Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

You should instead ask " how long must a rich person show up before their flight"

I have not read the book, but from your quote selection so far it seems to mismanaged comparisons of the 1% to the 80% of the population.

If you looked at the poorer part of the population that things are generally much faster since they get to travel by plane at all.

> Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at.

I was surprised the first time a Tesla went by because I had no idea a car could be that quiet.

New technology is very obviously making us more productive in several different ways - the metric in the article is just wrong. I'm going to pick on something that people in the thread haven't mentioned that much: Logistics and online infrastructure.

I get every kind of thing possible delivered right to my door and this is made possible by improvements in logistics. Not having to spend my time going out shopping for these things gives me time which I can spend productively or on recreation at my option.

1) Medicine: When in the 80s or 90s if I needed medicine I would need to wait for a doctor's appointment, get a prescription, wait at the pharmacy to collect, now my doctor knows when I need a repeat, sends it electronically to my pharmacy and it's ready when I arrive (or I could have it delivered).

2) Groceries and household goods: Everyone from Amazon down to my local deli and bakery has a website where I can request goods, pay online and have them delivered within days or sometimes even same day. This wasn't possible in the 80s at the scale we have today. You had to shop in person or some companies used to have paper catalogues where you had to send in a form to order, wait days or weeks for goods to arrive. Not only that but repeat/subscription orders were extremely limited. Now I have repeat orders for everything from my dog's food to my razor blades. THings which were subscription services in the 80s are still available but have a much wider selection.

3) Services: Lots of "in person" services can now be delivered by video. My wife and lots of friends are professional musicians. In spite of the pandemic they were able to continue teaching over zoom. Their productivity would literally have been zero during the lockdowns as they would not have been able to work at all were it not for new technology. Likewise things like video consultations allow people access to doctors etc without the time that would otherwise be wasted on travel etc to get to the appointment.

I literally don't even want to use a computer at all. I want a cheap powerful rototiller, and an herbicide that only targets bamboo, and a robot laser to zap snails and cabbage moths in my garden. But here I am like a schmuck putting out little bottle tops of beer for the snails to drown in, running around like a doofus with a butterfly net to catch moths, and breaking my back to dig up 2-foot-deep bamboo roots over 2 acres.

Fuck modern technology. I don't want to sit in front of a screen. I want to live life in the real world. Give me solutions to my problems, not distractions from them.

> Safety has increased, of course.

Come to think of it, security too. Hijackings weren't unusual news items in the 1970s; now, it's hard to remember the last one. And that partly explains the slower airport experience today (which is really due to nobody investing in the resources to speed it up).

> It's popular to point to how much airline ticket prices have fallen since dregulation (under Democratic president Carter) in 1979, without also noting that 1979 was a local price peak driven by the Iranian oil embargo of the same year.

A lot of those narratives are similar if one takes even a cursory look at the facts. As an aside (and IIRC), per the autobiography of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, who was not a Democrat (and was a follower of Ayn Rand) and served in various roles under many presidents including Carter, deregulation began under Carter.