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		We Have Fewer Inventions to Get Used To
	
	Our world is changing at a rate faster than some people think other
people can adapt to.  The idea is frequently put forward that the pace of
technology is getting faster and faster and that the citizen of today has
much more to get used to than his father or great-grandfather.  My view is
that technology is accelerating (though not nearly as quickly as it could or
as I would like), but that there isn't as much change to adapt to as there
was before.
	
	In order to see the point, we must distinguish between the pace of
scientific and technological change itself and the rate of change in the way
people live.  For example, atomic power plants represent a technological
change of great importance, but it makes no difference to me when I press the
light switch whether the electricity was produced by burning coal or by
fissioning uranium.

	Between 1890 and 1930 technological changes had drastic effects on
the daily lives of all Americans.  In that period the following inventions
came into common use by great masses of people: electricity in the home,
central heating, indoor plumbing, telephones, streetcars and then
automobiles, movies, and radio.  These inventions made the small middle
class family without servants feasible, allowed the middle class to move to
the suburbs, gave each person free physical access to the region of the
country in which he or she lives, and allowed immediate communication with
one's relatives, friends, girlfriends or boyfriends, and business associates.
The effect of these innovations was very large.  The style of relations
between the sexes was changed as the car expanded the scope of dating.
Servants disappeared from the families of the middle classes, the modern
nuclear family developed, reliance on the entertainment of radio and movies
became possible.

	The recent effects of technological change have been much smaller
Most of the innovations of greatest importance scientifically have had little
social effect.  Indoor toilets have had more social impact than the laser.

	Since World War II, the major changes in daily life have come from
television and the birth control pill.  Mass air travel came in the 1950s,
but had much less social effect than mass rail travel almost a century
earlier.  Television also came in the 1950's, and color television in the
1960's, but the social effect was only a strengthening of the earlier
introduction of radio.

	The pill came in the 1960's but adequate contraceptive devices
already existed and were in widespread use by middle class women who wanted
sex without babies.  Reliable female controlled contraception came in the
1920s.

	I discount several technological advances as not requiring
adaptation.  Medical advances are also discounted, because a person regards
health as normal and sickness as an imposition.  Thus a gradual change was
the fact that childhood death became a rare event.  My mother remarked to me
about 1950 that she considered it a great success that both my brother and I
had survived, whereas I took the survival of my children for granted. My
mother's feeling was warranted by her own childhood;
when she was a child, more often than not,
some of the children in a family would not survive.

	We also discount production efficiencies leading to greater all
around prosperity.  People find prosperity easy to adjust to.

	We may also imagine that the fear of nuclear war is something
people have had to get used to even though there has been less war
involving the major industrial countries since World War II, and the
threat of Nazi world conquest has not really been replaced.  It is
difficult to say what the change amounts to in terms of fear.
I doubt that the fear of nuclear war in the U.S. has anything like
the psychological effects on (say) children as the fear of fighting
in Beirut.  Levels of violence like that of Beirut today have been
endemic in human history in many places.

	Today and for the last 40 years, technological change affecting
people's daily lives has been much slower.  In the sixties there was a
period of rapid social, political, and ideological change which was the
source of much stress.  Part of this stress comes from the mis-identification
of its source as technological rather than social.  This causes the mistaken
remedy to be proposed of slowing technical change rather than adapting to the
social changes.  If and when the innovations advocated in this book (and
similar things proposed by others) begin to appear, we may re-enter another
period of rapid technological change in living patterns.