There used to be a view that the direction of human history was always upwards, the arrow of progress. While that has been dented somewhat in the past year here in the USA, as President Trump is pushing everything backwards (this week making it charmingly clear we don’t want immigrants from “shithole” countries), outside of politics I think most people still believe in progress. The evidence? The managers and students I meet point to technology, and the benefits of ever-faster change. I am told new technologies are sweeping aside the old; ratcheting up progress through an unprecedented technological revolution. As I listen to the excited comments about how we are creating a better world, I always ask the same question: “are you sure?”
I believe we are making significant progress, but perhaps not where I am told. It might be worth separating out four strands of progress: technological, economic, political and social. I have some doubts about progress in the first three areas, especially if by progress we mean advancement or betterment. The good news is in the last area.
Clearly, technologies are constantly being improved. However, I see the dominant activity being incremental enhancements, with occasional steps forward. Some of the time, even the incremental improvements are scarcely better. One of my favourite examples concerns air travel. I will have to go to Washington in the next few months. By road it is a little over 330 miles, and takes just over five hours to drive to Washington. It is just over one hour (gate to gate) to fly. You might note that this journey time that has remained fairly constant over the past twenty-five years: little progress in actual flying time. Moreover, living out in the wilds of Pfafftown, I have to leave home around three hours before my flight is due to depart (allowing hour or so to drive to Greensboro airport, park my car, check in, go through security, and wait at the gate). In Washington, once through the terminal, I find a taxi, and go into town. Altogether, close to five hours! OK: got that off my chest!
Of course, it is quite different if we look at longer distances. I used to fly to San Francisco three times a year: five hours in the air is a lot better than 42 hours of driving (and that would be without stops). Yes, over more than trivial distances, flying is much quicker. Real progress. However, to repeat, while the advantage of going by air for long distances is clear, actual flying time has changed very little. At the same time, the discomfort has gone up greatly. Security is slow. Seats and legroom have shrunk. In-flight meals and entertainment are disappearing. In other words, there have been changes, but recent technological progress has been small, focussed on engineering efficiency. Incremental improvements in engines, lifting bigger planes, with many more people packed inside.
Progress in cars? Cars have changed, but, again, this has been incremental. Better systems, from ABS to collision avoidance. Petrol consumption is better than it used to be. Hybrid and all-battery cars are slowly appearing, but overall the cars themselves are only changing slowly. At the same, congestion is increasing (a recent report noted the average car speed in New York is 4.7 miles per hour, just a little faster than walking, and nearly 30% slower than it was five years ago.[i]). Like aeroplanes, the technology of cars has slowly improved, but the quality of the experience is no better, if not worse. The promise of new technologies in reducing death in car accidents seems less than satisfactory, with just over 37,000 deaths in the USA in 2016, the rate per 100,000 of the population starting to increase again.[ii]
How about communications with the advent of the smartphone? The technology for that was developed in the 1980’s, with Motorola and Nokia mobile telephones, handheld computers by HP and many others, the IBM PC, and the Macintosh, Apple’s computer with a graphic interface. What we have seen over the last thirty years has not been a series of major technological breakthroughs, but a series of incremental changes, very clever, but nothing more than that. Progress? The result of minor technological improvement is being on line to the boss 24/7; your home PC constantly at risk of being hacked, your vital details stolen; Bloated programs and poor security. People living their lives mediated by their smartphone.
Are we making technological progress? Real technological progress is unusual, and occasional. The 1880’s and the internal combustion engine. The early 20th Century and flight, followed by the jet engine in the 1940’s. The 1950’s saw the development of the computer, and the transistor; the internet emerged in 1991 (a development of AARPANET in the 1980’s.)
At this point, my students or managers get grumpy. Look at what we can do now! Uber and Amazon; but there were (and still are) cab companies and I can remember Sears catalogues. GPS, eBooks, Facebook, Google. I will continue to argue that major technological progress has been sporadic, and most of what we see is incremental enhancement. Further, the changes have been in the technology, and not necessarily designed to make a better world. Some have made it less satisfying, less enjoyable.
If I am less than excited about technological progress, what about economic change? If our focus is on financial transactions, earning and spending money, then change has been about abandoning cash and moving to the virtual world to carry out the transactions. The core remains the same. Of course, inside financial institutions, the technologies of securities and hedging, arbitrage and gaming the share market have changed enormously. Is that progress, or a clever way to use money to make more money, without wasting energy on developing products or services?
I’ve already declared my hand on progress in politics. In the USA, we are going backwards, retreating to populist tactics, and the steady retreat from democracy to oligarchy. Enough of our local challenges. Worldwide, Freedom House reports that in 2016 (its most recent yearly report), freedom declined for the eleventh year in a row. It considered there were “setbacks in political rights, civil liberties, or both, in a number of countries rated “Free” by the report, including Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Tunisia, and the United States. Of the 195 countries assessed, 87 (45 percent) were rated Free, 59 (30 percent) Partly Free, and 49 (25 percent) Not Free.”[iii]
Overall, there is an illusion of progress, of things getting better, but I sense it is just an illusion, and underneath the ‘fake news, things are changing slowly, and not always in the right direction.
However, there has been progress in society, even if it is hard to find out about it. The good news can be found in reports from the Pew Research Center [iv]. The Center describes itself as a ‘fact tank’: “a foundation of facts that enriches the public dialogue and supports sound decision-making. We are nonprofit, nonpartisan and nonadvocacy. We value independence, objectivity, accuracy, rigor, humility, transparency and innovation.” [v] As far as I can tell, all that appears to be true.
Among many other surveys and use of official statistics, the Center often reports on generational differences. I don’t want to do more than introduce you to their work and findings, especially as it relates to younger people, the millennials, those I keep believing are our hope for the future [vi].
In a quick summary, what do we know about the millennials? Here are some quotes from the Pew Research Center:
“Millennials and Generation Xers cast 69.6 million votes in the 2016 general election, a slight majority of the 137.5 million total votes cast … It is likely, though not certain, that the size of the Millennial vote will surpass the Gen X vote in the 2020 presidential election … Millennials are likely to be the only adult generation whose number of eligible voters will appreciably increase in the coming years … The ascendance of the Millennial vote is noteworthy because Millennials are more likely to be self-described independents, but they also are more Democratic than older generations in their political preferences. Among Millennials, 44% were independents in 2016, compared with 39% of Gen Xers and smaller shares of Boomers (31%) and members of the Silent Generation (23%). At the same time, Millennials lean to the Democratic Party to a much greater degree than other generations. In 2016, 55% of all Millennials identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, while just 33% identified as Republicans or GOP-leaning independents. By comparison, 49% in Generation X, 46% of Boomers and 43% of members in the Silent Generation identified with or leaned Democratic. And on issues such as marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage, Millennials take more liberal positions than those in older generations.” [vii]
There’s more good news. While those preferences might change as they get older, Millennials have higher levels of education than other generations, use libraries, read books, are more tolerant of diversity, and more concerned over the lack of attention being paid to race relations. They are the most critical generation in terms of the Trump administration’s actions in relation to race and race relations. [viii]
Just this week, The Economist included an article on millennials:
“Surveys by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction show that the proportion of 15- to 16-year-olds who have tried cigarettes has been falling since 1999. A rising proportion of teenagers have never tried anything mind-altering, including alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, inhalants and sedatives. The proportion of complete abstainers rose from 11% to 31% in Sweden between 2003 and 2015, and from 23% to an astounding 61% in Iceland. In America, all illicit drugs except marijuana (which is not illicit everywhere) have become less popular. Mercifully, the decline in teenage opioid use is especially steep.
Nor are young people harming each other as much as they used to. Fighting among 13- and 15-year-olds is down across Europe. Juvenile crime and anti-social behaviour have dropped in England and Wales, and with them the number of juvenile convicts. In 2007 almost 3,000 young people were in custody; by 2016 the number was below 1,000. Teenagers are also having less sex, especially of the procreative kind. In 1991, 54% of American teenagers in grades nine to 12 (ages 14-18) reported that they were sexually experienced, and 19% claimed to have had sex with at least four partners. In 2015 those proportions were 41% and 12%. America’s teenage birth rate crashed by two-thirds during the same period.”
As with alcohol, the abstention from sex seems to be carrying through into early adulthood. Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University in California, has shown that the proportion of Americans aged 20-24 who report having no sexual partner since the age of 18 rose from 6.3% for the cohort born in the late 1960s to 15.2% for those born in the early 1990s. [ix]
With this generation emerging, there is every sign of making progress in the future.
It’s not all good, of course. Without bludgeoning you with yet more extracts from reports and statistics, African American Americans are pessimistic about the future, and angry about how they are treated (figures of 80% or more). They are incarcerated at five times the rate of Caucasians [x]. They are less well paid, have higher rates of unemployment, lower levels of participation in higher education, more single parent families. and the list goes on. They represent a significant and pessimistic segment of the millennials, with every good reason to feel that way. Little evidence of making progress there.
Millennials of all backgrounds are poorer than previous generations at the same age, and more live at home than in the past. They work hard and do not job hop any more than previous generations did at the same age. [xi] More to the point, they look at the consumerism, corporate exploitation, and waste shown by the richer generations above them, and want to make change. They support legislation to reduce global warming. [xii] They really don’t like being labelled ‘millennials’!
They are not perfect, but they are our hope for positive change. They must wonder about those who have preceded them. What must they think of people spending small fortunes on becoming ‘Mindful’, or learning to think ‘Positive Thoughts’ (it’s a win-win world). In the crazy world of self-improvement:
“We are being sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, all at once, including parts that we did not previously know needed upgrading. (This may explain Yoni eggs, stone vaginal inserts that purport to strengthen women’s pelvic-floor muscles and take away “negative energy.” Gwyneth Paltrow’s Web site, Goop, offers them in both jade and rose quartz.) There is a great deal of money to be made by those who diagnose and treat our fears of inadequacy; Cederström and Spicer estimate that the self-improvement industry takes in ten billion dollars a year. (They report that they each spent more than ten thousand dollars, not to mention thousands of hours, on their own quests.) The good life may have sufficed for Plato and Aristotle, but it is no longer enough. “We are under pressure to show that we know how to lead the perfect life”.” [xiii]
Making progress. Yes, there is a generation that might be able to achieve that, if only they can get through the ‘Goop’! [xiv] [i] David Leonhardt, How to Get New York Moving Again, New York Times, 7 January 2018
[ii] See <https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812453>
[iii] <https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017>
[iv] <http://www.pewresearch.org/>
[v] <http://www.pewresearch.org/about/>
[vi] Generation dates are as confusing and contested as everything else. However, for the Pew Research Center (and me) millennials are the generation born between 1981 and 1995, preceded by Generation x (1965-1980), the baby boomers (1945-1964), and the ‘silent’ generation’ – who are they kidding!! – born before 1945 (and still alive!!). For the sake of completeness, those born from 1996 onwards are generation Z (boring, huh!).
[vii] See more details at <http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/31/millennials-and-gen-xers-outvoted-boomers-and-older-generations-in-2016-election/>
[viii] <http://www.people-press.org/2017/12/19/most-americans-say-trumps-election-has-led-to-worse-race-relations-in-the-u-s/>
[ix] <https://www.economist.com/news/international/21734365-they-are-also-lonelier-and-more-isolated-teenagers-are-better-behaved-and-less>
[x] <http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/>
[xi] <http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/19/millennials-arent-job-hopping-any-faster-than-generation-x-did/>
[xii] <http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/7-global-warming-and-environmental-regulation-personal-environmentalism/>
[xiii] Andrea Schwartz, ‘Resolutions’, A Critic at Large, New Yorker, 18 January 2018: she is quoting from Carl Cederström and André Spicer recent book, Desperately Seeking Self Improvement, OR Books, 2017
[xiv] Did I say progress? Please visit goop.com, and read all about the world of a modern lifestyle brand. You might want to remember that Goop synonyms include glop, goo and gunk!
