Life in the 21st Century: A Trade-Off

The photo here depicts a slice of life from 1905, before fire-fighting equipment had evolved into an early version of the trucks we have today.  (To skeptics, of which I was one before I looked this up: both the source of water, the fire hydrant, and the modern battery to power the headlight were developed more than 100 years earlier.)

This is a reminder of how the last 120 years, due purely to improvements in technology, has made our lives safer, longer, healthier, more productive, and more convenient than they’ve ever been in the past. But, absent the improvement represented by developments in technology, many parts of our lives have gotten far worse.

In 1905, was it conceivable that today:

• The leader of one of our two political parties would be a criminal conman? Does any legitimate historian regard Teddy Roosevelt as a sociopath?

• The world’s #1 automaker, Volkswagen, which led #2 Toyota by over $32 billion in revenue as of June 2023, could have possibly decided, as a corporation, to rip off 11 million customers, and another 8 billion people on Earth who use their lungs to breathe, with its scheme to defraud emissions regulations?

• Wells Fargo, which was founded 41 years old before this bicycle was made, would be ordered to pay $3.7 billion in penalties and victims’ compensation for alleged illegal practices that caused thousands of the bank’s customers to lose their homes and vehicles?

We’ve made a trade, whether we want it or not, from moral decency to creature comfort and the gross abuse of the common American consumer.

All I can say about this personally, and I’m sure my thoughts are echoed by most of my peers who made their money in the late 20th Century, is that we were lucky to have lived and worked in a time in which business morality still meant something.