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Dear Jack,

Mississippi was hit by some epic thunderstorms the other week. Perhaps you were one of the many people across our state left without electricity?

For me that meant trying to work without air-conditioning (AC). It was not a productive experience.

As I sweltered in the heat, I was left wondering how people in Mississippi managed before the advent of AC?

Invented in 1902 by Willis Carrier, within living memory there were plenty of homes and offices in Mississippi that did not have any AC. For a start, it was once very expensive. According the HumanProgress.org the cost of AC units has fallen by 97 percent since the early 1950s. AC only became ubiquitous in cars and shop within the past two or three decades.

What might life be like in Mississippi without refrigeration? As late as the 1950s, a significant number of Mississippi households did not have refrigeration.

When the first self-contained refrigerator, the Frigidaire, went on sale in 1919 it cost $775 – or about $12,000 in today’s money. Today, you can buy a vastly better refrigerator for only a fraction of the cost.

It’s not only the costs of keeping cool that have come down.

In 1979, to buy a 14 inch television, the average American earning the average wage would have needed to work 70 hours to earn enough. Today, a vastly better TV can be purchased for the equivalent of 4 hours of work.

The other day I re-watched Wall Street, that classic 1980s movie starring Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. In the movie, Gekko uses one of the first commercial cell phones, a DynaTec. Apparently, Gekko’s phone retailed for almost $4,000 at the time, or over $10,000 in today’s prices. It needed re-charging after 30 minutes.
Thanks to the free market, people on low incomes today have access to better technology than Gordon Gekko did in the 1980s

Today, even someone on the minimum wage in Mississippi could afford a vastly better cell phone than anything available to Wall Street billionaires a generation ago.

Among those officially classified as ‘poor’ in America, 99 per cent live in homes that have a fridge, 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent have a phone and over 70 per cent own a car.

Since 1996, the real cost of household appliances has fallen by over 40 per cent. The cost of footwear and clothes by 60 per cent. Indeed, the average American home is full of gadgets, entertainment systems and labour-saving devices many of which had not even been invented when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

As my friend the author, Matt Ridley puts it, “our generation has access to more calories, watts, horsepower, gigabytes, megahertz, square feet, air miles, food per acre, miles per gallon, and, of course, money than any who lived before us”.

And here’s another remarkable thing. We get all this extra stuff without having to work as hard. In 1913, the average American worker put in 1,036 hours that year, compared to less that 750 hours a year now.

Often, I hear people talking about there being ‘too much technology’. It is fashionable to say that we should turn away from technology and get back to a pure and simple past. Really? I’ve never heard anyone express that sort of opinion in any of the poor countries I’ve lived in.

If anyone ever tells you that we have too much technology, you might want to suggest that they switch off the air-conditioning for a few hours and think about it.

Thank goodness for modern technology – and the free market that makes it available at an affordable price for everyone.

Have a wonderful – thunderstorm free - weekend!

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Warm (but not too warm) regards,
Douglas Carswell
President & CEO

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