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.<p>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).
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:<p>"<i>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>"<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
<i>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</i><p>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.
To me, the article seems panglossian (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide</a>).<p>Some of the "upsides" (e.g. improvements in patent regime) just aren't there. Some aren't as wonderful as they are described.<p>I'm in my mid-sixties; I'm very much a candidate for the "things were better in the old days" brigade.<p>But I do think many (most?) things have improved. Housing is better; healthcare is <i>immeasurably</i> better (unless you can't afford it); and mobile telephony has improved the lives of at least a billion people worldwide.<p>Because I'm not miserable old git, I'm not going to list downsides.<p>[Edit] OK, I'll list one: permanent war.
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?<p>What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?
I often ask people: “if you could be 20-years old in 1991 or 2021, which would you pick?”<p>An incredible number of people pick ‘91. Some people even ask to go back to the seventies.<p>This article explains why I would much rather be young now rather than before.
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.<p>That said, given current inflationary trends, it will be interesting to see if this still holds up in a decade or two.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cpi2020.png?x91208" rel="nofollow">https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cpi2020.png?x...</a>
We are social animals. Other people make me happy. Other people make me miserable.<p>Quality of life depends far more on the integrity of a person's human relationships than these trivial material gains.<p>I can remain bright eyed through all kinds of horribleness if I believe my suffering is meaningful and valued.
> Car Theft is rarer, and in particular, we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our car radios<p>> Remember when physically detaching your car radio to avoid leaving it in the car was considered a 100% normal thing to do?<p>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.<p>> All Day: because you won’t be yelled at for tying up the (only) phone line<p>... 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'".
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.
Interesting. My first thought was, 'HIV is not a death sentence', and looked for the section on medicine. Randomly:<p>- Mapping the human genome has led to many applications of genetic medicine.<p>- Polio was eradicated in India.<p>- Cancer death rates declined 27% since 1999...
I don't think the author has kids, but as a new parent the 2020s have numerous improvements over the 1990s:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There've been vaccines developed for many common childhood illnesses. No more rotavirus, no more chickenpox.<p>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.
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.
<i>> remember how advertisements always had to say “no batteries included”?</i><p>Hmm. Perhaps this is a regionalism, but I remember the phrase as being "batteries not included":<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batteries_Not_Included" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batteries_Not_Included</a>
This one has if anything gotten worse rather than better:<p>> Car Theft is rarer, and in particular, we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our car radios<p>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.
<i>Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”</i> and <i>we have things pretty good now</i> 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.
The big changes, I think, are smartphones and widespread LGBT acceptance. Everything else just seems like incremental improvements to existing technology.
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.
Driving maps/planning is wildly better, not just a little better.<p>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.<p>First getting mapquest and then later in-car GPS and later Waze has been super convenient.
Without denying any of the improvements cited here, some things, even in computing, are no better:<p>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.<p>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.<p>3) What else?
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?
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:<p>- 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.<p>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).
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.<p>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.
> EU: the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive<p>A funny point considering the absolute unmitigated disaster that is the Eurozone both in concept and implementation x)<p>> Keurig & other Single-Serve coffee machines<p>Another unsustainable waste of materials. Just use ground coffee please.<p>> Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”<p>Yes, it has been outsourced to countries with dirt-cheap labour. I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing.
Neat list.<p>I have issue with this one in part:<p>> Not Watching crummy VHS tapes, period<p>The rewind button actually worked 100% of the time.<p>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.
( "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?)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty</a><p>>The percentage of the global population living in absolute poverty fell from over 80% in 1800 to under 20% by 2015.<p>This is astonishing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The things he points out, however, are crucial pieces of <i>why</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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 <i>very</i> 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.<p>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.
This note at the bottom, about high mortality rates in the past, is always striking to remember:<p>"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."<p>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.
> Fresh Guacamole can be easily bought due to pressure pasteurization<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
I can't pinpoint what it is specifically, but something about this website visually makes reading it seem unpleasant.<p>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.
Look at the essentials and you'll see we've actually been going backwards, ever since the 1970s:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
> All-You-Can-Eat Broadband:
Faster<p>> ...<p>> Indefinite: not worrying about running out of AOL hours, liberated from the tyranny of time metering and (mostly) bandwidth metering<p>Except that some ISPs <i>do</i> 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.
The list cannot obviously contain everything, yet I think the switch from CRTs to LCD monitors should have been mentioned.<p>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.
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.<p>It also threatens to wipe away many of those, especially if societies or ecosystems begin to collapse or conflicts increase.
>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<p>This actually sounds really fun and makes me feel nostalgic for the 90s
Adding a point to this: Toll Booths.<p>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.
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.
This one stood out for me:<p>> <i>All-You-Can-Eat Broadband</i><p>... 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.
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.
My point of view is that I live in the future now.<p>When I was a kid in the 90's when I think about life back then it sucked, compared to nowadays.<p>I think we could list a lot more than what is in the article.
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
> airplane flights no longer cost an appreciable fraction of your annual income12 , and people can afford multiple trips a year.<p>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.
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.
“ the Internet/Human Genetics/AI/VR are now actually things
Imagine dealing with the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in 1989 instead.”<p>Am I the only one hat thinks without Facebook and other social media, our vaccination and mask wearing rates would likely be much higher?
It's unbelievable how inconsequential most of those are...<p>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...
Obligatory Louis CK riff: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U</a>
Time between 1990 to now is not linear.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
>Imagine dealing with the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in 1989 instead.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.