From Infectious Greed:
We flatter ourselves by imagining that we live in an age of endless invention and innovation. We don’t. By almost any reasonable measure the inventions of the last few decades pale against the great inventions of the past, and we rely so heavily on mostly unchanged hundred-year-old doodads that we would, as a species, be embarrassed, were we broadly capable of said introspective emotion.
Here is Michael Lind on the subject of this “boring age”:
We like to believe we live in an era of unprecedented change: technological innovation is proceeding at a rate with no parallel in all of human history. The information revolution and globalization are radically disruptive. Just as Barack Obama would like to be a transformational President, so the rest of us like the idea that we live in a thrilling epoch of transformation. But the truth is that we are living in a period of stagnation....…Technology has been remarkably stagnant in the areas of transportation and energy. As energy expert Vaclav Smil has pointed out, global jet transportation relies on the gas turbine, which was developed in the 1930s, and global shipping uses the diesel engine, invented in the 1890s. The fastest commercial airliners ever to fly reside in museums. The most cost-effective forms of mass transit everywhere, except for a few dense urban areas, are buses and planes.
Whether the heat source is coal, natural gas or nuclear energy, most electricity today is generated by a variant of the steam turbine that has been around since the 1880s. The wind turbine and the solar-thermal and photovoltaic technologies beloved by greens are old enough to qualify for Social Security. And these elderly technologies are limited to those privileged enough to live in industrialized countries. A substantial minority of the human race still derives heat and warmth from wood and dung....MORE
