If you want to see a truly amazing trip down 44 years of memory lane, check out this comparison of the 1978 Cray computer, at the time the most powerful computer in the world, and the 2022 iPhone. I won’t bother giving you the specifics because the narrator, Dave Darling, does a very good job.
In talks I gave in the early 2000s in which I highlighted the huge advances in computing, I said that if we had seen the same advances in, say, kidney surgery, you could have decided whether to get kidney surgery–or buy yourself a cup of coffee. Now the comparison would be way more extreme.
The video reminds me of the less spectacular, but still spectacular, effects of the lightbulb that William D. Nordhaus pointed out years ago. Interestingly, in granting him his half of the Nobel Prize in economics, the Nobel committee didn’t even bother to mention what I thought was one of his biggest contributions. Here’s what I wrote on the issue in my biography of Nordhaus in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
He showed that the price of light in 1992, adjusted for inflation, was less than one tenth of one percent of its price in 1800. Failure to take this reduction fully into account, noted Nordhaus, meant that economists have substantially underestimated the real growth rate of the economy and the growth rate of real wages.
HT2 Jeff Hummel.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Jan 20 2024 at 10:01am
While agreed that the advances haven’t been quite extreme, there have been significant advances in QOL for kidney transplants. My mother recently donated her kidney. They did some new surgery that was much less invasive (I don’t know the details or what it’s called; sorry). But she was mostly recovered and approaching a “normal” life within 2 weeks. I guess that previously recovery could take months.
While not quite the same as choosing between kidney surgery or getting coffee, I think weeks less of pain is certainly a good advance.
David Henderson
Jan 20 2024 at 10:56am
Thanks. Good to hear and good for your mom.
Walter Boggs
Jan 20 2024 at 3:11pm
My understanding is that, with modern laparoscopic techniques, the donor kidney can be removed with much smaller incisions. Gall bladder surgery has been done this way for a while.
Mark Brophy
Jan 20 2024 at 10:58am
My wife at age 62 had a tumor in her kidney so the Mayo Clinic removed it, a procedure not available 30 years ago. She’ll probably live to age 90. The tumor was caused by bad genes that she inherited from her father who died at age 54 of bladder cancer.
steve
Jan 20 2024 at 11:58am
If 1800 is your baseline I would think kidney surgery has advanced at least as much. Anesthesia didnt exist in 1800. The use of antiseptics didnt come into being until the mid 1800s. So surgery on the kidney largely didnt exist in 1800. If some surgeon actually tried it and it wasn’t recorded we can be sure it was painful and the pt probably died from an infection. The story I like to remember is that around 1800 a surgeon was doing surgery on a guy’s leg and accidentally cut off his testicles. Speed was emphasized in surgery back then and the pt moved. Bummer.
And just to be pedantic I would note that one of the goals in medicine has been to avoid even needing surgery. Between lithotripsy, chemo and radiation we have done quite a bit of that. Anyway, I dont know how you compare the costs of something that didnt exist in 1800 to what we have now, but if someone did try real kidney surgery in 1800 the cost was probably death of the patient.
Steve
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 20 2024 at 1:17pm
The first computer I worked on after I left college in 1978 was a PDP 12 made by Digital Electronics back in 1972. It was about six feet high, four feet wide, 2 feet deep, weighed 600 lbs., and had 4,000 bytes of memory. It could run FORTRAN programs no longer than about 100 lines of code.
David Henderson
Jan 21 2024 at 12:21pm
Thanks for commenting on the most important part of my post.
Jim Glass
Jan 21 2024 at 8:40pm
In 1980 I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III, black & white monitor, running at 2.0 MHz, with 48k memory and two 180 KB 5-inch floppy disk drives, plus a daisy wheel printer. That combo cost $4,000 — almost $16,000 in today’s money.
It was the best consumer purchase I ever made in my life. I was just starting my second real job with a small but fast growing entrepreneurial company and was the only person with a computer. It was still the era of the Selectric typewriter (although about to end like that of the dinosaurs — link provided for those who’ve seen lots of pix of dinosaurs but never a Selectric.). I was immediately the most productive person in the company, the owner really like that, my career went vrooom!
(That boost kept me ahead of the tech curve for many years — first in my circle on the Internet, first on the Web pre-Netscape via Gopher, and what a change that’s been! — until the smart phone arrived. Then the curve passed me and disappeared somewhere off ahead. Since then tech-wise I’ve been mister putter-put-put … but every Boomer has had his day.)
Joe K
Jan 22 2024 at 6:07pm
Similar to the advancements in computing are the advancements in life due to better energy usage.
circa 1800 , it took about 20 minutes of human labor to plant , grow , harvest , convert the seed to flour to make a single loaf of bread
By 1900 it to about 10 minutes of human labor.
Today, the same task to make enough flour to make a single loaf of bread is about 2 seconds.
Massive improvements across virtually everything in the last 2oo years.
Mactoul
Jan 20 2024 at 11:48pm
While there has been great progress in treating acute conditions, situation is altogether different concerning chronic conditions.
Partly because the scientific method doesn’t easily apply to conditions that develop over many years and having multiple causes. And partly because of wrong paradigms that rule the medical establishment.
Otherwise why the global epidemic of obesity and diabetes?
Jim Glass
Jan 21 2024 at 3:28pm
Firstly, and dominatingly, because the price of food (calories) has plunged since the 1970s when the surge in obesity and all the resulting diabetes started. Supply and demand. What happens to the consumption of a product when its price goes down?
The same with calories as with computing power.
Secondly, as life has become ever more automated and labor saving, caloric expenditure has steadily declined. This is even more so with women than men — my middle-class mother used to lug clothes outside to a line to hang them, wash the family dishes by hand, and perform many other such physical tasks, etc., etc., while today’s housewives sit on a sofa watching The View.
This explains why during the obesity epidemic in the USA women have gained more weight than men, and housewives have gained more weight than working women.
Diabetes is largely preventable by maintaining a healthy weight and *reversable* with weight loss — which greatly simplifies the ‘complex’ scientific treatment of it as a chronic medical condition.
The law of supply and demand is really very powerful in all fields. ‘Tis a pity it isn’t taught anywhere outside of econ courses.
Mactoul
Jan 21 2024 at 8:07pm
Not as simple as that. Calorie intake would closely track calorie expenditure provided one’s hormonal state is not disordered.
Obesity is a storage disorder– calories are diverted to storage leading the person to consume more.
Jim Glass
Jan 22 2024 at 12:55am
What matters is the reverse – if calorie expenditure naturally rises to match caloric intake (but for disordered hormones). After all, calorie consumption must increase as its price steeply falls — don’t think you can ignore that fact.
If you are claiming this, you are claiming that if one treats oneself to 10 cheaper-than-ever Oreo cookies, one in a healthy hormonal state naturally feels the urge to add 5 miles of running to one’s normal physical output. (What it takes for the typical adult male to burn 500 calories). Oddly, I’ve never seen that in my life, in anyone else or myself. Dang, after big Thanksgiving feasts I’ve seen lots of people who wanted to pass out, but never one who wanted to go run cross-country. Though if you have controlled studies actually documenting this effect, please link.
Which strangely began to strike the general population just as the price of food plunged.
I presume you mean by the insulin mechanism: Mice injected with insulin add a layer of fat. Carbohydrates spike insulin in people. Thus, people who eat carbs add fat, which requires them to eat more to meet their energy needs, eating more carbs adds more fat, repeat. QED. (Post 1975.)
I don’t want to bring the insane “diet wars” to this blog, but this is a perfect example of the “mechanistic” fallacy endemic across medicine as described by Dr. Francis in my other comment. It sounds plausible, and is ALL OVER the Internet (and pop science elsewhere) providing huge psychic benefits to believers (“we’re not responsible for our coming diabetes”) and $$$-benefits to those pushing it to meet the demand for it whether they believe it or not. But before addicting ourselves via emotional reasoning to this tribe, lest we fool ourselves, lets ask if are there be any obvious empirical facts plus theory indicating the contrary to consider? (Less snarky than: “Who gets obese eating ever more fruits and vegetables?”) Fair question?
1) In a tightly controlled study, people ate as much as they wanted on high carb / low carb diets. The high-carbers had the big insulin increase response expected — yet *reduced* their calorie consumption by an average 700 a day. (A lot!) “Every single participant, no noise.” What?
2) A chart of historical data shows the more evil conjoined twin of carbs, sugar (“simple carbs”, the most basic form) falling in consumption for the lasts 25 years. But look at the line rising fast since 1975 – is that commerce in food?
3) A Phd University Professor (atypical in look and attitude!) explains the details. E.g.: Injected insulin increases appetite, but endogenous insulin reduces it (see #1) … The body tries to maintain balance, so insulin effects to increase fat are offset by other mechanisms to reduce it (named) … insulin layers muscle too – do bodybuilders load up on insulin? (He’d know!) … there are “dozens and dozens of studies” comparing the effects of high-carb and low-carb diets finding the same thing — same calories consumed, same weight effect. Etc., etc. Listen and enjoy.
So, what do you think?
I’ll add a non-scientific anecdote: 11 years ago (at age 59) I was 250+ lbs. obese, pre-diabetic with all the related problems. Then I got my fat butt up off the couch, started walking and dieting, then jogging and dieting more. In a year I lost 75 pounds, and I wound up running 5 marathons. All my bloodwork major risk factors turned into anti-risk factors and remain the same today. So … what happened to my “disordered hormones” ??
That’s why I’m invested in the obesity arguments. But there is a LOT MORE here, all the fact-blind emotional reasoning tribalism that has spread across the health field, dividing it up into warring camps, is also spread far far beyond it into our polity, carving it up in other ways. The Chinese, Russians and Iranians have nothing to bring us down … but this...
BTW, social media is evil.
Mactoul
Jan 22 2024 at 10:55pm
Your rewording — eat more, exercise more — isn’t equivalent to my formulation (exercise more, eat more). Indeed, I don’t think there is anything controversial about ” working up an appetite “.
A lot of studies are too clever. It is often feasible to conduct the study in such a way to get the desired answer. Hence one needs to go in depth and deconstruct these studies. You may appreciate some of the required deconstruction at the blog high-fat-nutrition. blogspot. com
Jim Glass
Jan 21 2024 at 7:38pm
Biological systems are hugely more complex (and self-limiting) than electronic systems, so the comparison is inapropos. John Ioannidis some years back published the (in)famous analysis “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, focusing on medical research — as to which, he really understated the case.
It’s not just that the systems being studied are far more complex, the *cognitive understanding* of interventions is far more complex (and thus often plain wrong) for medical professionals as well as for patients, the public. (Need I mention Covid Madness?) Here’s a cardiologist going through these cognitive failures and biases…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmJsCaQTXiE
Notable is “the mechanistic fallacy”: i.e., it logically seems like an idea should work so the profession must do it to save lives and improve health. The good doc say that as few as 1% (!) of these ideas that are actually implemented in hospitals and elsewhere, typically supported by observational studies, in the end pass the “ooops” test. A few examples…
[] Using stents to open clogged arteries to prevent heart attacks. How could it not be right? So for a generation it was the standard practice norm. Ooops!
[] Alzheimer’s patients have plaque-covered brains. Remove the plaque, they’ll be better! After a couple decades and billions of dollars spent on developing drugs that successfully remove the plaque … Ooops.
[] Hormone replacement therapy for women. Those of you who are old enough and interested in such things will remember this was a big deal. Observational study after study after study found that women who obtained hormone therapy from their doctors lived longer and healthier lives than those who didn’t. The word spread in media (especially women’s), it became a “women’s rights!” issue, pharma made a fortune from it, more studies backed it up, if you questioned them you were both anti-science and anti-women, then, finally … OOOPS!
The list goes on and on… How can so much logic confirmed by so many observational studies be so wrong??*
Consumers, the public, are even more confused with distorted thinking, as our evolutionarily inherited, now obsolete & irrational takes on our health drive us nutz. I’ll skip all the mass of medical scams and semi-scams driven by mass consumer demand for them. Let’s just look at how consumers view some actual, real working interventions versus their reality. The data….
[] Breast cancer prevention by mammogram. This has got to be good, right? Even the NFL promotes it in pink! But how good?…
Per 1000 women over 50 who did not/did have mammograms, over 11 years…
Deaths from any kind of cancer, 22/22 … deaths from breast cancer, 5/4 …. ‘false alarm’ unneeded further medical procedures, 0/100 … unnecessary mastectomies 0/5.
“Mammograms reduce deaths from breast cancer by 20%!”
[] Prostate cancer screening by PSA test. Men get equal consideration (if only).
Per 1000 men over 50 who did not/did have screening, over 16 years…
Deaths from prostate cancer, 12/10 … deaths, 322/322 … ‘false alarms’ resulting in further procedures, 0/155 … men with non-progressive cancer unnecessarily diagnosed or treated, 0/51.
“PSA screening reduces deaths from prostate cancer by 17%!”
Go through such data, here and elsewhere, for the lists of other such popular treatments and you’ll find their benefits are overall very modest — if important for those who get them, E.g., statins (over three years, age 40+) reduce risk of heart attack from 2% to 1% and death from 4% to 3%. Are those 1% reductions big or little? Well, they are 50% and 25%, and they are big if they are you.
Also, for older persons, over-50ish, interventions that do work do *not* reduce all cause mortality much if at all, because if one thing doesn’t kill you another will. See the cancer data above. So as to late-in-life kidney surgery, God bless and good luck. (I take my blood pressure medicine daily not to live longer but because I don’t want to live after a having a stroke before I die.)
And you’ll see that on the whole, the *only* interventions that dramatically reduce *all cause* mortality, at near *all* ages of intervention, are (1) vaccines, and (2) moving to the healthy bodyweight, diet, exercise & sleep combo.
So of course we live in a world where two big social movements of the moment are (1) anti-vaxing, and (2) anti-fat shaming. Because that’s who we are. (All us human beings are tribally-motivated idiots, “idiot” being defined as a smart person who acts stupidly without having the excuse of a low IQ. But that’s just my stupid opinion.)
Anyway, computer technologists don’t have any of these problems — they don’t rely on observational studies of populations to learn if an innovation works … or need long-term control group populations to be sure, when nobody wants to be in a control … or need to *wait years* to see if a “good idea” works or is actually a bad one … don’t serve customers who can’t tell/don’t know if a new computer actually runs faster or slower, many of whom insist on buying magical thinking-model “alternative computing”…
~~~~
* Actual observational studies confirm that “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is true, it works! But is it because of the apple? Multiply by billion$$$$$.
Mactoul
Jan 22 2024 at 11:58pm
Mechanistic models are opposites of observational studies. There are bad mechanistic models but the good models can guide one to causation, not just correlations.
Obesity is correlated with many other things apart from price of a calorie. For example, production of unsaturated fats. The over-consumption of unsaturated fats is mechanistically implicated in hormonal disorders that lead to obesity.
As for laziness of modern people, plenty of people are in fitness and running which was hardly so in older times.
john tate
Jan 23 2024 at 12:08am
Circa 1979-1980 I soldered together a Zilog Z-80 based Heathkit H-89 whose memory was 32K and mass memory, a cassette tape, and eventually a 105kB floppy disc. Later, 1981 I assembled a DEC LSI-11 based machine (this was a PDP-11 on 3 chips); same 32K RAM and 2x250kB floppies.
Nic Johnson
Jan 23 2024 at 5:02am
Worked for an oil company in the 80s and we got a Cray. Our reservoir simulation codes were over 100,000 lines of Fortran. It took hours to compile on an IBM 360 and 390 and our VAX. Because of this we kept object code and linked it every time we ran the codes and even linking took a few minutes. The Cray could compile and link the same code in 2 seconds. We compiled and linked every time we ran the code on the Cray. It was amazingly fast in its day.
Comments are closed.