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http://www.slate.com/formatdynamics/CleanPrintProxy.aspx?1263420282278 Household appliances, not Gloria Steinem, ushered women into the workplace.
vision, expressed in the March 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics: "Where a calculatoron the Eniac is equipped with 18,000 Posted Thursday, Jan. 4, 2001, at 3:00 AM computers in the future may have only1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh but some things remain distressinglyunchanged. Nearly a thousand years ago, Wrong again, but then so was everybody.
promised by The Jetsons (and I have countryside to provide new forests" (I rocket pack), but the stuff we did get— years ago, Scientific American reportedthat economic progress in Manhattan support only a limited number of horses.
the home. The rest spent an average of 58 economies grow, continues to plague ournational discourse.
In the long run, economic growth comesnot from cramming more horses ontoyour island, or more factories into yourrust belt, or even more information ontoyour servers, but from technologicalbreakthroughs—not from more of thesame but from the new and previouslyunthinkable.
By the middle of the last century, Scientific American's false vision of thefuture had been displaced by a new http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=95955 http://www.slate.com/formatdynamics/CleanPrintProxy.aspx?1263420282278 and she walked 6,303 feet along the way.
walking only 665 feet along the way.
Rochester, Ananth Seshadri at theUniversity of Wisconsin, and Mehmet Yorukoglu at the University of Chicago.
advent of central heating, dryers, electric of water around the house every year.
irons, frozen foods, refrigerators, washingmachines, vacuum cleaners, and running liberation—and more specifically theentry of women into the labor force—was them, wrings them out (either by hand orwith a mechanical wringer), then hangs them to dry and moves on to theoppressive task of ironing, using heavyflatirons that are heated continuously onthe stove. By 1945, things had changed:About 60 percent of households hadwashing machines (though essentiallynone had dryers). How dramatically didthat change affect women's lives? In1945, government researchers undertookto find out. The researchers observed afarm wife named Mrs. Verett while she http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=95955 http://www.slate.com/formatdynamics/CleanPrintProxy.aspx?1263420282278 Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, ofMore Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. century, those appliances have gottencheaper; as they've gotten cheaper,they've spread to more households. Asthey've spread to more households, morewomen have entered the marketplace.
International comparisons tell the samestory: By and large, the countries wheredurable goods are cheapest are thecountries where more women work forwages. The same was true across theUnited States in the middle years of thecentury.
I'd like to see GSY apply their methods tostudy the men's liberation that happenedearlier in the millennium, when largenumbers of men left farms to go to workin the marketplace. Was that revolutionalso driven by technological innovations?My guess is yes, but as far as I know, nobody's done the kind of careful dataanalysis for men that GSY have done forwomen.
My prediction for this century is thattechnological innovation will continue totransform and enrich our lives in waysthat none of us can now imagine. Of allthe predictions one could have made acentury ago, that was the only one thatproved true.
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Source: http://www.jeremygreenwood.net/papers/landsburg01.pdf