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Which sectors will prove technologically stagnant?
Megan McArdle writes:
As the Boomers age, they will consume fewer of the things that we produce efficiently, and more of the things that we provide relatively inefficiently.
Here is more, and I hereby take Megan to be a robot pessimist.
It is a revealing question to ask which sectors a person considers technologically stagnant. Baumol claimed it is the performing arts, but TV and the internet have belied this; it is true that those media are not *live* performance but that is substituting objective aesthetic judgment for what consumers really care about. People love Dexter, whether or not there is someone actually in the box. For stagnant sectors, I will nominate:
1. Haircuts, you might as well get them in Mexico
2. Automobiles (given the overall extent of technological progress, are they really so much better than in 1957?), although the $2500 car may change this
3. Spicy food, it seems best in relatively poor countries
I'm not yet sure about teaching. It seems to be a candidate but people are learning an awful lot from blogs these days; don't fixate on delivering the old service the way we always have.
Your picks? Keep in mind that something has to be stagnant in relative terms, to date it sure isn't computer chips but they raise the bar for the average. I expect pharmaceuticals and webcams to make it much easier to care for old people, but only on a per year of life basis; the number of years lived and thus total cost will rise too.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 9, 2008 at 03:07 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
I'm suspicious. The history of predicting technological change on any kind of longer time horizon has been hasn't been particularly good.
Posted by: mgunn at Jan 9, 2008 3:27:36 PM
As someone whose first car was a 1977 Pinto, I can say that autos today are quite superior to those of 1977, and no more expensive on an inflation adjusted basis.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Jan 9, 2008 3:29:14 PM
Re#2: Care to crash in a car without seat belts, crumple-zones, or air bags? Engines are much more complicated, but are also more efficient and less polluting, for whatever that's worth.
Posted by: Mike Beversluis at Jan 9, 2008 3:40:13 PM
Cars are definitely a bad pick. Cars have changed about as much in the past 20 years as televisions. Safety, reliability, performance, and comfort have all improved radically over the years. Features that were not even available on luxury cars then are standard on almost all cars now, really technologically advanced stuff like stability control, for example.
Posted by: Rafe at Jan 9, 2008 3:49:02 PM
Have you DRIVEN a car from 1957 or even 1977 recently? I'm guessing no.
Even the cheapest cars are better in every way than cars were then. They are safer. They are quieter--road noise and wind noise alone meant it would never have been possible to listen to jazz or classical music in a car, let alone talk on a phone. It takes significantly less effort to use the brakes or turn the steering wheel now than it did 30 or 50 years ago--enough that you would now find it difficult to actually stop a 70s automobile, even a light one. Cars under 20k produce more horsepower than even the best racing cars did in the 70s. When was the last time you got stranded because your car actually physically broke down? That used to happen all the time--failed electrical systems, bad parts, bad gaskets, lost pressure, bent rods. None of that happens now.
The problem with haircuts is not that the market is stagnant, but information about the market is difficult to come by. Women easily pay several hundred dollars every six weeks to look their best if they can find someone who can do that for them.
Posted by: mouse at Jan 9, 2008 3:49:09 PM
You completely miss the mark on Cars. A colleague recently bought a 1966 Mustang and was *appalled* at how "primitive," unreliable, and uncomfortable that "classic" was. The road shake alone made him go back his Prius.
A mechanic from 1975 would be utterly unable to work on a modern engine, for example. He wouldn't even recognize the principal diagnostic tools, for example.
What's happened is that the leading car manufacturers, unlike software providers, have gotten so good at introducing radically new technology (variable time engines, elaborate emission control systems, airbags, tinted shatter-proof windows) that most consumers aren't even aware of the changes.
Posted by: tylerh at Jan 9, 2008 3:51:09 PM
Tyler is fully aware of the improvements in automobiles over the years, but his point is that if cars had mirrored the overall level of technological progress during the last 50 years, perhaps we should have something far better than the current crop. Something along the lines of self-driving cars or maybe ones that fly.
Posted by: Jonathan L at Jan 9, 2008 3:52:18 PM
I'm with YW and MB on cars - they are (I hate to admit it) more reliable, longer lasting, and just better all round than even 15 years ago.
As for haircuts - I agree, but I doubt if teenagers would.
I would list conversation, education, housing, cooking and music (not that I'm an expert in any). All have incorporated many technological advances, but I don't think the incorporation has been successful in producing real advances within these fields and that, rather than incorporation of technology, must be the criterion.
Posted by: tom s. at Jan 9, 2008 3:55:26 PM
I nominate commercial fishing and other natural-resource-heavy sectors. More than 75 per cent of fish stocks are fully or overly exploited, and it's not clear whether aquaculture technology will be able to improve this situation.
Posted by: guest at Jan 9, 2008 3:59:05 PM
Tyler--
Starting in the late '80s body rust on cars became a much less serious problem.
I like your haircut example, although if you go to a hair dresser's, they do use scheduling software now which improves things (but only marginally).
My candidate technologically stagnant sector is preschool: Children under 5 years old can't use computers, they aren't shown audiovisual materials and they don't use a lot of battery operated toys. There's some innovation in snacks and art supplies, I suppose, but mostly it's human beings playing with, reading to, singing with and supervising children much the way they have for the last five thousand years (well the widespread reading to, came later.)
Posted by: MostlyAPragmatist at Jan 9, 2008 4:06:37 PM
"As the Boomers age, they will consume fewer of the things that we produce efficiently, and more of the things that we provide relatively inefficiently."
Isn't this just another way to describe luxury goods?
Posted by: Hovie at Jan 9, 2008 4:14:49 PM
Jonathan L--
That's exactly what most people are arguing. Cars *have* kept up with the overall technological progress of society. Its computers and information technology that are racing ahead, rather than automobiles lagging behind.
Posted by: quanticle at Jan 9, 2008 4:19:43 PM
On the theme of cars, how about cab drivers. Sure you can call them with your cell phone, but most of the time you are either near a land line or its easier to hail one.
Airline travel is also stagnant. Sure booking is easier, but it does not seem were more efficiently providing flights between cities over time.
Posted by: seth at Jan 9, 2008 4:22:49 PM
If Aubrey de Grey's right, soon old people will be old, but not sick and frail anymore. This could change a lot of things.
See this TED video if you haven't already:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39
If you want to help, you can donate to the Methuselah Foundation (just google it), and of course get informed by reading Aubrey's book and trying to poke holes in his theories.
Posted by: Michael G.R. at Jan 9, 2008 4:38:44 PM
On the food question, I think that tech advances actually make food marginally worse, unless one makes an effort to have "good" food. Refrigeration means that meat is shipped "dead" in advanced countries, versus shipped live to point-of-sale as it often is in places like China. The various eco-foodie movements are addressing these points, but since they won't scale beyond "enthusiast" level quantities, food grown and shipped in "Third World fashion" will remain premium products in advanced countries.
(One odd effect of this is that chicken at KFCs in China is clearly better than it is in the US.)
The trick will be to combine technology with "organic" ideas in a way to get prices down, although some would object since avoiding technology is often part of the marketing and self-branding strategy that goes with the food.
Posted by: Foobarista at Jan 9, 2008 4:47:02 PM
I think the big change in autos is longevity and/or reliability. A 1950s or 1960s car with 50,000 miles was an old car, constantly breaking down. Now one expects a car to provide reliable transportation for 100,000 miles -- something only a Volvo or SAAB did 40 years ago.
In air travel there has not been a significant improvement in travel time since jet passenger planes were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s. But look at the difference in how you arrange your schedule on line. The entire industry of travel agents has almost been eliminated -- now only a few specialized players remain.
Posted by: spencer at Jan 9, 2008 4:59:07 PM
Expensive Universities with highly paid professors. 1) fewer kids being born. 2) people don't have the money to send their kids there. 2) Online Teaching! One good online teacher can provide a lecture for infinitely many students. Where's YouTube University?
Posted by: peanut at Jan 9, 2008 5:03:06 PM
Education. Not merely stagnant, backsliding. And not just "pre-school." In the early Nineties, a co-worker from Holland expressed amazement that I referred to the Hanseatic League in conversation - I was the first person he had met here who had heard of it. I do not consider it coincidence that I was also the oldest non-managerial co-worker he knew, by about a decade...
Not that I would agitate for returning to the curricula faced by my parents, or theirs. Or even altogether my own. Indeed, I recognize some possible improvements (my sisters' children can do multiplication/division much faster than I ever could - but have a harder time reading directions on new devices, etc.).
Posted by: teqjack at Jan 9, 2008 5:14:27 PM
Almost every aspect of our society changes, even that most recalcitrant element, government. To find a segment that does not change technologically, one has to remove all incentive to change which is difficult or occupy a niche that is so unglamorous that a company has little competition.
My pick is septic systems. They haven't changed that much and there will always be a need for septic technology because public water is not an option in many rural locations. There is no particular incentive to develop new designs because a septic system lasts for 30 plus years. It isn't as though you are doing to run out and buy the latest model.
Posted by: Sophie at Jan 9, 2008 5:25:20 PM
K-12 education.
Because children are cognitively wired to learn from real human beings.
Posted by: PJ at Jan 9, 2008 5:26:21 PM
Foobarista, I see your point, but I don't think it's quite right to say that technology has made food worse. It has certainly made worse food available, but the good stuff is still around and there's now an option between cheap & poor quality and expensive & good quality. [Insert standard stipulations about relativity and subjectiveness of "cheap," "good," etc.] Cheap & bad may have crowded the market, but that's more of a result of people's preferences than the technology itself, not to mention that the process that lead to cheap & bad also often makes things plentiful.
Refrigeration may mean food is shipped "dead," as you say, but it also means it isn't shipped rotten. And a "third world" chicken may be deliciously fresh in Beijing, but I couldn't get a clementine there fresh or otherwise with "third world" techniques. I guess I'm just saying that the ability to get a wide variety of mediocre food isn't necessarily worse than a small selection (and quantity) of "good" food.
I think of it rather like mechanized weaving. Factory-produced cloth isn't as nice as the hand-made stuff, and it may have lead to people wearing a lot of clothes that were "worse" than they did previously, but there was a lot more opportunity to get clothes that never existed.
As to the original point about spicy food, I think it's best in poor countries because many poor countries are in tropical climates, and tropical climates lend themselves to spicy food for historical reasons. I don't think if (e.g.) Jamaicans all got rich they would produce spicy food any less efficiently than they do now.
Posted by: Jared at Jan 9, 2008 5:32:03 PM
To pile on the car comments: It wasn't all *that* long ago that car manufacturers didn't even bother to include with the car an odometer capable of indicating that the car had traveled 100,000 miles. Now cars go that far before requiring their first major maintenance.
Posted by: Aric at Jan 9, 2008 5:38:13 PM
I suspect strong spices were originally used to cover the unpleasant taste of rotting foods so we are more likely to find spicy food in poor countries. We only grow to like spicy food when our palates get used to strong spices, and start losing the ability to differentiate more subtle flavors. People who love Thai traditional massage usually don't get much a kick out of Swedish massage. Similarly, people who love real Thai food usually find Swedish food bland.
Posted by: Yan Li at Jan 9, 2008 5:56:15 PM
Re spicy food and poor countries.
Spicy food has nothing to do with poverty. I sincerely hope the author meant that as a joke. If it's serious, s/he needs some attitude readjustment....
I assume by spicy, s/he means hot - Why is it that Mexican food, Indian food, and Sichuanese food is hot? Answer - because all these foods use some form of capsacin (i.e. chilies or equivalent). Capsacin has some preservative qualities - but it is best known in medical circles for promoting sweating. In a hot environment sweat quickly evaporates - promoting cooling...ie. evaporative cooling...Obviously this is handy in a hot climate.
It has nothing to do with poverty...
I'd suggest as technologically stagnant the author's attitude about hot food and poor countries....Harrumph.
Posted by: Ashok Khosla at Jan 9, 2008 6:02:43 PM
It's a fact that the richest countries have the least spicy food. Almost all of Europe, the US, and Japan have practically no spicy food. Korea is probably the richest country that indulges regularly in spicy food.
Posted by: Kachow at Jan 9, 2008 6:21:21 PM
