Are We Moving Slower Today Than 40 Years Ago?

Why are we moving slower today than we were 40 years ago? Literally, it does not compute; it makes no sense.

Most Interstate Highways in the 1980s had a speed limit of 70 MPH. 40 years later? 70 MPH. Traffic congestion on the coastal urban sprawls means the average speed is WAY slower than 40 years ago.

State-of-the-art airliners cruised at 550 MPH in 1980 (Boeing 747) and 540 MPH today (Boeing 787). What happened to the hope for a supersonic or hypersonic passenger aircraft where we could fly from Boston to LA in a couple hours?

State-of-the-art passenger airlines also flew aircrafts that, on average, carried more passengers. In 1980 a Boeing 747 carried 400-600 passengers depending upon its configuration. Today, a 787 carries 200-330 passengers depending upon its configuration.

Where’s all this going?

We have all told ourselves: “We are in the time of exponential technology. I have this supercomputer in my hand that connects me to literally every other person in the world.” Awesome. But that’s moving bits and bytes, not atoms.

Paraphrasing Peter Thiel, when we look at the technological progress each of us has seen in our respective lifetimes, the consensus is that we’re doing great and everything is moving super fast. But in the 1960s and 1970s, “technology” meant atoms and bits. It meant biotech and medical devices. It meant nuclear power, new forms of energy, underwater cities, the green revolution in agriculture, space travel, supersonic aviation, flying cars, etc. But, today, our only progress is in the realm of computing.

Decline in expectations has not only been felt in technology, it’s been felt culturally. We’ve lowered our expectations in many ways.

Consider healthcare: President Nixon declared the War on Cancer in 1970 and said that we would defeat cancer in 1976 by the bicentennial.  Well, we didn’t “defeat” cancer, and today, we couldn’t declare war on Alzheimer’s, even though 1/3 of 85-year-olds suffer from it.

Consider our falling down infrastructure: In Boston, the Big Dig project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (US$7.4 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2020). However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $21.5 billion adjusted for inflation), a cost overrun of about 190%. We have learned to expect less from our governments than ever before.

Today, we’re "not allowed" to develop new drugs with the FDA charging $1.3 billion per new drug. We're not allowed to fly supersonic jets because they’re too noisy. We're not allowed to build nuclear power plants. We've outlawed progress in the world of atoms, so people focus on bits. There’s been an explosion of bureaucratic limitations and regulations which (so far) have eclipsed potential progress. Candidly, most people I speak with are clueless about the incredibly harmful energy suck this is. But if you are an entrepreneur, you know that Bureaucratic Regulatory Capture (of us) is on its way to being complete.

It's also the mass popular culture: Have we stopped believing in the future? We’ve become either too optimistic or too pessimistic about the future, either way it means there’s nothing we can do. If you're Optimistic, the future will take care of itself. If you're Pessimistic, we're headed to the apocalypse. But it's completely up to us. Extreme Optimism and extreme Pessimism are both equally wrong.

Look, I don’t need flying cars or a Star Trek style transporter. Can we just apply ourselves to the basics? Fix the roads so it’s safer to drive faster. Introduce supersonic—hell why settle—introduce hypersonic flight.  Let’s get cracking.