25 Things That Didn't Exist on New Year's Day 20 Years Ago
The creative destruction that takes place in a market economy is impressive to behold.
The first New Year’s Day I remember clearly was in 1987. I was seven years old and mom dropped off a bunch of us at the local ice-skating rink.
I remember the song on the radio when we pulled in that day (“True Colors” by Cindi Lauper) and the video game I played in the ice shack where kids went to warm up and order snacks. It was Xevious, a vertically scrolling shooter game; though it was released in 1982, it felt cutting edge at the time—and ridiculously hard.
You can tell from the look of Xevious that we’ve come a long way since 1987—and not just in video games. The world I grew up in doesn’t seem that far away in my mind, but when I stop to think about it, I realize just how different it is—in both good ways and bad.
Indeed, one needn’t even go back as far as 1987. I have a nephew who is just shy of 20. Look at the things that didn’t exist when he was born. (Hat tip to Bloomberg journalist Jon Erlichman for providing much of this list.)
iPhoneFacebookYouTubeInstagramTwitterTikTokAndroidBitcoinTeslaiPadGmailNetflix streamingAmazon PrimeSlackRedditGoogle MapsSnapchatLinkedInSubstackChromeZoomSkypeSpotifyAirbnbUber
There’s little question that all these new technologies improved our lives in many ways. I can’t imagine going back to a world that didn’t have, say, Google Maps or Uber.
Still, I found it a little sad thinking about Xevious, and how obsolete it is today (and arcades in general). This is true of nearly all the technology that existed in 1987. But it’s important to understand why and how things changed, and no one offers a better lesson on this front than Joseph Schumpeter.
Schumpeter, an Austrian-born political economist, described the creative destruction that takes place in a market economy in his seminal work Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
Capitalism…is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. And this evolutionary character of the capitalist process is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers. Nor is this evolutionary character due to a quasi-automatic increase in population and capital or to the vagaries of monetary systems of which exactly the same thing holds true.
The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers' goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.
I’ll always feel nostalgic about games like Xevious, but I’m also thankful for the creative destruction that’s occurred in recent decades that has offered me things I couldn’t possibly have dreamed of when I was seven (or even when I graduated college).
That’s the miracle of capitalism.
