Cornucopia

In footnote 2 of a classic 2000 paper, Brad DeLong asks:

• Could the Emperor Tiberius have eaten fresh grapes in January? Could the Emperor Napoleon have crossed the Atlantic in a night, or gotten from Paris to London in two hours? Could Thomas Aquinas have written a 2,000-word letter in two hours–and then dispatched it off to 1,000 recipients with the touch of a key, and begun to receive replies within the hour? Computers, automobiles, airplanes, VCR's, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, telephones, and other technologies– combined with mass production–give middle-class citizens of the United States today degrees of material wealth–control over commodities, and the ability to consume services–that previous generations could barely imagine.

This suggests DeLong puts even more weight on the transformative power of economic progress than did Joseph Schumpeter, whom Art and I lean on in Mere Economics, and who wrote these words:

• There are no doubt some things available to the modern workman that Louis XIV himself would have been delighted to have yet was unable to have–modern dentistry for instance. On the whole, however, a budget on that level had little that really mattered to gain from capitalist achievement. Even speed of traveling may be assumed to have been a minor consideration for so very dignified a gentleman. Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars, and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to a rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

In Schumpeter's defense, there was an awful lot of improvement between 1942 (when these words were published) or 1950 (when he died) and 2000 (when DeLong published his paper). Indeed, several of DeLong's examples either didn't exist in Schumpeter's day (VCR's, computers for all intents and purposes), or were only dramatically improved after he died (washing machines, vacuums, telephones), or had very high real prices during his lifetime (say, commercial air travel).

If anything, Art and I may understate the extent of 20th century economic progress in Chapter 1 of Mere Economics.