Now, whatever the movements in the relative prices of ‘people’ and ‘things’, the fall in the share of people working as domestic servants would not have been as dramatic as it has been in the rich countries over the last century, had there not been the supply of a host of household technologies, which I have represented by the washing machine. However expensive (in relative terms) it may be to hire people who can wash clothes, clean the house, heat the house, cook and do the dishes, they would still have to be hired, if these things could not be done by machines. Or you would have to spend hours doing these things yourselves.
Washing machines have saved mountains of time. The data are not easy to come by, but a mid 1940s study by the US Rural Electrification Authority reports that, with the introduction of the electric washing machine and electric iron, the time required for washing a 38 lb load of laundry was reduced by a factor of nearly 6 (from 4 hours to 41 minutes) and the time taken to iron it by a factor of more than 2.5 (from 4.5 hours to 1.75 hours).[2] Piped water has meant that women do not have to spend hours fetching water (for which, according to the United Nations Development Program, up to two hours per day are spent in some developing countries). Vacuum cleaners have enabled us to clean our houses more thoroughly in a fraction of the time that was needed in the old days, when we had to do it with broom and rags. Gas/electric kitchen stoves and central heating have vastly reduced the time needed for collecting firewood, making fires, keeping the fires alive, and cleaning after them for heating and cooking purposes. Today many people in rich countries even have the dishwasher, whose (future) inventor a certain Mr I. M. Rubinow, an employee of the US Department of Agriculture, said would be ‘a true benefactor of mankind’ in his article in the
The emergence of household appliances, as well as electricity, piped water and piped gas, has totally transformed the way women, and consequently men, live. They have made it possible for far more women to join the labour market. For example, in the US, the proportion of married white women in prime working ages (35–44 years) who work outside the home rose from a few per cent in the late 1890s to nearly 80 per cent today.[3] It has also changed the female occupational structure dramatically by allowing society to get by with far fewer people working as domestic servants, as we have seen above – for example, in the 1870s, nearly 50 per cent of women employed in the US were employed as ‘servants and waitresses’ (most of whom we can take to have been servants rather than waitresses, given that eating out was not yet big business).[4] Increased labour market participation has definitely raised the status of women at home and in society, thus also reducing preference for male children and increasing investment in female education, which then further increases female labour market participation. Even those educated women who in the end choose to stay at home with their children have higher status at home, as they can make credible threats that they can support themselves should they decide to leave their partners. With outside employment opportunities, the opportunity costs of children have risen, making families have fewer children. All of these have changed the traditional family dynamics. Taken together, they constitute really powerful changes.
Of course, I am not saying that these changes have happened only – or even predominantly – because of changes in household technologies. The ‘pill’ and other contraceptives have had a powerful impact on female education and labour market participation by allowing women to control the timing and the frequency of their childbirths. And there are non-technological causes. Even with the same household technologies, countries can have quite different female labour market participation ratios and different occupation structures, depending on things like social conventions regarding the acceptability of middle-class women working (poor women have always worked), tax incentives for paid work and child rearing, and the affordability of childcare. Having said all this, however, it is still true that, without the washing machine (and other labour-saving household technologies), the scale of change in the role of women in society and in family dynamics would not have been nearly as dramatic.
Compared to the changes brought about by the washing machine (and company), the impact of the internet, which many think has totally changed the world, has not been as fundamental – at least so far. The internet has, of course, transformed the way people spend their out-of-work hours – surfing the net, chatting with friends on Facebook, talking to them on Skype, playing electronic games with someone who’s sitting 5,000 miles away, and what not. It has also vastly improved the efficiency with which we can find information about our insurance policies, holidays, restaurants, and increasingly even the price of broccoli and shampoo.
However, when it comes to production processes, it is not clear whether the impacts have been so revolutionary. To be sure, for some, the internet has profoundly changed the way in which they work. I know that by experience. Thanks to the internet, I have been able to write a whole book with my friend and sometime co-author, Professor Ilene Grabel, who teaches in Denver, Colorado, with only one face-to-face meeting and one or two phone calls.[5] However, for many other people, the internet has not had much impact on productivity. Studies have struggled to find the positive impact of the internet on overall productivity – as Robert Solow, the Nobel laureate economist, put it, ‘the evidence is everywhere but in numbers’.
You may think that my comparison is unfair. The household appliances that I mention have had at least a few decades, sometimes a century, to work their magic, whereas the internet is barely two decades old. This is partly true. As the distinguished historian of science, David Edgerton, said in his fascinating book
Just before the start of the trans-Atlantic wired telegraph service in 1866, it took about three weeks to send a message to the other side of the ‘pond’ – the time it took to cross the Atlantic by sail ships. Even going ‘express’ on a steamship (which did not become prevalent until the 1890s), you had to allow two weeks (the record crossings of the time were eight to nine days).
With the telegraph, the transmission time for, say, a 300-word message was reduced to 7 or 8 minutes. It could even be quicker still. The
The internet reduced the transmission time of a 300-word message from 10 seconds on the fax machine to, say, 2 seconds, but this is only a reduction by a factor of 5. The speed reduction by the internet is greater when it comes to longer messages – it can send in 10 seconds (considering that it has to be loaded), say, a 30,000-word document, which would have taken more than 16 minutes (or 1,000 seconds) on the fax machine, giving us an acceleration in transmission speed of 100 times. But compare that to the 2,500-time reduction achieved by the telegraph.
The internet obviously has other revolutionary features. It allows us to send pictures at high speed (something that even telegraph or fax could not do and thus relied on physical transportation). It can be accessed in many places, not just in post offices. Most importantly, using it, we can search for particular information we want from a vast number of sources. However, in terms of sheer acceleration in speed, it is nowhere near as revolutionary as the humble wired (not even wireless) telegraphy.
We vastly overestimate the impacts of the internet only because it is affecting us now. It is not just us. Human beings tend to be fascinated by the newest and the most visible technologies. Already in 1944, George Orwell criticized people who got over-excited by the ‘abolition of distance’ and the ‘disappearance of frontiers’ thanks to the aeroplane and the radio.
Who cares if people think wrongly that the internet has had more important impacts than telegraphy or the washing machine? Why does it matter that people are more impressed by the most recent changes?
It would not matter if this distortion of perspectives was just a matter of people’s opinions. However, these
