lostlogin 4 years ago |

Neat list.

I have issue with this one in part:

> Not Watching crummy VHS tapes, period

The rewind button actually worked 100% of the time.

I also have an issue with the like for USB. Yes, it’s better than most 90’s tech, but USB-C in its various guises/disguises and it’s horrible relationship with Thunderbolt is a travesty. The cables and ports can’t reliably be distinguished and various things just won’t work, or become unreliable. It’s just so unhelpful to have so many identical specs in in form factor.

johnwalkr 4 years ago | |

I travel a lot for work (well, I used to) and changed all my peripherals and devices (even my shaver) to usb-c interface/charging, in some cases by hacking it in myself. It took an annoying amount of research, and Nintendo switch was the worst offender, but eventually I have one charger, and a few cables for ALL of my stuff in a tiny bag. Everything in the bag is worth about $50, and I have the same bag duplicated in my backpack, desk and trip luggage (in this one also international adapters that snap onto the charger).

One caveat is I only used macbooks for years. I was shocked when I built a Ryzen desktop and one usb-c port was standard, without thunderbolt support. So I had to begrudgingly use a to c cables there.

271828182846 4 years ago |

( "Not Rewinding VHS tapes before returning to the library or Blockbuster" ... how about going to some video store was kinda cool and added some social aspect to sitting on your couch alone and watching a movie? how can you even add crap like that on such a list with such a title and not realize how delusional this is?)

there are no material life improvements - only more efficient dopamine triggers. but that's not an improvement because before the 90s - guess what - they had their own triggers.

in that spirit you could add how access to more diverse pornography brought happiness to so many lonely men considering how especially a hundred years ago they were so starved they would get aroused at the sight of women's knees. poor bastards.

guess what, your mega-tittie-porn isn't really an improvement over some picture where a woman lifts her skirt you can see her ankles. it's just a fucking going round in circles what you all confuse with "improvement".

life for many people fucking sucks and most of those "improvements" only come at the expense of removing people further from any kind of meaningful spiritual fullfilment.

megameter 4 years ago | |

Access to sexual experiences is something I would count as a great liberation of the past decades. When a man got desperate for release not all that long ago, they didn't hop online for an outlet, they drove to the seedy part of town and visited a strip club, went to a porno theater, solicited hookers, etc. Those things are still around, and there were some possibilities to "phone date", but lack of options made things overall less secure and discreet for everyone involved relative to today where the man can just look up an Onlyfans or prowl Tinder profiles. 1980's teen movies like "Sixteen Candles" were OK with date rape as a concept, and that was just the tip-of-the-iceberg. We're doing better.

This goes even more so if we speak of the spectrum of LGBT identities, which in 1991 was in the midst of losing all continuity with the past because so many died from AIDS; many folks then would stay closeted and quiet because coming out was just too threatening. Casual homophobia was everywhere, and the "gay neighborhoods" of larger cities were somewhat exceptional even within that city. Now it's hardly unusual to be out, though generational acceptance remains rocky.

thegrimmest 4 years ago | |

>there are no material life improvements

I don't know about you, but having cheap access to climate control and refrigeration is a pretty big deal. Even animals appreciate a warm place to sleep and fresh food.

Your reasoning seems ascetic. If a fellow says he's happier with the mega-titties than the ankles, who are you to tell him otherwise? Every human experience can be categorized into a dopamine or cortisol trigger. Who vested the authority in you to decide which of them constitute "meaningful spiritual fullfilment" and which do not?

robbedpeter 4 years ago |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

>The percentage of the global population living in absolute poverty fell from over 80% in 1800 to under 20% by 2015.

This is astonishing.

In the time frame he's focusing on, from the 90s to now, the decrease in absolute poverty and substantial increases in well-being globally are facts that subsume any single technology or widget or innovation.

24% in 1990 down to around 7% today. More people are living better lives than at any point before in history, and this should be celebrated, but hardly seems to be noticed.

The things he points out, however, are crucial pieces of why things have gotten better. We're able to instantly connect to a global pool of information, alerting each other to the swarm of problems facing the world, and we're able to take action.

Charitable donations, political activism, decentralized media, ubiquitous internet access, and a thousand other small things have enabled and inspired people to use powerful networks of people and computers and resources to effectively target and fix huge problems facing billions of people.

Sure, we have real challenges in the misbehavior of big tech companies and the politics of the panopticon, but maybe we can be hopeful that history has a trend toward a more liberal, purposeful, enabling life for all humans that exceeds the mere struggle for survival.

I think of this article as a reminder to appreciate things that are so incredibly important, even if they tend to go unnoticed day to day. Stop and smell the victory of technology over struggle and disease and discomfort and starvation.

globular-toast 4 years ago |

It's good to reflect on improvement as it's so easy to start taking stuff for granted. The two I often think about are smoking and food.

The smoking ban happened in England in 2007, so I didn't have to put up with smoking for that long. But I can definitely remember the time when going out meant your clothes and hair stunk of smoke. It was disgusting. In Germany it is still legal for smaller establishments to have smoking, and smoking is still very popular in Germany, unlike the UK and US. A few of us were looking for a place to have some drinks one night and found it really difficult because going into a smoking place was out of the question.

Growing up in the UK we always had the cheapest food. In the 90s supermarkets started having value brands and we had a lot of "Tesco Value" stuff. Today you just cannot find food at such low quality. If you buy the cheapest today, you are getting what would have been a premium product back then. The bread was like tough foam, the crisps like burnt potato skins, the beans were mostly watery sauce.

adventured 4 years ago |

This note at the bottom, about high mortality rates in the past, is always striking to remember:

"My grandmother casually horrified us a few years ago by going through the list of her dead siblings: 2 died on the farm of ‘summer diarrhea’ (bovine tuberculosis from unpasteurized milk) as infants, an unremarkable fate in the area, and then 3 died in their teens–20s after moving to the city to work in textile factories. The rest died later. For comparison, she lost 1 child out of 5 (stillbirth), and 0% of her >12 grandchildren/great-grandchildren."

Several years ago an older friend of mine recounted to me that his father was one of three siblings to survive the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920, six of his brothers and sisters died from it.

lordnacho 4 years ago | |

Indeed. What I found interesting is that when I looked up the stats, the death rates for under 1 year olds has continued to decline even in recent decades. I had previously thought it would have stalled after the things you mentioned had been solved. My guess is premature births have much higher survival now than 20 or 40 years ago.

lotsofpulp 4 years ago | | |

I would assume that the birth rate going down considerably amongst poorer people is a big factor too.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...

germinalphrase 4 years ago | | |

A side effect of the abortion debate has been significant financial investments by the pro-life in premature birth research. The earlier it is possible to define viability, the earlier abortions can effectively be banned.

wolverine876 4 years ago |

> Fresh Guacamole can be easily bought due to pressure pasteurization

Where do I find this? I tried this spring and summer but couldn't find guacamole that doesn't spoil within a day or two, especially after being opened, which is too soon to be practical.

owenversteeg 4 years ago | |

It looks like Wholly Guacamole, with 83% market share of the US guacamole market, is pressure pasteurized, so it should last significantly longer: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/econo...

As far as prices go, seems like Walmart has them at $4.89 for 6 mini cups (12oz total or 340g) or a large single package of 15oz/425g for $4.98. An average avocado weighs 136 grams without the pit or skin according to the USDA. Let's say 1/5th of the total weight of avocado flesh you buy is spoiled in some way (too stringy, too hard, spoiled etc.) At $1.25 per avocado and 20% spoilage, the large single package of Wholly Guacamole and the avocado are nearly the same price. Various sources claim that the average US avocado price is around $2 but when I buy them myself I usually get them around $1; I suppose if you're paying more it's an even better value.

So, looks like a good value in addition to saving on spoilage. My only worry would be the plastic waste, but I can't seem to find what the containers are made out of and if those are recyclable.

wolverine876 4 years ago | | |

Thank you! I've eaten Wholly Guacamole; not really the best, but now that I know it's pasteurized, I might try it again.

WillPostForFood 4 years ago | |

Yo Quiero is using the process on their pre packaged guacamole.

https://yoquierobrands.com/

jameshart 4 years ago | |

Get the single serve packs then.

wolverine876 4 years ago | | |

Thanks, but that's too much waste for my taste.

musicale 4 years ago |

The linked/pictured 1980s and 1990s desktops seem much more accessible and usable since items are visible, tangible, and divided by function. Wall space is well-used for communication, reminders, calendar, and artwork.

Following the link, the "clutter free" desktop from 2014 hides all affordances and labels, and dumps everything into a laptop and smartphone screen. The "clutter" is now digital, more complex, and arguably more intrusive in terms of continuous interruptions that follow you around everywhere.

yawaworht1978 4 years ago |

Sorry to be that guy, but there have been anti improvements as well. All this came with a financial cost, things seem much more expensive than back then. Society as a whole is much more sedatery and physically lazy and this is reflected in overweight numbers, contributing factor to increased health care cost. And ever since corona struck, life quality rapidly decreased for those who like to get out and do things.

newbamboo 4 years ago |

War on drugs lost, war on smoking won: people smoke the herb too. Because it’s not yet monopolized the incentive to not use weird chemical pesticides and whatnot is lower than it is with tobacco. Still I mostly agree. I just worry there will be long term health impacts that weren’t there when weed was grown organically and much lower in thc. The vaping pandemic of 2019 comes to mind as one example.

jacobmischka 4 years ago |

I can't pinpoint what it is specifically, but something about this website visually makes reading it seem unpleasant.

I think the lines of text are too wide, the font is too large and thick, the line height is too small, and paragraphs really need to be padded vertically, the indentation instead makes it seem like a high school essay and made me want to close the tab immediately.

tylerjdurden 4 years ago | |

On the other hand, I really liked the way the links behave when you hover over them.

thorwasdfasdf 4 years ago |

Look at the essentials and you'll see we've actually been going backwards, ever since the 1970s:

Housing: Now less affordable than ever. It takes more hours worked to afford any kind of shelter than ever in the last 50 years. According to an interview I once watched: in the 60s, a painter could afford a single family house and six kids and the wife didn't even need to work. today, two painters working together can barely afford shelter, even with no kids.

Cars: MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same. Comfort is roughly comporable, at least since the invention of AC. It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s, in terms of average number of hours worked in order to afford a car.

Education has seen the greatest amount of inflation. Whereas a high school diploma could give you a great enough salary to afford a house in the 60s. Now, not even a bachelors or masters is enough to afford basic shelter for many people living in the first world.

Yes, we have a gazillion more computers, iphones, smart watches and toys to play with. We can fill our entire house with plastic now. what goood is that if you don't have a house to stay in? where will you plug in all those electronics and your massive 70" tv, when you're out on the street?

dminvs 4 years ago |

> stoves

You'll pry my gas range from my cold, dead hands

memco 4 years ago |

> All-You-Can-Eat Broadband: Faster

> ...

> Indefinite: not worrying about running out of AOL hours, liberated from the tyranny of time metering and (mostly) bandwidth metering

Except that some ISPs do have caps and going over results in throttling or extra charges. I thought those days were behind us, but no. It is better than it used to be, but it's still a thing.

hit8run 4 years ago |

No one can afford a house in or close to the town anymore. So actually life quality for most people went down south.

alberto-m 4 years ago |

The list cannot obviously contain everything, yet I think the switch from CRTs to LCD monitors should have been mentioned.

My eyes used to itch when I watched a CRT for more than a couple of hours, if better technologies didn't become available I would have probably not chosen a career in IT.

Pelam 4 years ago |

I love the list and optimism is a breath of fresh air, but climate change is the elephant hiding between the lines. It is linked in many ways to many of those improvements.

It also threatens to wipe away many of those, especially if societies or ecosystems begin to collapse or conflicts increase.

d_burfoot 4 years ago |

>having Fansubs available for all anime (no longer do anime clubs watch raw anime and have to debate afterwards what the plot was! Yes, that’s actually how they’d watch anime back in the 1970s–1990s

This actually sounds really fun and makes me feel nostalgic for the 90s

pessimizer 4 years ago | |

In the late-80s/early-90s my supply of animu was supplied by a HS friend from Singapore who still had friends and family there who would tape things off TV for him that would get to me 2nd or 3rd generation. I also generally got what I got.

I'd be so happy when I got my hands on something that VIZ reprinted, like Baoh, Grey, or Outlanders. Then, I'd know what was going on.

trynumber9 4 years ago | |

If you know a bunch of people who do not understand Japanese you could still do that. Could be fun, I'd try it once at least.

tuatoru 4 years ago |

We wanted to be healthy, housed, hopeful, informed and befriended. We got 140 characters.

mr-ron 4 years ago |

Adding a point to this: Toll Booths.

EZ Pass type devices has made long distance traveling so much easier and more efficient. Anyone travel the Mass Pike in the 90s? It would be stopped for a quarter mile for the privilege to pay 75 cents in a line.

legrande 4 years ago |

Every personal homepage should be like Gwern's, but not everyone's as prolific or has the time to document their whole digital life and document every neat research type thing they found online.

JeremyNT 4 years ago |

This one stood out for me:

> All-You-Can-Eat Broadband

... in some places, with some providers. My local broadband monopoly imposes metered data usage, with caps and overage charges. You have to pay $30 to have unmetered access.

WalterBright 4 years ago |

It's nice not having to worry about someone stealing your car stereo anymore. But these days they saw off your catalytic converter, which is a plague in Seattle with organized gangs doing it.

ozim 4 years ago |

My point of view is that I live in the future now.

When I was a kid in the 90's when I think about life back then it sucked, compared to nowadays.

I think we could list a lot more than what is in the article.

cblconfederate 4 years ago |

incremental. Most notable changes? fast internet. LED monitors/tvs ... trying to think of something that is not a waste of time ... OS updates and program isntalls are fast, those took a lot of time, electronic payments .. maps/yelp/tripadvisor when you travel ... human interactions are dysfunctional though

SavantIdiot 4 years ago |

> airplane flights no longer cost an appreciable fraction of your annual income12 , and people can afford multiple trips a year.

I routinely flew in the 80's and 90's: shorter lines, more cabin space, and food every flight (and fewer yokels airing their stinky bare feet). I'd go back to that in a heartbeat.

johnwalkr 4 years ago | |

Domestic flying in Japan (on the non-discount airlines) is still great. Published regular prices (not based on number of seats left), virtually no security, no ID required, liquids allowed. No problem checking in 20 minutes before the flight, and since the prices are regular, no problem to call 30 minutes before a flight because you're running late, and change to the next flight. If you're nice, probably no problem to flat-out miss a flight and get put on the next one.

toss1 4 years ago | |

Yup

These times of algorithmic flight loading and canceling/combining 'underbooked' flights really stink.

I once ended up flying a Seattle - Boston redeye on a 747 with a total three other passengers, and the flight crew said that they (Braniff Air, bought by Northwest, etc.) were still making money on the flight because the hold was full of US Mail.

That was a quality experience we'll likely never see again.

(Then again, I also once flew London to NYC one row in front of the smoking section - that's also a quality experience that I won't miss never seeing again)

asdff 4 years ago | | |

I never got why they still have ash trays in the bathrooms of the planes. They have a nonsmoking sticker right above the ash tray with a cigarette logo. If you aren't going to replace the door, why not just put the sticker on top of the little ash tray and cover it up?

notdang 4 years ago | |

So this means that people with less disposable income can afford to fly now.

And the people with more income are feeling that their comfort has to suffer.

So for those with more income, maybe it makes sense to pay for first class or hire a private charter plane?

SavantIdiot 4 years ago | | |

Trains are nice too. Cheaper, and you get to move around and mingle at lot easier. Maybe try one of those? Busses are cheap as well, but you can't walk around as much. But I know some people think trains and busses are gross and "lower class", which is why they have so much trouble getting funding. It's a catch-22: people won't use them, so lines don't get funded, so people don't use them.

I'm quite fond of Amtrak's Adirondack. It is a lovely way to visit relatives during Thanksgiving and see the foliage. Cheaper than planes and less stressful.

https://www.amtrak.com/routes/adirondack-train.html

oh_sigh 4 years ago | |

You can still get that by paying the same fraction of your income and flying business class.

telesilla 4 years ago |

Great we're doing better however I notice most of these are benefits experienced by the middle class and up. How about we do better and also give a leg up for the those in poverty? Even if Macdonalds is serving healthier food, I wouldn't pat ourselves on the back quite yet.

throwaway0a5e 4 years ago | |

The smartphone, value engineered window A/C unit and all manner of other things have given the poor a massively better lifestyle than they did in the 1990s.

Go watch some early 90s movies and look at the kinds of apartments and houses normal "not material to the plot" people live in and how they are furnished and compare to today.

nonameiguess 4 years ago | |

The greatest change to the world from the last X decades is the lifting of billions from extreme poverty in Africa and Asia. Changes to middle class life have been insignificant in comparison.

telesilla 4 years ago | |

For those reminding me of that poverty has been greatly alleviated with the last decades, I understand very well however this article completely lacked this info and it came across to me as ignoring this important demographic.

Ericson2314 4 years ago |

Food has gotten much better, and Wikipedia exists. Those are my favorites.

LightG 4 years ago |

Enjoyed that list, but nearly lost me at "leaf blowers" ...

alasdair_ 4 years ago |

“ the Internet/Human Genetics/AI/VR are now actually things Imagine dealing with the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in 1989 instead.”

Am I the only one hat thinks without Facebook and other social media, our vaccination and mask wearing rates would likely be much higher?

coldtea 4 years ago |

It's unbelievable how inconsequential most of those are...

Unlike other things, if you didn't have them, you wouldn't really think twice about them in the first place, except as very minor inconveniences...

IshKebab 4 years ago | |

It's not really surprising lots of them are fairly minor given that it is meant to be an exhaustive list, not a list of only significant changes.

coldtea 4 years ago | | |

Yes, but even the significant changes among them are mostly inconsequential when one compares with what we got e.g. between 1880 and 1960 (electricity and running water at most homes, cinema, radio and television, nuclear energy and weapons, x-rays, lasers, i.p. engines, cars, airplanes, DNA, satellites, rockets, digital computers, and tons more...)

cwoolfe 4 years ago |

This is a refreshing perspective. Thanks for sharing!

hiddencache 4 years ago |

Two words: plaid shirts.

victorbstan 4 years ago |

I looked at the 1980s desktop picture and I realized nothing has improved since then.

technothrasher 4 years ago | |

I looked at the 1980s desktop picture and realized the computer on it was a Mac Classic (with the logo and name removed, and an earlier mouse and keyboard), which was released in 1990.

jbverschoor 4 years ago |

Had a faster broadband connection in the 90s than right now. It was also cheaper.

RegBarclay 4 years ago |

Obligatory Louis CK riff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U

luckyorlame 4 years ago |

huh? Nothing compelling here.

aaron695 4 years ago |

Time between 1990 to now is not linear.

The web kicked off in the late 90's, picked up the 2000's but not real fast, and now is really flying and one assumes it will continue to accelerate.

Power tools are amazing. And that's the internet pushing them. I can see reviews with each new advancement anywhere in the world. They can see R&D around the world. Each company has to keep up and so do the counterfeiters. I'll order from overseas if they are not available local. Power tools augment humans, you can see people's home improvements getting more complex which is also pushed by the internet. Everything is in hyper mode.

aldress 4 years ago |

I do think that the biggest life improvement of this decade is the smartphone. To think that we have so much computing power and limitless things to do on a very small device makes this improvement the most revolutionary one.

ghaff 4 years ago |

>Imagine dealing with the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in 1989 instead.

I've wondered about this. No vaccines presumably. But, also, the sort of work from home, online shopping, remote school, etc. that many people/companies were able to more or less adapt to basically wouldn't have been possible in 1990--and, arguably, much before 2000 if that.

It's true that there was less air travel, including international travel, in 1990 than in 2019 but I'd need to be convinced this would be an important factor.

Comparisons to 1918 are hard, if only because of WWI and associated secrecy, but from what I can tell having read a bit, it doesn't appear as if there were widespread or long-lived closures of schools and other places. I assume, we would have acted likewise in 1990; i.e. we wouldn't have done a lot because there wasn't a lot we could do.

ADDED: This was not intended as a political comment. Merely speculation about how the world may have reacted differently in a world effectively without internet or (likely) a rapidly-developed vaccine.

victorbstan 4 years ago | |

1796 – Edward Jenner develops and documents first vaccine for smallpox.

kiba 4 years ago | | |

Variolation already exists back then, but with a survival rate of 1-2%. What Edward Jenner did was to confer scientific status on the idea of vaccination and investigated cowpow as a much safer method of inoculation against smallpox.

Heck, decade earliers, George Washington inoculated his troops against smallpox against the wishes of the continental congress.

ghaff 4 years ago | | |

For one thing, a very different disease. For another, how long did it take him?

And depending upon how you count, it took decades to develop a polio vaccine.

I would not bet on a COVID vaccine being developed and tested in about a year in 1990.

matthewmorgan 4 years ago | |

Chinese geneticists didn't have the ability to do it back then.

uhtred 4 years ago |

I never thought Brussels Sprouts tasted bad in the past -- always delicious! Also, JFC, at least make your own Guac -- it's like the easiest thing to actually make yourself. I can't think of anything easier.