Tag: United States of America

Rocket Mail: When Technologies Fail to Rise

One of the episodes which the United States Post Service (USPS) is trying to sweep under the rug, is their attempt to use rocket mail. i.e. send mail on actual rockets. Oh, and you might want to know that the first rocket to be used that way by the USPS was a nuclear missile.

Missilemail.jpg

The idea of rocket mail was originally developed in germany in the 19th century, but never really took off. However, as missile technology improved, the USPS took note of the idea and decided to give it a shot. And so, the first official American rocket mail was launched in 1959.

The USPS chose for that purpose a Regulus cruise missile armed with a nuclear warhead. They stripped took the warhead off, and replaced it with mail containers that were supposed to withstand the impact when the missile hit the ground. The missile was launched from Virginia and reached its destination in Florida in just 22 minutes. Since the two states are around 700 miles apart (~1,200 km) that means the mail got to its destination at a speed of around 3,500 km/h. That’s pretty impressive for mail delivery.

The US Postmaster General got so excited that he publicly claimed that the event is –

“of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world”

and that –

“Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”

Except, as we know very well now, they really didn’t stand on the threshold of rocket mail. The costs of rocket mail were too high – particularly for the infrastructure involved, which included the launch systems and the missile itself which couldn’t be reused. What’s more, at the same time that rocket mail was first attempted, international air travel became dramatically cheaper, so that important packages could easily be delivered in just a single day over the ocean, with no need for rockets of any kind.

Rocket mail is an historic invention which many futurists should consider whenever they gush about new technologies taking over the world. In the end, it all comes down to cost, and if that new technology is more expensive than what you currently use – or even from other technologies that are being developed at the same time – it probably won’t be used after all.

But at least the idea of rocket mail finally found use in Mission Impossible II after all – where Ethan Hunt’s sunglasses are being delivered to him via a rocket. The US Postmaster General can be proud indeed.

 

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This post was originally written as an answer to a question at Quora.  You are welcome to browse my content there and enjoy more answers about the future.

Inequality in the US

Here’s a fascinating quote from Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots:

“Surveys have shown that most Americans vastly underestimate the existing extent of inequality, and when asked to select an “ideal” national distribution of income, they make a choice that, in the real world, exists only in Scandinavian social democracies.”

The amazing thing is that most people simply don’t realize just how bad things are. Human beings have a tendency to compare their life quality with that of their neighbors and relatives, not with the millionaires and billionaires.

Surveys show that Americans generally believe that the top 20% of wealthy Americans possess just 59 percent of wealth [source]. Or that the bottom 40% possess 9 percent of wealth. This is nowhere near the truth (actually, the top 20% possess 84 percent of wealth, and the bottom 40% possess only 0.3 percent of wealth)[source].

Here’s How Bad Things Actually Are:

  • Between the years 1983 – 2009, Americans became more wealthy as a whole. But the bottom 80 percent of income earners saw a net decrease in their wealth. At the same time, the top 1 percent of income earners got more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth increase.[source].
  • Overall, the earnings of the top 1 percent rose by 278 percent between 1979 and 2007. At the same time, the earnings of the median people (that’s probably you and me) only increased by 35 percent [source – The Second Machine Age].
  • Inequality (as measured by the CIA according to the GINI index) in the US is far more extreme than it is in places like Egypt, Croatia, Vietnam or Greece [source].
  • Between the years 2009 – 2012, 95 percent of total income gains went to the wealthiest 1 percent [source].
  • Economic mobility in the US – i.e. whether people can rise (or sink) from one economic class to another, is significantly lower in comparison to many European countries. If you were born to a family in the bottom 20% of income, you have a 42 percent chance of staying in that income level as an adult. Compare that to Denmark (25 percent chance) or even Britain (30 percent chance) [source]. That means that the American dream of achieving success through hard work is much more practical if you’re living in a Nordic country or even in the freaking monarchy of the United Kingdom.
  • Inequality also has implications for your life expectancy. Geographic inequality in life expectancy has increased between 1980 and 2014. Some counties in the US have a life expectancy lower by 20 years than the highest counties. Yes, you read that right. The average person in eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia basically has twenty years less than a person in, say, central Colorado. And the disparity between the US counties shows no sign of stopping anytime soon [source].

What It All Means

Reading these statistics, you may say that inequality is just a symptom of the times and of technological progress, and there’s definitely some evidence for that.

You may highlight the fact that the ‘water rises for everyone’, and indeed – that’s true as well. Some may rise more rapidly than others, but in general over the last one hundred years, the average American’s life quality has risen.

You may even say that some billionaires, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are giving back their wealth to society. The data shows that the incredibly wealthy donate around 10% of their net worth over their lifetime. And again, that’s correct (and incredibly admirable).

The only problem is, all of these explanations doesn’t matter in the end. Because inequality still exists, and it has some unfortunate side effects: people may not realize exactly how bad it is, but they still feel it’s pretty bad. They realize that the rich keep on getting richer. They understand that the rich and wealthy have a large influence on the US congress and senate [source].

In short, they understand that the system is skewed, and not in their favor.

And so, they demand change. Any kind of change – just something that will shake the system upside down, and make the wealthy elites rethink everything they know. Populist politicians (and occasionally ones who really do want to make a difference) then use these yearnings to get elected.

Indeed, when you check out the candidate quality that mattered the most to voters in the 2016 US elections, you can see that the ability to bring about change is more important by far than other traits like “good judgement”, “experience” or even “cares about me”. And there you have it: from rampant inequality to the Trump regime.

Now, things may not be as bleak as they seem. Maybe Trump will work towards minimizing inequality. But even if he won’t (or can’t), I would like to think that the politicial system in the US has learned its lesson, and that the Democratic Party realized that in the next elections cycle they need to put inequality on their agenda, and find ways to fight it.

Do you think I’m hoping for too much?

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Cover image from the Economist