Counting one's blessings is one of the pleasant difficulties of American life during this explosion of wealth creation. To help with the counting, here are a few facts culled from various sources.
In 1975 an IBM mainframe computer cost $3.5 million. Today a $1,500 PC is a thousand times faster. If there had been comparable changes in the cost and performance of automobiles, a car would cost $2 and would go 600 miles on a thimble of gasoline.
According to David Frum in his splendid new book How We Got Here — The '70s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), in 1950 one-third of Americans lived in houses without flush toilets. In 1975, 80 percent of Americans still had not traveled by air. In 1982, when Forbes magazine published its first list of the 400 richest Americans, 153 of their fortunes were derived primarily from real estate and oil. By 1998 the fortunes of only 57 were. In 1930 the United States had proven reserves of 13 billion barrels of oil. After fighting the Second World War and fueling the postwar boom, proven reserves in 1990 — not counting any in Hawaii or Alaska — were 17 billion, an increase of 20 percent. (In 1975 the proven reserves in the Persian Gulf were 74 billion barrels. In 1993 they were 663 billion, a nine-fold increase.)
Robert William Fogel of the University of Chicago, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in economics, says in his new book (The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism, to be published in May by the University of Chicago Press) that three centuries ago chronic — yes, chronic — malnutrition was universal — yes, universal. Even the English peerage had a deleterious diet. The lords and ladies got enough calories but not enough vitamins, and they consumed much too much alcohol and salt, which contributed to liver and other diseases that accounted for a high mortality of those fortunate enough to reach age 40.
Fogel says, "The bad dietary habits of the peerage were probably most harmful to unborn children because ladies of the realm were apparently consuming well over three ounces (eighty-five grams) of absolute alcohol per day on average — more than enough to produce a high incidence of birth defects."
A final blessing, potentially, at least for those of you who own stock in telecommunications companies: There are 6 billion people on Earth, and it is estimated that one billion of them have never made a telephone call.
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