Has Progress Died with Neil Armstrong?

In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick set their “Space Odyssey” in 2001. Eleven years after that date, the movie continues to be as much science fiction as it was in the 1960s. Robots do not think, and in fact, there are few with mechanical arms. Space exploration lies in the sleep of the just. The theories of “space power” that exaggerated the imagination of military strategies in the 1970s are ridiculous in today’s world.

Neil Armstrong, who recently passed away, continues to be one of 12 men to have set foot outside of Earth. On December 12, it will be 40 years since the last human being landed on the moon.

In 2012, cars do not fly. Nuclear fusion is as far as away as it was in 1968. There is no vaccine against malaria. The death rate has decreased, but the word “cancer” continues to be considered almost equivalent to “death sentence,” despite the undeniable advances in the fight against that disease (advances which often have to do with early diagnosis).

Heart disease continues to kill us. Oscar Pistorius is nicknamed “Blade Runner,” but the movie by Ridley Scott takes place in 2019, and it does not seem that replicants will be running around Los Angeles in seven years (the book on which the film “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was based, takes place on Jan. 3, 1992, when the most advanced technology in Spain was the immediate arrival of the AVE and in Los Angeles, problems came from racial violence between blacks, Koreans, Hispanics and whites, not between humans and androids that had escaped from Mars.)

Eighty seven percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, whose extraction technology has not changed dramatically. Despite what we say in the media, renewable sources of energy barely supply 1.32 percent of the world’s energy.

Boeing 747s that began flying on Feb. 9, 1969 (when Armstrong had not arrived on the moon) are still in service. Artificial insemination has increased, but children are made as they also have been, not in test tubes. We have deciphered the genome, but we still do not know the keys to many diseases.

And, on top of it all, as we have seen today, soon all of the men who have been on the moon will die. Can anyone imagine if only 12 people had arrived in America in 1492 and by 1535, they had all died?

These cases seem to confirm the thesis of Tyler Cowen, an economist from George Mason University, which states that technological progress has slowed since the 1970s. Cowen, in reality, is a formidable gourmet, to whom the author of these lines owes the discovery of the best Thai restaurant in Washington, but he also is a tremendously respected economist (and, unlike Krugman, does not need to look for a fight): He is a columnist for The New York Times, has the most influential blog among his colleagues worldwide, “Marginal Revolution,” and has written the best seller, “The Great Stagnation.”

Living in the Fifties?

Cowen likes to ask that we look at a movie from the fifties and compare what we see there with the real world. The majority of what we see still exists today. Improved, it’s true, but the same. Bathrooms (I do not know why Cowen always ends by talking about them) are the same. Television, practically the same (just without a flat screen). It is true that there have been quantitative advances in all of these areas, but they have not been very qualitative. Essentially, according to Cowen, we continue to live in the 1950s, which is when they created a series of inventions developed in the beginning of the century and put in mass production during the Great Depression in the 1930s. The advancement of information-based and communication technologies (computers, telephones and the internet) is, for Cowen, the only exception to this rule. Maybe the new techniques used to extract petroleum and natural gas (“fracking” or “hydraulic fracturing”), together with renewable methods, will also change the energy panorama of the world. For now, however, they are only a promise.

Why are we in this situation? According to Cowen, there are various factors, but, among others, is the decreased popularity of engineering careers, which have traditionally played a central role in technology development. Today, whoever wants to earn money becomes a lawyer or doctor (at least in the United States) and if someone is good with numbers, he or she goes to Wall Street in order to design financial products (investment banks swept away many NASA astronauts at the beginning of the past decade to create titles based on junk mortgages). However, this explanation does not seem very solid.

According to a study from Georgetown University, it is certain that an engineer or whatever graduate with a knowledge of algebra has an employment rate 66 percent lower than average, but the fact remains that barely 4.8 percent of workers in the United States are employed in the STEM field (the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and that by 2018, that figure will barely rise to 4.9 percent.

Whatever the reason, a world with fewer technological advances is a more complicated world. It is no coincidence that the end of what Cowen considers to be the final wave of progress, at the end of the seventies, coincided with the appearance of inflation and was aggravated by the gas crisis. If there are no technological advances, productivity barely increases. Because of this, salaries should increase less. Instead, there is inflation and competition is lost (the best example is Spain, where we have specialized in sectors of low productivity, like real estate, because houses, according to this economist, are made similar to how they were forty years ago. However, upon fixing our salaries to inflation, our productivity has actually decreased.)

Thus it is not strange that, in 2010, James Cameron set “Avatar” in the year 2154. Where Kubrick gave us less than a century to discover the origins of the universe, now Hollywood gives us more than 150 years to start the exploration of other worlds.