Many of the most important inventions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries are things that we would not want to do without today; yet they had little effect on the national accounts because they were so inexpensive: aspirin, lightbulbs, water chlorination, bicycles, lithium batteries, wheeled suitcases, contact lenses, digital music, and more.
Later,
All the same, I will venture a guess about one feature of the future: technology will go “small.” Twentieth-century technology was primarily about “large” things. …Energy was generated by massive power stations. Materials were produced by gigantic steel mills. Huge airplanes and tall cell towers embodied what the twentieth century could do. But the twenty-first century may be very different. …sorting cells, and sequencing and splicing genes may offer a better path to a better future than building supersonic planes.
Read the whole thing. I think that it may deserve one of David Brooks’ annual awards for magazine pieces.
Not so sure about that. The light bulb would have been irrelevant without electricity, bicycles without roads or steel mills, lithium batteries without electronics, and chlorination seriously changed population. Any one part may seem small but that is because of large changes elsewhere.
I have downloaded, but not finished, the whole article.
What seems always missing in so many of these discussions and studies is attention to the improvements in distribution and in the methods of exchange.