Art? I haven’t looked into it much, but I don’t really know of any significant improvement in fine arts for a very long time—not in style/technique and not even in the technology (e.g., methods of casting a bronze sculpture). I’d also suggest that music has gotten less sophisticated, but this is super-subjective and treads in culture-war territory, so I’m just going to throw it out there as a wild-ass hypothesis for someone to follow up on at some point.
Education? High school graduation rates are up, and world literacy rates are up, but I’m not really sure about overall educational achievement?
Health care price/affordability: medicine itself has advanced tremendously, but the pricing on basic services is all out of whack and the way we pay for them is a tangled mess.
Housing affordability, maybe? I’m not sure.
If you said 50 years instead of 100, there’s a longer and more obvious list. There really hasn’t been any major breakthrough in manufacturing, agriculture, energy, or transportation in that time, and some things (like passenger flight speeds and airport convenience) have clearly regressed.
Art? I haven’t looked into it much, but I don’t really know of any significant improvement in fine arts for a very long time—not in style/technique and not even in the technology (e.g., methods of casting a bronze sculpture). I’d also suggest that music has gotten less sophisticated, but this is super-subjective and treads in culture-war territory, so I’m just going to throw it out there as a wild-ass hypothesis for someone to follow up on at some point.
I’m a little bit late to the party here, but there are examples of improvements in sculpture technology/technique/style leading to new (& very beautiful) works of art, see e.g. Barry X Ball’s works made with a combination of 3d-scanning, CAD software, CNC mills & traditional techniques. Not to mention he has a wide variety of stone available to him thanks to the global trade system.
As for music, I guess that totally depends on what you’re comparing. The proper comparison for today’s popular music isn’t Beethoven or Bach but folk music & perhaps music for drawing rooms & salons, which, although they had their own beauties, were nowhere near as complex & intricate as the traditional European art music that is most listened to today. Of the past, only the best survives, but in the present the good & the bad coexist. That said, I think maybe there’s a kernel of truth in what you suggest. But we shouldn’t trust our intuitive judgment on this.
Housing affordability: There are new construction technologies on the horizon, such as modular construction and mass timber; mass timber is being incorporated into new versions of the International Building Code, so it’s gradually being normalized. However, my colleagues in the YIMBY movement tell me that zoning laws limit competition among construction companies, which discourages them from investing in these innovations. (Also, construction unions seem to hate modular construction.)
What makes you think there haven’t been major breakthroughs in energy technology? As I understand it, there has been significant progress in making renewable energy cheap.
I’ll have to read more about progress in “renewables” to decide how big a breakthrough that is, but at best it would have to be counted, like genetics, as a potential future revolution, not one that’s already here. We still get most of our energy from fossil fuels.
Off the top of my head:
Maximum life expectancy. We’ve pushed up life expectancy at birth enormously, and life expectancy at all ages has increased somewhat. But 80–90 years is still “old” and we haven’t cured aging itself.
Art? I haven’t looked into it much, but I don’t really know of any significant improvement in fine arts for a very long time—not in style/technique and not even in the technology (e.g., methods of casting a bronze sculpture). I’d also suggest that music has gotten less sophisticated, but this is super-subjective and treads in culture-war territory, so I’m just going to throw it out there as a wild-ass hypothesis for someone to follow up on at some point.
Education? High school graduation rates are up, and world literacy rates are up, but I’m not really sure about overall educational achievement?
Health care price/affordability: medicine itself has advanced tremendously, but the pricing on basic services is all out of whack and the way we pay for them is a tangled mess.
Housing affordability, maybe? I’m not sure.
If you said 50 years instead of 100, there’s a longer and more obvious list. There really hasn’t been any major breakthrough in manufacturing, agriculture, energy, or transportation in that time, and some things (like passenger flight speeds and airport convenience) have clearly regressed.
I’m a little bit late to the party here, but there are examples of improvements in sculpture technology/technique/style leading to new (& very beautiful) works of art, see e.g. Barry X Ball’s works made with a combination of 3d-scanning, CAD software, CNC mills & traditional techniques. Not to mention he has a wide variety of stone available to him thanks to the global trade system.
As for music, I guess that totally depends on what you’re comparing. The proper comparison for today’s popular music isn’t Beethoven or Bach but folk music & perhaps music for drawing rooms & salons, which, although they had their own beauties, were nowhere near as complex & intricate as the traditional European art music that is most listened to today. Of the past, only the best survives, but in the present the good & the bad coexist. That said, I think maybe there’s a kernel of truth in what you suggest. But we shouldn’t trust our intuitive judgment on this.
Housing affordability: There are new construction technologies on the horizon, such as modular construction and mass timber; mass timber is being incorporated into new versions of the International Building Code, so it’s gradually being normalized. However, my colleagues in the YIMBY movement tell me that zoning laws limit competition among construction companies, which discourages them from investing in these innovations. (Also, construction unions seem to hate modular construction.)
What makes you think there haven’t been major breakthroughs in energy technology? As I understand it, there has been significant progress in making renewable energy cheap.
I’ll have to read more about progress in “renewables” to decide how big a breakthrough that is, but at best it would have to be counted, like genetics, as a potential future revolution, not one that’s already here. We still get most of our energy from fossil fuels.