The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    cmaukonen's picture

    The New old Normal

    By cmaukonen on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 7:35pm |

    The Elephant Stairs at Case Western Reserve University

    When I was living up in Cleveland Ohio I had a friend that went to CWRU. He was an Engineering major and lived in one of the dorms up the hill from University Circle.  To get to the dorms you had to climb these stairs that were call the Elephant Stairs. They were called that because they looked like there were designed more for elephants to use than humans. It was a bit of a hike.

    Since the turn of the 20th century we have lived in a period of unequaled technological and scientific advances that had not been seen before then. With the birth of the industrial revolution there seemed to be just one advance after another.  With steam power, electricity, electric lighting,  telegraph, telephone, radio, television, vacuum tubes, transistor and integrated circuits. Satellites and men in space. Nuclear power and computers. All happening in the space of a little over 100 years. The previous 100 years did not have half or even one fourth the number of advances.

    Before all this we were primarily and agrarian society and economy made up of yeoman farmers and hunters and fishermen.   When the industrial revolution took off this began to change and change rapidly. New wealth and ways to accumulate it all based on the next advance. The next new discovery. Industry became the main ingredient to fuel the economy. People investing the these new growth areas. All of which depended on the previous discoveries. Vacuum tubes on the electric light. Radio on vacuum tubes and the telephone and telegraph. Transistors on vacuum tube lab equipment. Integrated circuits on transistors. Computers on integrated circuits. And on and on.

    But like the elephant stairs above, each new advance was a step and unlike them, each new step has become further and further from the last and the steps becoming higher and higher. Requiring greater and greater effort to achieve.  We are now at a plateau technology. The next new things are still in the research labs and years away from becoming something that can be available to the public at large. Some have yet to be developed since the underlying technology itself has yet to mature.

    Which gives investors  fewer and fewer areas to invest and requires more investment to bring to fruition.  Our growth economy is returning to the rate it was before the industrial revolution but those who have come to expect the continuation to the past economic situation refuse to accept this. So they try to create it out of thin air and like champagne bubbles from the Old Lawrence Welk Show, they all pop.

    This is the new old normal.

    Comments

    "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
    Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Patent Office, 1899.


    by Rootman on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 8:09pm

    I recall that line from school!

    Great quote.


    by Richard Day on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 8:17pm

    I remember that quote as well. I would say that is not the case but the next big things are a long way off.

    We we have right now, more or less, is what we will be stuck with for a while. Just different colors and shapes.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 8:32pm

    We are five years away from having free energy. Nine years from a computer that will outthink the most intelligent human. Twelve years from medical immortality. Fifteen years from a computer with more intellectual power than all living humans combined. Sixteen years from having my credit cards paid down. Twenty years from antigravity.


    by Rootman on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 8:57pm

    And thirty years away from having pigs fly.

     

    Or cars.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 9:11pm

    The point being that as this article about superconductors from the BBC makes fairly clear.

    "You always think you can do it faster but if you look in the history of advances, it takes about a generation to get from lab discovery to marketable option," Professor Yurek told BBC News.

    He noted that the optical fibres that criss-cross the globe carrying data and even transistors experienced the same lag between discovery and widespread use.


    by cmaukonen on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 9:18pm

    Cause the guys in marketing take long lunches.


    by Rootman on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 9:22pm