We like to believe that we are standing at the summit of human progress. Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the computer on your desk. Look at the network that seems to be everywhere at once. A little more than twenty years ago, the internet still felt like a creaking contraption for programmers, hobbyists and people in university laboratories. Today it is more like air. We work through it, shop through it, fall in love through it, quarrel through it, learn through it, remember through it, and increasingly use it to prove that we are still here.
Medicine, too, seems to be waiting at the threshold of miracle. We keep hearing about cloned organs, genetic repair, stem-cell therapies, personalised drugs and technologies to slow ageing. Life expectancy in some wealthy countries still inches upward, and journalists like to translate this into intoxicating figures: a few more hours each day, a few more months each year. At this rate, it seems, humanity cannot be far from taming old age. Immortality may still be unrealistic, but something uncomfortably close to it appears to be waiting around the corner.
This story is seductive, and it is everywhere. The 21st century is described as an age of acceleration: new medicines are about to arrive, cancer is about to be conquered, space tourism is about to become ordinary, hypersonic aircraft are about to shrink the planet into an afternoon, and artificial intelligence and biotechnology are about to rewrite the human condition. Almost every week the news throws another “new hope” in our direction. But pause for a moment and the picture begins to blur. Many of these breakthroughs are still press releases with lab coats attached. Many of these futures are announced year after year, always imminent, never quite present.
Yet there really was a time when the future was not a slogan but an event. It is not so distant from us, though it already feels almost mythical. I will call it the Golden Quarter: roughly the years from 1945 to 1971. In less than a single human generation, almost the entire skeleton of the modern world was assembled. The contraceptive pill transformed sex, family and the fate of women. Electronics remade industry and communication. Computers moved from monstrous machines toward repeatable systems. The first seeds of the internet were planted. Nuclear power was released. Television entered the living room. Antibiotics turned many once-deadly infections into manageable conditions. Human beings went into space. The civil rights movement cracked open ancient structures of inequality.
The list goes on. Feminism became a mass political force. The teenager became a cultural identity. The Green Revolution changed food production. Colonial empires fell apart. Popular music shaped global youth culture. Commercial aviation became ordinary. The gay rights movement began to speak in public. Cars became cheaper, safer and more reliable. High-speed trains appeared. Human beings walked on the Moon, probes travelled toward Mars, smallpox was driven toward extinction, and the double helix revealed the structure of life’s information. That period was like a civilisation engine suddenly running at full power. Science, technology, economics and social attitudes all accelerated at once.
Progress exists today, of course, but its character has changed. We increasingly locate innovation in the fine adjustments of consumer electronics and information technology. Screens become brighter, cameras multiply, software runs faster, feeds become more endless. Yet a better phone is not the same as a faster aircraft, and smoother social media is not the same as the eradication of a disease. We once imagined futures of flying cars, lunar settlements and new energy systems that would alter civilisation. What we received instead was shorter video, thinner devices and more frequent operating-system updates.
Economists often explain the postwar golden age through wealth. After the Second World War, the United States and Western Europe entered a boom that lasted more than two decades. Japan rebuilt itself from ruins into an industrial power. Germany experienced its economic miracle. Even many countries on the other side of the Cold War became richer in certain measurable ways. Cheap energy, population growth, government stimulus, military spending and reconstruction combined to produce a long cycle of expansion.
But economics alone misses the stranger fact of the period: the dense explosion of inventiveness. Scientists, engineers, doctors, reformers and ordinary young people seemed suddenly to acquire confidence that the world could be remade. For biologists, physicists and materials scientists, it was almost impossible to imagine a better time to be alive. At the same time, social attitudes shifted with comparable force. Before 1945, even supposedly enlightened societies held views about race, sex and sexuality that now seem almost prehistoric. By 1971, many of those assumptions were in retreat. The world had not merely become richer. It had become another world.
And today? Look up at the sky. The airliners passing overhead may look modern, but in essence they are refined versions of the jet aircraft of the 1960s: quieter, more efficient, with better electronics, but not fundamentally different machines. In 1971, a flight from London to New York took about eight hours; for ordinary passengers, it still does. More ironically, there was then a passenger aircraft that could cross the Atlantic in three. We have since lost it. Cars are safer, more comfortable and more fuel-efficient than they were, but they have not undergone a true paradigm shift. We have made the old machines more polished. We have not created a new age of transport.
Medicine tells a similar story. Human beings do live longer, but not chiefly because of the dazzling therapies so often promised in headlines. Cancer research has consumed enormous sums over decades, with governments, charities, universities and pharmaceutical companies all involved. Yet progress against many cancers remains far more modest than the public is encouraged to imagine. Some cancers have become much more treatable; many remain stubbornly resistant. We hear often of major breakthroughs, but less often see them become ordinary treatments in ordinary hospitals.
After the dizzying breakthroughs of the last century, basic science seems to have entered a long slow lane
Gene therapy, cloned organs, stem-cell repair, life-extension technology, personalised medicine and the genomic revolution have all been announced, repeatedly, as entrances to a new era. But for most patients, they are still not everyday realities. The paralysed do not routinely walk again. The blind do not routinely see. Dementia remains devastatingly hard to stop. Chronic addiction is still poorly understood and imperfectly treated. When the human genome was decoded, many declared that medicine was about to be transformed. Many years later, much of that promise still sits in the future tense.
Psychiatry is especially awkward. Drugs have become more refined, diagnoses more varied and language more complex, but many of the central problems remain unresolved. Depression, anxiety, addiction, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder still often depend on long trial and error, partial relief and incomplete understanding. Gains in longevity, meanwhile, often come from more ordinary measures: smoking less, controlling blood pressure, improving diet, reducing infections and avoiding accidents. These are important, but they do not glitter like cloned organs.
There has been no new Green Revolution. Energy remains entangled with fossil fuels. The roads are still filled mostly with metal vehicles powered by combustion or by electricity generated within a system still struggling to decarbonise. Materials science has not produced a transformation on the scale of plastics, semiconductors, new alloys and composites. Physics, after the glory of relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics and particle theory, seems to have become harder and slower. The Higgs boson was a magnificent discovery, but it confirmed a theory more than it rewrote the world in the style of Einstein. String theory has carried immense hopes while lingering near the edge of testability. And as for the Moon, it has been too long since anyone went back.
The question, then, is unavoidable: why did progress slow? More precisely, why did it erupt after 1945 and begin to lose speed around the 1970s?
The easiest answer is war. The Second World War certainly accelerated many technologies. Radar, rockets, jet engines, nuclear research and the mass production of antibiotics all owed something to military pressure. The Cold War then continued to drive space programmes, computing, military electronics and aerospace. Without the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, it is hard to imagine Americans reaching the Moon so quickly.
But war cannot explain everything. Many key technologies already had roots before the war. Penicillin, jet propulsion and nuclear fission were not conjured from nothing by conflict. War accelerated them; it did not entirely create them. Besides, if mobilisation and money were the decisive factors, today’s world should be more than capable of launching a new Apollo. Global wealth is far greater than it was in the 1970s. There are more engineers, more universities, more computing power and more capital. The money has not vanished. The talent has not vanished. Why, then, do civilisation-altering innovations seem rarer?
One answer is that the easy fruit has already been picked. Unused land, mass education and the technological harvest of 19th-century science were all relatively accessible resources. Perhaps it was simply easier to move from propeller aircraft to jets than it is to move from modern jets to something radically better. Perhaps it was easier to go from no antibiotics to antibiotics than from antibiotics to the conquest of cancer. This explanation has force, but it is not enough.
History repeatedly shows that people mistake difficulty for completion. Around 1900, some believed that physics was nearly finished, with only details left to settle. Then relativity and quantum mechanics overturned the house. Flight was similar. Before the Wright brothers, theories competed and genuine powered flight seemed uncertain; the breakthrough was not widely foreseen. A plateau can be the illusion immediately preceding a new paradigm. We should be cautious before concluding that there is simply nothing large left to discover.
The missing element may not be money, but what money now does. Capitalism was once a vast engine of progress. In the 18th and 19th centuries, capital built roads, railways, telegraphs, factories and steam systems. It drove industrialisation and remade the world’s productive capacity. Wealth was often invested in infrastructure and technologies that changed how civilisation worked.
Today, wealth is concentrated in remarkably few hands. The very rich have more things to buy than their predecessors could have imagined: private jets, superyachts, mansions, collections, experiences at the edge of space. These objects are expensive, seductive and full of status, but they rarely push outward the frontier of knowledge. More importantly, when wealth can reproduce itself through financial assets, the incentive to invest in difficult, uncertain, long-term innovation weakens. If one can become richer by inventing nothing, why take the trouble of changing the world?
The new ideal of innovation is not to make a product last longer, but to make it expire faster
The Golden Quarter also coincided with declining inequality in many developed countries. The middle class expanded, public education widened and ordinary workers shared in growth. Does equality help innovation? The answer is not obvious, but the question is worth asking. A more equal society may be more willing to invest in public goals, and more capable of drawing large numbers of people into education, science and engineering. By contrast, an extremely unequal society turns short-term money-making into almost the only recognised measure of success.
When success is defined by how much money can be generated quickly, progress itself is distorted. Companies no longer chiefly aim to produce durable, reliable things that transform life. They aim to make existing products feel obsolete as soon as possible. The next phone must make the previous one seem inadequate. The next car must make the old model feel embarrassing. The next operating system must persuade users that delay is a form of backwardness. Innovation is colonised by marketing and becomes a technology of manufactured dissatisfaction.
Half a century ago, the makers of telephones, televisions and cars often took pride in durability. Consumers believed that a product could last for years, and that belief itself was part of a brand’s value. Today almost no smartphone is sold on that promise. Its business logic is not to accompany you for a decade, but to convince you, soon enough, that what you already own is no longer enough. Innovation becomes less a force that makes the world different than a rhythm that makes consumers buy again.
Venture capital, too, has become more cautious in certain crucial respects. In the 1960s, capital was willing to gamble on emerging electronics and genuinely uncertain futures. Today, much investment prefers projects that can scale quickly, copy easily and exit profitably: an app, a platform, a smoother service, a slight adjustment to a business model. These things may make money. They do not necessarily produce antibiotics, moonshots or nuclear energy.
Still, private capital is not the whole story. Many of the great achievements of the Golden Quarter came from public investment. Taxpayers replaced the grand philanthropists and venture capitalists of the 19th century. Universities, government laboratories, military projects and public institutions laid the foundations of modern technology. Early electronic computers emerged from universities. The internet came from publicly funded research networks. The World Wide Web was born at CERN, a public scientific institution. Much of the basic work in medicine, materials, aviation and spaceflight depended on government money.
Since the 1970s, it has become increasingly common to assume that the private sector is the natural home of innovation. The past few decades do not entirely vindicate that faith. Yet the puzzle is more complicated: public research spending has not simply disappeared. In many industrialised countries, research budgets have continued to rise in real or relative terms. Money is still being spent. Papers are still being published. Laboratories are still operating. Why, then, are the returns not as dramatic?
Perhaps the missing ingredient is tolerance for risk. Many of the achievements of the golden age would struggle to be approved today. The global campaign against smallpox saved tens of millions of lives, but it also caused severe side effects and some deaths. In the 1960s, new drugs moved to market faster. This produced disasters, including the tragedy of thalidomide, but it also produced a wave of medical gains that benefited millions.
Today’s systems are more careful, more complex and more safety-conscious. There are good moral reasons for this. Nobody should wish to return to an age of crude regulation and reckless experimentation on patients. But reduced risk also has a price. Drug approval takes longer, clinical trials cost more, liability risks are heavier, and many promising treatments die before they reach patients. In preventing visible mistakes, we may be accepting invisible deaths: people who might have been helped sooner, but die inside safer procedures.
Risk aversion has also trapped agriculture and energy. Vitamin A-rich golden rice might have helped protect many children in poorer countries from blindness and death, yet it has long been delayed by anti-GM campaigns. Nuclear power has suffered a similar fate. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl became symbols of terror in public memory, even though the comparison between actual deaths and the risks of other energy sources is far more complicated than most people imagine. The result was stagnation in nuclear research and construction across much of the world, while humanity continued burning coal, oil and gas. Part of the price of the climate crisis is that fear of certain risks overwhelmed understanding of larger ones.
Apollo today might not lose to technology, but it would very likely lose to risk assessment
The Apollo programme could hardly happen today in the same form. Not because people have lost interest in the Moon, but because a few-per-cent chance of astronaut death would be enough to paralyse modern political systems. The Boeing 747 moved from drawing board to flight in only a few years, a remarkable expression of engineering nerve. Modern aircraft projects take longer, carry more regulation and move through more complex organisations. We gained safety. We lost a certain velocity of daring.
Fifty years ago, scientists and engineers were often seen as agents of liberation. People still remembered infections before penicillin, child mortality before vaccination, pain before modern dentistry, and the narrow geography of life before affordable cars. Science and technology meant escape from an older world. Today we are more likely to distrust experts, suspect technologies and dwell on side effects, ethical disasters and unknown consequences. Some of this suspicion is necessary. But when suspicion becomes the default posture, a society becomes better at preventing harms than at creating goods.
Social progress followed a similar pattern. The people who transformed postwar society often accepted real risks. Civil rights activists faced police batons, jail and violence. Antiwar protesters faced tear gas and state power. Early feminists faced ridicule, exclusion and hostility. Gay rights activists faced humiliation and legal punishment. Much progress did not arise in safe conference rooms. It was forced into being on streets, in courts, on campuses and inside families.
Social change continues today, but it often takes narrower and more cautious forms. Language policing, identity performance, social-media punishment and the maintenance of group consensus sometimes replace harder struggles over institutions. Students were once imagined as a rebellious force; many young people today are better at expressing the correct position than at challenging prevailing orthodoxies. Social media appears to give everyone a voice, but it often produces timidity. People learn to read the wind, avoid complexity, join the group and punish dissent.
Does any of this matter? One might say that even if technological progress has cooled, the world is still better than it has ever been. This is not absurd. Human beings today are generally longer-lived, richer and safer than their ancestors. Violence has declined over long timescales. Many diseases are controlled. Famine is less common. Child mortality has fallen. Civil rights have become deeply entrenched. Same-sex marriage is legal in more countries, and explicit racism is met with revulsion in many societies. The world of 2014 was, in many respects, more comfortable and civilised than the world of 1971.
The internet is also a genuine wonder. In some ways it is more profound than Apollo because it has transformed the daily lives of billions. Ordinary people can cross the Atlantic for a few days’ wages, which is extraordinary by historical standards. Science fiction often imagined flying cars and starships, but did not quite foresee a world in which nearly everyone carried a global communication terminal in a pocket. We are not living in an age without progress.
We could have had a world in which cancer was retreating, dementia was treatable, and clean energy had changed the fate of the climate
The problem is not that the world failed to improve. It is that it might have improved so much more. If the Golden Quarter had not burned out, but had become a Golden Century, we might already have powerful treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. We might have safe, cheap, low-carbon nuclear energy sufficient to weaken the climate crisis. We might have used genetics to bring cheaper and healthier food to the poorest people on Earth. Cancer might no longer be one of the most stubborn shadows over modern medicine.
We need not even imagine lunar colonies. More modest futures would have been enough: faster aircraft, safer reactors, bolder medicine, more nutritious crops, longer-lasting batteries, and a technological culture less enslaved to short-term consumption. If the Golden Quarter had become a Golden Century, the magical phone in your hand might at least have had a battery that lasted more than a day.
The real sadness is not that the future never arrived. It is that it once seemed so near. Human beings proved, in twenty-five extraordinary years, that societies could change quickly, science could break through repeatedly, technology could remake ordinary life, and ancient prejudices could be forced into retreat. We did not lose intelligence. We did not lose wealth. What we may have lost is rarer: confidence in large purposes, tolerance for failure, patience with public ambition, and the courage to believe that progress is something greater than the next device.
