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Five hundred years of progress packed into a sack of flour.
Here's some food for thought.
A smart shopper can buy a 5-pound bag of Gold Medal flour for 69 cents. That's enough to feed three people for a day - 7,500 easy-to-digest, relatively nutritious, and potentially tasty calories. All for less than 0.7 percent of an average American's income.
Compare this American to one of our ancestors half a millennium ago, a typical person living in the span between 1400 and 1600. Back in those days, less than one-tenth of humanity lived in cities. The most basic problem of material life - the fight to put food on the table - took up the majority of everyone's working time and energy: Three-quarters of human economic production consisted of growing or procuring foodstuffs. Well-nourished preindustrial populations with abundant land double in size every generation, but our ancestors were lucky to see their population grow by 10 percent in 30 years. Back then people were hungry, malnourished, and disease-ridden.
Our ancestors were on the Malthusian edge, where you lack the calories and the nutrients to equip your immune system to do a first-class job controlling infectious diseases, where women's body fat levels are low enough that ovulation is a hit-or-miss affair, and where you spend a lot of time thinking how hungry you are. (Consider the monumental role played by food and big, bad appetites in that era's fairy tales. Now consider the language still used by wage earners that echoes a hungrier time, from bringing home the bacon to being the breadwinner.)
The 7,500 calories in today's bag of flour would equal the diet of a four-person peasant family for a whole day; the difference is that it would take three days of medieval work to afford.
From 300 percent to 0.7 percent: By the bags-of-flour standard, we are some 430 times wealthier than our typical rural ancestors of half a millennium ago. Today - at least for the average American - getting enough calories to stay healthy has dropped off the radar screen. Quite the contrary: The surgeon general has warned that obesity is a literal threat to national security.
Impressive as it is, the steep rise in bags-of-flour wealth probably understates the magnitude of transformation we in the US have already been through. Harvard economic historian David Landes' Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor points out that the richest man in the early 19th century, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, died in his fifties of an infected abscess that we can now cure with $5 of over-the-counter antibiotics. Was Rothschild really "richer" than a guy today in his fifties working behind the meat counter of Safeway and making $15 an hour?
Suppose a group of theatergoers in Elizabethan England had decided one evening that they wanted to see a performance of Macbeth. Queen Elizabeth herself might have been able to pull it off if Shakespeare's acting company had the play in its current repertory. But she was the only person in England who could have done so. Go back before Gutenberg to 1400, and a single copy of a book costs as much as two months' income of a skilled craftsman - the same share of that society's productive potential as $6,000 is today. Even the richest of our late-medieval and early-modern ancestors were appallingly poor. Indeed, the shift in what kinds of goods we can produce may be as big a deal as the extraordinary drop in how efficiently we can produce them.
However, there's plenty to quarrel about in the very optimistic view of the present. There is still famine in the world.
It is true that most famines today have political causes. It is true that the cause of remaining famines is not that food production is insufficient but that the hungry have no land and no income, and if you have no income the market economy doesn't care whether you live or die. But a human race that has surpassed the food-producing capacity of our preindustrial ancestors more than 400-fold per capita ought to have also solved the social engineering problem of using this productive potential to eliminate hunger. A humanity that can produce powerful doses of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals for pennies should be one that delivers these drugs to the truly sick, whether they live in Buckinghamshire, Brooklyn, or by the banks of the Zambezi.
William Gibson once famously said that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Guess what: The present isn't evenly distributed, either. The human race today has a tremendous degree of wealth and productivity, with an extraordinarily unequal distribution. There are still more than a billion people whose lives look very similar to those of half a millennium ago. Bringing the future to the world's leading-edge cities is a piece of cake. The challenge is bringing more than a few bread crumbs' worth of the present to the rest of the globe.
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