Golden Years Quickly Turning to Zinc

As this birthday rounded on me, introspection has dug up some memories long forgotten about yesteryear’s price and quality of life. In many respects, progress has made life better for us all, but in others, we are irredeemably losing something with every passing year.

Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it was a very neighborly community despite its population density. My grandparents used to send me alone at eight or nine years-old to the nearby mom-and-pop grocery with $20 cash and a hand-written list of items to buy. Occasionally the cash came up short against the list, and the proprietor grocer would just smile and jot it down for my grandparents to pay later, a grace probably impossible with modern corporate supermarket franchises. When I would return homewards, my grandparents would exclaim, “Oh, is a gallon of milk $1.50 already?!” The shortness of funds was not due to penury in our case, thankfully, but because my grandparents had a mental sense of the dollar being more valuable than it was quickly becoming.

Mind you that this was when a BlowPop® lolly still cost a nickel, and for a quarter you could buy a pack of Garbage Pail Kids, which included cards, stickers and a fossilized stick of gum. The graffiti-covered subway was accessed by paying 90¢ for a token, and come to think of it, when dad emptied his pockets and the change cascaded to the kitchenette’s tiled floor, it resonated like little bells since the coins back then still had real silver in them, not the deadened sound of modern change amalgamated with zinc and probably plant-based derivatives!

Not everything was so rosy, of course. Our household kept a stopwatch by the rotary landline (Zoomers, this was like a smartphone which isn’t smart and has to be plugged in all the time) to monitor the time spent on long-distance calls since those were expensive. Long-distance meant calling, like, New Jersey, visible from our high-rise’s window. After using up a roll of analog film in your camera and longing to see the fun-filled photos captured on vacation, you had to wait a week just for the developer to show you that Uncle Dave’s drunken thumb was blocking most of the shots! Upcoming concerts had to be advertised in newspapers and magazines months in advance so that people could send checks for tickets, and receive them, all by snail-mail taking weeks.

Technological progress since then has increased life’s pace a hundredfold, but it has also proportionately increased productivity, resulting in lower net costs all around. That said, in the long-run technology will never outpace inflation by government, and this is what is inexorably undermining our quality of life. Consider the case of a cost-reducing technology which has to be conceived, researched, developed, prototyped, financed, released, marketed… long before it can have any effect at reducing costs in some industry. Meanwhile government simply wills fiat money into existence from thin air to satisfy its steadily growing list of desires, a process little more complicated than typing zeros to the end of bank balances. If left unrestrained, government’s insatiable desires will eventually wipe out whatever material benefits we receive from innovation, irredeemably robbing citizens of their life equity and making their final years far from golden.