David Leonhardt complains today that planes, trains, and automobiles aren't any faster than they were half a century ago. Fair enough. That's true. But then he adds this about a typical person taking a cross-country flight:
They leave their homes several hours before their plane is scheduled to depart. Many sit in traffic on their way to the airport. Once they arrive, they park their cars and make their way through the terminal, waiting in a security line, taking off their shoes, removing laptops and liquids from their bags. When they finally get to the gate, they often wait again because their flight is delayed....A cross-country trip today typically takes more time than it did in the 1970s.
It's true that security lines have increased waiting time in airports significantly. That's a social decision entered into with our eyes open. But the rest of this is just wrong. Over the past two decades, anyway, traffic congestion and flight delays haven't changed much:
Then Leonhardt tries to explain why travel hasn't gotten any faster over the past 50 years or so:
Why has this happened? A central reason is that the United States, for all that we spend as a nation on transportation, has stopped meaningfully investing in it.
This makes no sense. Cars are no faster than they used to be, but that's not unique to America. It's true everywhere in the world. Ditto for airplanes and ditto for trains—though it's true that a few places have more bullet trains than us. But even Leonhardt admits this is mostly due to higher population densities.
As it happens, I agree with Leonhardt's larger point about government investment in R&D. We should do more of it. But it's silly to cherry pick transportation as an example of the perils of low R&D spending. Different times call for different investments, and our current era demands investment in things like health care, gene therapy, artificial intelligence, and communications. And guess what? Those areas have all been growing like gangbusters. The result, contrary to Leonhardt's gloomy implication, is that the US economy has been far more dynamic than any of its peer countries:
As a nation we have problems. The opioid epidemic has decimated life expectancies among the poor. US income inequality is the worst among large, rich countries. A national addiction to sugar has ravaged our health. Unions have withered. And our government is uniquely dysfunctional.
Nonetheless, taken as a whole the United States is hardly a nation in decline, as Leonhardt says. We are growing faster than our peer countries. We have more entrepreneurs. Our military is unsurpassed. Our infrastructure is mostly fine as long as you don't uncritically accept the word of the civil engineering lobby. Driverless cars are right around the corner. Our universities continue to be the best in the world. And contra Leonhardt, we also spend more on K-12 education than any large country:
I too would like a cheap, ballistic rocket-plane that gets me to New York in an hour. We aren't there yet. Neither is anyone else in the world. But that hardly points to national stagnation. It's just a problem that isn't ripe for a solution yet. In the meantime, the US and the world are progressing at almost breakneck speed in lots of other areas that matter a great deal more. You just need to take a fair look at things instead of letting your gloom about our lack of flying cars overpower your common sense.
There are technical differences between the CPI and PCE measures of inflation, but they mostly only show up over long stretches of time. Over short periods, as you can see, they're generally quite close.
