The Six Laws of Zero That Will Shape Our Future

Technological advancements are reshaping countless aspects of the decades to come.

Chunka Mui — Jul 29, 2020

“There are decades where nothing happens; and, there are weeks where decades happen,” observed Vladimir Lenin. The recent weeks grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic certainly fall into the weeks-where-decades-happen category. What’s more, the trillions of dollars being spent on pandemic-fighting strategies might well make or break the decades to come, as I recently wrote.

Take telehealth, the adoption of which has seemingly been on the horizon for decades and suddenly, within a few weeks after Covid-19, achieved near universal embrace. McKinsey estimates that providers are seeing 50 to 175 times more patients via telehealth now than before Covid-19. What’s more, 57% of providers view telehealth more favorably than before and 64% report that they are more comfortable using it. These punctuated changes in perception, preference and practice could vault the telehealth market from $3 billion pre-Covid to $250 billion and, in the process, force the rewiring of the entire healthcare delivery system, according to McKinsey.

The technological drivers enabling telehealth are reshaping every other aspect of the decades to come, too. I previously introduced these drivers as six Laws of Zero that underpin a planning approach that Paul Carroll and I call the Future Perfect. In this article, I lay out the six laws in more detail.

The basic idea is that six key drivers of humanity’s progress—computing, communications, information, energy, water and transportation—are headed toward zero cost. That means we can plan on being able to throw as much of these resources as we need to smartly address any problem. Success in doing so would bring us closer to the Future Perfect. Alternatively, like gluttons at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we could binge in ways that exacerbate societal issues such as health, equity, civility, privacy and human rights.

Our Future Perfect approach, which builds on an approach developed by Alan Kay for inventing the future, projects the Laws of Zero into the future to imagine how vast resources could address important needs in key pillars of society, such as electricity, food, manufacturing, transportation, shelter, climate, education and healthcare. We’ve chosen 2050 as a marker because 30 years is far enough in the future that one isn’t immediately trapped by incremental thinking. Instead, we can explore how exponential resource improvements might radically alter the range of possible approaches. The question becomes “Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if we didn’t have this?”

The 30-year visioning is intended as a mind-stretching exercise, not precise forecasting. This is where creativity and romance lives, albeit underpinned by the deep science of the Laws of Zero rather than pure fantasy. We use a technique we call “future histories” to develop powerful narratives of compelling futures. We then pull backwards to today and chart possible paths for turning the 30-year visions into something more concrete. As Alan Kay says, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Now, let’s explore the drivers and understand what zero cost really does, to lay the foundation for designing those remarkably different and (hopefully) better futures.

Computing

That computing has followed the Law of Zero comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Moore’s Law, the observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that computing was doubling in power and halving in cost every 2 years. Ray Kurzweil has even observed that Moore’s Law describes not just integrated circuits but more than a century of computing, as shown below.

One consequence is that the smartphone in your pocket has over 100,000 times more processing power and one million times more memory than the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the moon and back—at a percentage of cost that effectively rounds to zero. While computing power obviously isn’t free, as anyone buying a smartphone knows, it looks almost free from any historical distance.

Now consider computing in 2050. If Moore’s Law remains a guide, computing power would double about 20 times in the next 30 years. Cost would be cut in half 20 times. In other words, we can look forward to computing power more than one million times faster than today with a per unit cost of today’s divided by million.

Even if Moore’s Law slows and engineers’ progress in cramming more circuits onto a silicon chip finally diminishes, innovations in computing architecture, algorithms and (perhaps) quantum computing are emerging to pick up the slack—and perhaps even quicken the pace. Rodney Brooks, former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, argues that the end of Moore’s Law, as we traditionally knew it, will unleash “a new golden era” of computing.

Communications

The first message that inventor Samuel Morse sent on his experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington DC in 1844 was, “What hath God wrought?” Some form of that astonishment has been expressed time and again as communications have moved from the telegraph to the telephone to the ubiquitous, digital communications of today. Communications is becoming ever richer, too, as having bandwidth to burn means that video (and, in time, augmented and virtual reality) can be part of every connection.

Reach will keep expanding, too. Riding on the computing Law of Zero, communications will expand into every corner of the globe, as tens of billions of devices and trillions of sensors are incorporated into a tapestry of communication. In other words, we aren’t just talking about humans connecting with each other.

Now, history suggests that expectations about communication should be tempered. The telegraph, for instance, was predicted in 1858 to bring world peace:

“It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.”

But, the telegraph turned out to be a critical instrument of war as well. The Union armies relied on some 6.5 million messages during the Civil War, and the telegraph provided the North key tactical, operational and strategic advantages over the Confederacy.

The Internet created similar delusions. We’d all understand each other better and communicate freely, so rainbows and unicorns…. Clearly, no one had imagined Twitter in those early days. No one realized how much Facebook, etc. could increase tribalism and exacerbate divides.

Still, whatever winds up flowing through the pipes in our future – whether butterflies or raw sewage – the pipes will be almost infinitely wide, and the cost will be a flat, low rate. Draw the graph of cost vs. performance from today’s perspective, and that cost in 2050 will be so low that let’s call it zero.

Information

In the late 1990s, during the Internet’s coming out party, it started to become clear just how much information could be collected on people’s online behavior. But Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, defiantly told us that, while his credit card company or someone else might know that he went to see a certain movie, “They won’t know whether I liked it!”

No longer. Just a few buildings away from Negroponte’s old office at MIT, researchers can monitor motion, heartrate, breathing and even emotions for people simply by how they reflect ambient radio waves, such as Wi-Fi. So, sensors in a movie theater can already get a good read on how Negroponte and the rest of an audience felt about a film. Mix in a little genomics, biology, financial data, social preference data, census data, etc., and, whoa, we’re naked, whether we want to be or not.

Furthermore, if you think social media is revealing now, wait until you see what’s coming. Already, a startup called Banjo has become a sort of network of networks and is monitoring massive amounts of private and public social feeds around the world. It divides the globe into 7 trillion sectors and monitors in real time what is happening in each of those small areas.

It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure up the dystopian possibilities; but, the ability to monitor everything and everywhere has plenty of potential benefits, too.

In a simulation described by the Attorney General of Utah, Banjo was able to solve a child abduction case in minutes. The same case eluded a multi-agency task force that applied hundreds of person-hours using traditional methods. A real-life example: by matching a social media post about the sound of gunfire with closed-circuit video camera showing gunfire, Banjo was the first to detect the 2017 shooting at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas.

How much will all that information cost? A good indicator is the sequencing cost per genome, which is falling at an exponential rate even faster than Moore’s Law.

Still, we are far from taking full advantage of the Laws of Zero in information. Just consider the sad state of Covid-19 testing, where wait times of up to two weeks are rendering test results “useless” for guiding public health strategies, quarantines and contact tracing. Instead, imagine building a world where every bit of such information is available when you need it to enable and manage a Future Perfect.

Energy

A joke in the world of energy imagines Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison coming back to life today. Bell would be amazed by wireless communications, by the small size of phones, by texting and all the other apps. What would he even do with an iPhone? Facetime? Fortnite? TikTok? Where would he start? By contrast, Edison would look at the electric grid and say, “Yeah, that’s about where I left things.”

Fortunately, big change is finally afoot.

When Bell Labs developed the first solar photovoltaic panel in 1954, the cost was $1,000 per watt produced. That means it cost $75,000 to power a single reading lamp – maybe a little pricey. By 2018, solar was down to 40 cents a watt. A drop in price by a factor of 2,500 over six decades isn’t Moore’s law, but it’s certainly headed toward that magic number: zero.

Wind power is also on an aggressive move toward zero – prices are down nearly 50% just in the past year. Contracts were recently signed for wind power in Brazil at 1.75 cents per kilowatt hour, about one-fourth of the average of 6.8 cents per kwh worldwide for coal, considered to be the cheapest of the conventional energy sources.

The key holdup for renewable energy has been batteries. There has to be some way to store solar and wind energy for when you need it, which means the need for lots and lots of battery capacity. Fortunately, batteries are progressing on three key fronts: battery life, power and cost. CATL, the world’s top producer, recently announced a car battery that can operate for 1.2 million miles, which is 8 times more than most car batteries on the market today. And, as the figure below by BloombergNEF shows, battery prices have plunged 87% in the past 10 years. Even Gordon Moore would be pleased.

So, we have at least three cost curves that look like they’re headed toward zero: solar, wind and batteries. That’s plenty, but others are worth mentioning as well, including nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, geothermal and radical improvements in efficiency. Together, they create a Law of Zero for energy that will create unfathomable benefits. Energy drives every living thing, and unlimited energy will drive unlimited opportunities.

Edison wouldn’t know what hit him.

Water

Water is the new oil. A quarter of humanity faces looming water crises. Demand is growing with population, urbanization and wealth, taxing traditional fresh water supplies while also polluting them. But there’s hope: Limitless energy could allow for the almost magical availability of water.

By 2050, anyone near a body of saltwater could benefit from water technology breakthroughs. Desalination has always been possible but prohibitively expensive because of the energy costs, whether done by filtering out the salt through osmosis or by evaporating the water and leaving the salt behind. But cheap energy makes desalination more plausible, hopefully in time for the many cities around the world that are getting desperate for water.

Water won’t be pulled right out of thin air in great quantities any time soon, but that technology is also under development. One group won a $1.5 million X Prize by developing a generator that can be used in any climate and can extract at least 2,000 liters of water a day from the air at a cost of less than two cents a liter, using entirely renewable energy.

Cody Friesen, founder of Zero Mass Water, a startup backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BlackRock and other high profile investors, says decentralized production of water will lead to benefits akin to those that come from having abundant electricity while off the grid. He says 1% to 2% of the world’s carbon footprint comes from mass-purifying today’s water; that carbon dioxide goes away when water is drawn from the air and purified at your doorstep by the sorts of solar-powered Source Hydropanels that his company produces.

Like many potentially world-changing future solutions, Friesen’s approach doesn’t make economic sense today. But his early research, products and field experiments, such as his work with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), helps to develop the solution for when the approach, riding on the Law of Zero for energy, becomes viable on a massive scale by 2050, if not sooner.

Where there is abundant water, along with the energy that comes from that Law of Zero, there can be food. The basics of life will be available everywhere, even to the far corners of the Earth.

Transportation

Although the enthusiasm for autonomous vehicles has taken a hit over the past couple of years – they are a really hard problem — some early successes and the multitude of startups and brilliant scientists tackling the issues make us confident that 2050 will include an unlimited number of fully autonomous vehicles.

The implications are mind-boggling. Basically, terrestrial transportation heads toward zero marginal cost. Remember, electricity is heading towards zero cost, and all these cars and trucks will be powered by batteries, so fuel is no longer an expense. In addition, the cost of driving, in terms of the time you devote to it, will disappear once we reach full autonomy. With time no longer a factor, distance won’t be, either. Even if you have to travel a couple of hundred miles, or spend two or three hours in a vehicle, you take your world into the vehicle with you and can act just as you would sitting on your couch at home. So, much of the expense associated with fuel, time and distance go away.

Now, a lot of metal will need to be shaped and maintained even in an autonomous future, so transportation won’t be free. But it will be so much less expensive than it is today that we can be profligate in throwing transportation resources at anything we want to design for the Future Perfect. So, think in terms of a world where fuel is free and, thus, infinite, and where many considerations of time and distance no longer matter.

Yes, lots of people and businesses will have to adapt. Most notable are the 4.5 million professional drivers in the U.S., but they’re just the start—and it won’t all be on the negative side of the ledger. Autonomous vehicles will also change emergency rooms (which currently treat some 2.5 million people each year after auto accidents and, based on current estimates, might treat only 10% as many once AVs become ubiquitous). We know that the vast majority of the roughly 40,000 people who die on U.S. roads every year will miss that appointment with death (Yay!) and keep living productive lives.

We also know that health, wealth, education, economic mobility and more will all improve, because access to transportation currently constrains so many people, and those limitations go away.

Not all the Laws of Zero will kick in right away. The ubiquity of water, in particular, will take time to play out, partly because getting to zero cost for energy will also take a bit. For all these Laws of Zero, supporting technologies need to continue to mature and be helped along by some as-yet-to-be-invented (but inevitable) scientific breakthroughs.

But the core question is fascinating and important: How will these Laws of Zero let us design and build as grand a world as possible for our children and their kids by 2050?

What can removing today’s actual and cognitive restraints let us realistically project for them in terms of electricity, food, manufacturing, transportation, shelter, climate, education, healthcare and—dare we say it?—the political and social environment that will define the equity, civility, privacy and human rights in the world in which they live? How much can we increase the odds of success if we more clearly envision the Future Perfect enabled by the Laws of Zero, and begin now to focus both inspiration and perspiration towards inventing it?

The short answer is: A lot, if we step up to the challenge. By doing so, we can make next few decades ones where centuries happen.

This originally appeared in Forbes.

Blog Post | Cost of Services

Vision Abundance Doubles on the LASIK Eye Surgery Market

The time price of LASIK eye surgery fell by over 50 percent since 1998.

Gale Pooley — Mar 7, 2024

Summary: Time price calculations show that LASIK surgery costs have fallen significantly since 1998. Advancements in LASIK technology, such as the transition to bladeless methods and personalized treatments, have enhanced both safety and efficacy. Dr. Gholam A. Peyman’s pivotal patent in 1988 laid the foundation for LASIK innovation, contributing to its increased affordability and accessibility, especially in countries like China and India.

This article was published at Gale Winds on 2/28/2024.

According to Market Scope, the typical cost for LASIK surgery in 2023 was $4,492. This is up slightly from the 1998 price of $4,360. Let’s calculate and compare the time prices to see the true price difference. Unskilled hourly compensation in 1998 was around $7.75, indicating a time price of 562.6 hours. Unskilled hourly compensation is closer to $16.15 today, indicating a time price of 272.1 hours. The time price has fallen 51.6 percent. You get 2.07 eyes corrected today for the time it took to earn the money to correct one in 1998. LASIK has become 107 percent more abundant.

LASIK is the acronym for laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis. Keratomileusis is the medical term for corneal reshaping. Clearsight.com reports:

LASIK technology has significantly advanced since its inception. The initial blade-based approach has been replaced by the bladeless method, using femtosecond lasers for increased precision. Wavefront and topography-guided technology now allow for personalized treatment, while sophisticated eye-tracking systems enhance the surgery’s accuracy and safety. The remarkable advancements have not only improved visual acuity but also enhanced the overall quality of visual perception, offering patients the ability to see the world around them more clearly and vividly.

While thousands of ophthalmologists and researchers from all over the world have been involved in advancing the technology, Iranian-born immigrant to the United States Dr. Gholam A. Peyman was awarded the key patent in 1988. He holds over 200 US patents, including for novel medical devices, intraocular drug delivery, surgical techniques, and new methods of diagnosis and treatment. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Peyman the National Medal of Innovation and Technology.

Continuous innovation in LASIK technology is making vision correction safer, faster, more precise, and more affordable. If you want to save some money and take a bit more risk, the procedure is around $1,600 in China and under $1,000 in India. China performs the most vision correction procedures on the planet.

Remember, the learning curve ordains that with every doubling of production, costs per unit fall between 20 percent and 30 percent. This is because we discover valuable new knowledge every time we perform the procedure.

As noted, since 1998, LASIK has become 107 percent more abundant in the United States, in contrast to hospital services, which have become 37.7 percent less abundant. Why the huge difference? LASIK has been relatively free to innovate. Perhaps more important, health insurance does not pay for this procedure, and LASIK is globally competitive. We also note that elective procedures have enjoyed much greater abundance growth than insurance-covered surgeries.

When entrepreneurs are free to innovate and compete, prices fall and quality increases. The opposite happens when governments and bureaucrats step in to protect the status quo. Imagine where we would be today if the manufacturers of eyeglasses had prevented the innovation of contact lenses? Or the contact lens industry had prevented LASIK?

Blog Post | Adoption of Technology

Bitcoin Brought Electricity to Countries in the Global South

It won’t be the United Nations or rich philanthropists that electrifies Africa.

Joakim Book — Mar 1, 2024

Summary: Energy is indispensable for societal progress and well-being, yet many regions, particularly in the Global South, lack reliable electricity access. Traditional approaches to electrification, often reliant on charity or government aid, have struggled to address these issues effectively. However, a unique solution is emerging through bitcoin mining, where miners leverage excess energy to power their operations. This approach bypasses traditional barriers to energy access, offering a decentralized and financially sustainable solution.

Energy is life. For the world and its inhabitants to live better lives—freer, richer, safer, nicer, and more comfortable lives—the world needs more energy, not less. There are no rich, low-energy countries and no poor, high-energy countries.

“Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done,” in Canadian-Czech energy theorist Vaclav Smil’s iconic words.

In an October 2023 report for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship on how to bring electricity to the world’s poorest 800 million people, Robert Bryce, author of A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, sums it as follows:

Electricity matters because it is the ultimate poverty killer. No matter where you look, as electricity use has increased, so has economic growth. Having electricity does not guarantee wealth. But its absence almost always means poverty. Indeed, electricity and economic growth go hand in hand.

To supply electricity on demand to many of those people, especially in the Global South, grids need to be built in the first place and then have enough extra capacity to ramp up production when needed. That requires overbuilding, which is expensive and wasteful, and the many consumers of the Global South are poor.

Adding to the trouble are the abysmal formal institutions of property rights and rule of law in many African countries, and the layout of the land becomes familiar: corruption and fickle property rights make foreign, long-term investments basically impossible; poor populations mean that local purchasing power is low and usually not worth the investment risk.

What’s left are slow-moving charity and bureaucratic government development aid, both of which suffer from terrible incentives, lack of ownership, and running into their own sort of self-serving corruption.

In “Stranded,” a long-read for Bitcoin Magazine, Human Rights Foundation’s Alex Gladstein accounted for his journey into the mushrooming electricity grids of sub-Saharan Africa: “Africa remains largely unable to harness these natural resources for its economic growth. A river might run through it, but human development in the region has been painfully reliant on charity or expensive foreign borrowing.”

Stable supply of electricity requires overbuilding; overbuilding requires stable property rights and rich enough consumers over which to spread out the costs and financially recoup the investment over time. Such conditions are rare. Thus, the electricity-generating capacity won’t be built in the first place, and most of Africa becomes dark when the sun sets.

Gladstein reports that a small hydro plant in the foothills of Mount Mulanje in Malawi, even though it was built and financed by the Scottish government, still supplies exorbitantly expensive electricity—around 90 cents per kilowatt hour—with most of its electricity-generating capacity going to waste.

What if there were an electricity user, a consumer-of-last-resort, that could scoop up any excess electricity and disengage at a moment’s notice if the population needed that power for lights and heating and cooking? A consumer that could co-locate with the power plants and thus avoid having to build out miles of transmission lines.

With that kind of support consumer—guaranteeing revenue by swallowing any excess generation, even before any local homes have been connected—the financial viability of the power plants could make the construction actually happen. It pays for itself right off the bat, regardless of transmissions or the disposable income of nearby consumers.

If so, we could bootstrap an electricity grid in the poorest areas of the world where neither capitalism nor central planning, neither charity worker nor industrialist, has managed to go. That consumer of last resort could accelerate electrification of the world’s poorest and monetize their energy resilience. That’s what Gladstein went to Africa to investigate the bourgeoning industry of bitcoin miners electrifying the continent.

Bitcoin Saves the World: Energy-Poverty Edition

Africa is used to large enterprises digging for minerals. The bitcoin miners springing forth all over the continent are different. They don’t need to move massive amounts of land and soil and don’t pollute nearby rivers. They operate by running machines that guess large numbers, which is the cryptographic method that secures bitcoin and confirms its transaction blocks. All they need to operate is electricity and an internet connection.

By co-locating and building with electricity generation, bitcoin miners remove some major obstacles to bringing power to the world’s poorest billion. In the rural area of Malawi that Gladstein visited, there was nowhere to offload the expensive hydro power and no financing to connect more households or build transmission lines to faraway urban areas: “The excess electricity couldn’t be sold, so the power stations built machines that existed solely to suck up the unused power.”

Bitcoin miners are in a globally competitive race to unlock patches of unused energy everywhere, so in came Gridless, an off-grid bitcoin miner with facilities in Kenya and Malawi. Any excess power generation in these regions is now comfortably eaten up by the company’s onsite mining machines—the utility company receiving its profit share straight in a bitcoin wallet of its own control, no banks or governments blocking or delaying international payments, and no surprise government currency devaluations undercutting its purchasing power.

No aid, no government, no charity; just profit-seeking bitcoiners trying to soak up underused energy. Gladstein observes:

One night during my visit to Bondo, Carl asked me to pause as the sunset was fading, to look at the hills around us: the lights were all turning on, all across the foothills of Mt. Mulanje. It was a powerful sight to see, and staggering to think that Bitcoin is helping to make it happen as it converts wasted energy into human progress. . . .

Bitcoin is often framed by critics as a waste of energy. But in Bondo, like in so many other places around the world, it becomes blazingly clear that if you aren’t mining Bitcoin, you are wasting energy. What was once a pitfall is now an opportunity.

For decades, our central-planning mindset had us “help” the Global South by directing resources there—building things we thought Africans needed, sending money to (mostly) corrupt leaders in the hopes that schools be built or economic growth be kick-started. We squandered billions in goodhearted nongovernmental organization projects.

Even for an astute and serious energy commentator as Bryce, not once in his 40-page report on how to electrify the Global South did it occur to him that bitcoin miners—the very people who are turning the lights on for the poorest in the world—could play a crucial role in achieving that.

It’s so counterintuitive and yet, once you see it, so obvious. In the end, says Gladstein, it won’t be the United Nations or rich philanthropists that electrifies Africa “but an open-source software network, with no known inventor, and controlled by no company or government.”

Blog Post | Cost of Services

What Cosmetic Surgery Innovation Can Teach Us About Healthcare Costs

The average time price of 19 procedures has fallen by 50 percent since 1998.

Gale Pooley — Feb 29, 2024

Summary: Hospital services costs have surged, raising questions about the effectiveness of regulation and government intervention in the healthcare industry. To investigate the potential impact of free markets on cost trends, we examined the time prices of common cosmetic surgery procedures, which are elective and typically not covered by insurance. Our analysis reveals a significant decline in the relative time prices of these procedures, indicating increased abundance driven by innovation and market competition.

This article was published at Gale Winds on 2/21/2024.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that since 1998, hospital services costs have increased 61 percent faster than average wages and far outpaced consumer price index inflation. This industry is highly regulated, and government restricts supply and subsidizes demand.

Would free markets help to reverse these cost trends? To answer this question, we looked at the time prices of 19 common cosmetic surgery procedures. These procedures are elective, and insurance companies typically don’t provide reimbursements. Cosmetic surgeons also have been relatively free to innovate, and cosmetic surgery centers are globally competitive.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons annually publishes prices for a variety of procedures. We compared the nominal prices from 1998 to 2022 against the average hourly wage rates of unskilled and blue-collar workers. This gave us relative time prices over time.

The average time price fell by 50.3 percent over this 24-year period. For the time it took to earn the money to pay for one procedure in 1998, you could get over two procedures today. Procedure abundance has increased by over 100 percent. The time price of chemical peels and laser hair removal fell the fastest by 87.7 percent and 80.1 percent, respectively. However, two procedure costs increased: upper arm lifts increased by 6.7 percent and facelifts by 1.6 percent.

Bar chart displaying Nominal hourly wage rates from 1998 to 2022

The above analysis compares categories of wage earners over time, but what about individuals? We typically start as unskilled workers and then advance as we acquire more productive skills, knowledge, and experience. Categories remain constant while individuals are upwardly mobile. If we look at an unskilled worker who “upskilled” to a blue-collar worker, cosmetic surgery procedures have become dramatically more abundant.

From 1998 to 2022, nominal unskilled hourly wages increased by 102.8 percent, while blue-collar hourly compensation increased by 91.2 percent. The average between these two categories is 94.7 percent. If you started out in 1998 as an unskilled worker and moved up to a blue-collar worker, your nominal hourly compensation increased by 348.5 percent.

Comparing an upskilling worker’s hourly compensation to the prices of cosmetic procedures indicates that the average time price fell by 78.4 percent. These workers could get 4.63 procedures in 2022 for the time price of one in 1998. Personal cosmetic surgery abundance increased by 363.5 percent for upskilling workers, growing at a 6.6 percent compound annual rate, doubling every 11 years or so.

Blog Post | Cost of Technology

Macintosh Computer Prices at the Age of 40

Get over six new iMacs for the time price of one Macintosh in 1984.

Gale Pooley — Feb 15, 2024

This article was published at Gale Winds on 1/26/2024.

Image displays a Macintosh computer from 1984 and several iMac's from 2024

Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh personal computer in 1984 at a retail price of $2,495. At the time, unskilled workers were earning around $5.00 per hour, putting the time price at 498 hours. Today, a new iMac can be bought for $1,299, and unskilled workers earn closer to $16.51 per hour, indicating a time price of 78.7 hours. The time price has decreased by 84.2 percent. A new iMac costs almost 420 hours less than a 1984 Mac. For the time it took to buy the new Mac in 1984, you can buy 6.33 iMacs today. Macintosh computer abundance has increased by 533 percent. This suggests a 4.85 percent compound annual rate, doubling in abundance every 14.4 years.

The 2024 iMac and the 1984 Mac are as different as a Ferrari and a bicycle in terms of speed and features. Ignoring the collector value, how many 1984 Macs would someone have to give you for a 2024 iMac? Most people would not trade at all. This would suggest the new iMac is infinitely better than the 1984 Mac.

Ridley Scott did the first Macintosh ad for the 1984 Super Bowl.

People like Steve Jobs have transformed our world with their creativity, vision, and entrepreneurship. We honor his life and work to lift humanity. Here is Jobs doing his first demo:

Here is another memorable ad that reflected his vision for creative work:

How many Steve Jobs were born today?