Institute For The Future

Interesting question

One of the things that can powerfully affect the future is the radical decline in price of a currently expensive good or service. The invention of the printing press made books (and later newspapers) exceptionally cheap; the Industrial Revolution did the same for a whole host of manufactured goods; and more recently the same thing happened with information technologies.

It's easy to see these trends in purely economic terms, and to overlook their human impact. I was recently reminded of this by a Matt Yglesias post (which I originally read on Marginal Revolution):

 

Brad DeLong observes "In Agatha Christie’s autobiography, she mentioned how she never thought she would ever be wealthy enough to own a car - nor so poor that she wouldn’t have servants."

 

This kind of thing gets a bit hard to get one’s head around when thinking about the future. What do you think will be the equivalent 100 years from now of Agatha Christie’s car and servants?

 

Of course, today (in the U.S. at least) no one would think of servants as cheaper than cars (though when I was kid living in Brazil, maids were still cheaper than cars). But fifty years ago the idea of having a computer in your house was absurd. So Yglesias raises a good question: what currently scarce things will become cheap in the future-- and vice versa?

(One caveat: the Christie quote comes to DeLong via e-mail, and doesn't seem to be sourced.)