In his Data Points column “Is the west talking itself into decline?” (Opinion, January 6) John Burn-Murdoch raises some excellent questions about the west being less hopeful about progress and innovation than in years past.
In his fascinating book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War, US economist Robert J Gordon — whom the IMF once dubbed the “prophet of pessimism” — raises related observations with a theory that the “special century” from 1870 to 1970 witnessed rapid economic growth in the US due to a flood of innovation that will never again be repeated. This century saw the invention of the lightbulb, commercialisation of electricity, the internal combustion engine, indoor plumbing, the telephone, television, commercial air travel, and penicillin — to name a few innovations that greatly improved the quality of American life and in some cases contributed to prolonging it.
My father was born in 1912. In his lifetime, he witnessed transport by horse and buggy to seeing man land on the moon. The boundaries of his life expanded from a small town in Wyoming to the entire world. My generation has not seen nearly such significant progress.
Could it be that the west is less hopeful because our critical needs have been met, and therefore significant improvement in the quality of our lives is unlikely? What is left to invent?
Innovations such as social media, self-driving cars, apps that notify us what to do when, and artificial intelligence that does our reading, writing and thinking for us suggest that Gordon is right. I’ll take my flush toilet any day over Facebook.
Cynthia Miyashita
Gatika, Biscay, Spain
