The internet, email, DVDs, iPhones, text messaging, flat TV screens, MRI scanners, Google, the International Space Station, hybrid cars, drones, Dolly the cloned sheep, GPS, Facebook, laptop computers, Nintendo, DNA tests, microprocessors, TikTok, digital cameras, bitcoin, electric cars, Whatsapp, LED light bulbs, Amazon.com, the birth control patch, PlayStation, wifi, Netflix, online banking, Elmo. Things that have become commonplace within a span of just three decades, since 1990. In that year, Italian Toto Cotugno won the Eurovision Song Contest. Toto who?
Things that became common in the forty years preceding 1990: credit cards, robots, transistor radios, hovercrafts, space travel, nuclear power, satellites, video, desktop computers, pacemakers, lasers, the computer mouse, bar codes, in-vitro fertilization, ATMs, supermarkets, mopeds, color TV, cash register scanners, Barbie, the pill, hula hoop, power steering, the hydrogen bomb, hairspray, McDonalds, cassette tapes, calculators, open-heart surgery, vaccinations against mumps and measles, Abba, the floppy disk, disposable lighters, the walkman, weather radar, prozac. In 1950, there was no song festival and no Beatles.
Yearning for the good old days usually dissipates once we start counting everything that didn’t exist back then. Much less if we go back yet another half century further, to the year 1900. There was no airplane, bra, zipper, radio, television, radar, plastic, cinemas, a sewage system in Los Angeles, insulin, refrigerator, breast or uterine cancer testing, nylons, freezer, antibiotics, kidney dialysis, velcro, bus transportation, air conditioning, neon, the teddy bear, highways for automobiles, vacuum cleaners, Amelia Earhart, washing machines, gramophone records, tea bags, central heating, tractors, lights in every room of the home, windshield wipers, cornflakes, tanks, crossword puzzles, toasters, band-aids, traffic lights, gas stations, not even a zeppelin yet.
Just about everything we know and can do today originated within a four-generation time frame. During that same period, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, rubella, foot-and-mouth disease, streptococcal and staphylococcal infections, syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes and malaria were brought under control. AIDS is no longer the threat it was just forty years ago. Thirty months after the Covid outbreak, five billion people worldwide had been vaccinated. One hundred years earlier, when the Spanish flu broke out in Kansas, spreading around the world as infectiously and deadly as Covid, no one was vaccinated. The first vaccination against influenza took place in 1946.
One hundred years ago, barely two billion people lived in our world. Four generations later, that number had quadrupled. Then, the average life expectancy for men was 46 years, for women 48. Now it is 75 and 80 years respectively, not counting Covid’s short-term effects. And those are the numbers that apply to the United States. In Western Europe, they are a fraction higher still: 80 years for English men, 83 for women, as is also the case in Holland. German men on average make it to their 79th birthday, women to85, just like in France.
All these facts, numbers, things, possibilities, people, improvements, accelerations and expansions since 1900 are on the balance sheet of a period of time that also included two world wars, two pandemics, a global economic depression, a bunch of recessions, wars in Asia and Africa, dictatorships in Eastern Europe, South America, China and a handful of neighboring countries, overt racism in America and South Africa, horrific mutilations of young women in the Middle East, a 40-year cold war and a nuclear arms race. What does that tell us?
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