Creation

That Total Factor Productivity thing is looking more interesting each day - especially on a day when fusion has been successful in a lab. A BIG lab, but a lab nonetheless. Folks have been working on the (controlled) fusion problem since at least the first hydrogen bomb, yet it took until the crisis itself to have this success. Fission, it’s worth considering, was successful not too many months after Pearl Harbor - a lot of technological improvement over the course of 30 years. Much of that improvement did occur during the Great Depression and the first year of the war, including the first nuclear reaction, the discovery of the neutron, and the determination that some reactions were evidently generating energy from fission. Looking with a similar view over the last few years, we’ve seen smartphones become ubiquitous, solar cells blossoming from rooftops, LED light bulbs that are unexpectedly energy-efficient, and electric cars which are only uncommon rather than unusual. 

It does seem as if we might be in a burst of technological breakthroughs that are simply being overshadowed by darker economic and political news. As mentioned before, the technological difference between 1935 and 1950 is surprisingly evident, in everything from clothing styles to automotive tech. Even with the improvements previously noted, there is not THAT much difference between today and 1999 - and much of the difference that there is can be seen as easily over the last 5 or 8 years (i.e. since the start of the Fourth Turning.)

Accepting for a moment that this phenomenon is real, can Strauss & Howe explain it? What about the Fourth Turning might inspire such an unexpected boon? In S&H, the expectation is that the Fourth is about survival rather than improvement, so what’s going on? If it is really happening, it seems likely that this is related to the cycle of personal freedom, which begins increasing during the Awakening and peaks around the start of the Crisis. Which is to say, during the 3rd and 4th Turnings, innovation and self-improvement are ascendent over maturation and hierarchical improvement. A lot of exciting things happen at once as creative types expand on their view of the world, with actions that influence more creative activities. Clearly that happened during the Internet boom - Amazon and eBay and Paypal come to mind - but it stopped after the dot-com crash....didn’t it? Maybe not. Perhaps the innovation slowed as capital exited businesses, but it didn’t stop the launch of the iPod a little over a year later, which led into iTunes Store and the iPhone and the iPad in quick succession. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity;  SpaceShipOne and the Deepsea Challenger - innovation may have become so ubiquitous that its continuation isn’t obvious. If so, we can expect it to become less prevalent - it may be doing so already - as the forces of history encourage use of existing technology over the invention of new.