“Airplanes today fly no faster than they did in the 1970s. In many countries, road speeds have decreased. Flying cars never showed up. In developed countries, the tallest buildings have only inched higher. Most rich countries produce less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago, and the cost of building new physical infrastructure like railways seems to rise inexorably. Yet cruise ships continue to grow: a natural experiment in what can be achieved outside the constraints that have stifled progress on dry land…

Since the SS Great Eastern in 1858, the gross tonnage of the largest passenger ships has grown an average of 1.59 percent per year, nearly double the 0.84 percent annual growth rate in the height of the world’s tallest buildings between the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and the Burj Khalifa in 2010. If we restrict ourselves to the tallest buildings in the United States in the last century, from the completion of the Empire State Building in 1931 to the One World Trade Center in 2020, the record of tallest building has only inched up at 0.24 percent a year.”

From Works in Progress.