The Silver Lining of 2020

We do not have to look far to find the bad that has come from the pandemic; loss of life, health, and employment are just a few of the casualties.  On a less serious level, we all miss the social connections we were able to enjoy much more easily a year ago.  However, some of the greatest moves forward in human progress have occurred when the outlook was bleak.  Hopefully, the beginning of great progress will be born out of the current malaise.

When we look back at history and big innovations, the military often comes up.  They have been involved in many emerging technologies that often have more than just military use.  Some examples include jet planes, helicopters, GPS, antibiotics, interstate highways, and the internet.  What makes the military such a hotbed of innovation?  Some may argue that they have the best talent, which might be true, but I would argue that their innovation is a result of urgency.

Private companies find a way to bring innovative products to market to make a profit, which is a sufficient motivator, but the military brings innovative products into use to stop the world from being taken over by Adolf Hitler.  There’s a lot more urgency when everything is on the line. This kind of urgency means removing barriers like regular budgets and 40-hour work weeks to throw everything you have at a problem.  We are all capable of more when the stakes are highest than when everything is going well.

Another difficult period in our history was the economic depression of the 1930s.  The unemployment rate in 1932 was almost 25%, and yet businesses found a way to do more with fewer employees.  Economist Alex Field wrote, “In 1941, the US economy produced almost 40% more output than it had in 1929, with virtually no increase in labor hours or private-sector capital input.  Almost all of the increase in output per hour is attributable to technological and organizational advance.”

The New Deal also produced remarkable results in building multi-lane highways, rural access to electricity, and other areas.  The Pennsylvania Turnpike was completed in 1940 and cut the travel time between Pittsburg and Harrisburg by 70%.  Some of America’s iconic bridges, including the George Washington and Golden Gate, were completed during the 1930s.  The number of rural homes with electricity stood at 10% in 1935 and grew to 50% by 1945.

Along with the electricity came home appliances like washing machines, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators.  These innovations freed up hours of household labor and opened the doors to more women participating in the workforce. 

Some of the other innovations that sprung up during the depression included supermarkets, which would eventually replace the inefficient way of shopping for groceries at multiple stores and being waited on at each store rather than picking the items off the shelf yourself.  Automobile manufacturers discovered new paints that would dry in a few hours rather than a few weeks.  New treatments were used for railroad ties that extended their life from eight years to twenty years, and factories adapted to Henry Ford’s assembly line model to stay in business.

Another big reason for the surge in innovation during this time was the number of high school and college graduates that emerged from a bad economy.  Many of them continued their education because they couldn’t find work and wanted to keep busy.  Eventually, all of these knowledge workers moved the progress forward. 

The big payoff of all this progress came to fruition during World War II.  America became the Allies’ manufacturing machine, and that advantage proved to make a big difference, perhaps the differences in the outcome of the war. In the space of six years, World War II began on horseback and ended with nuclear fission.  That kind of rapid progress can only be accounted for by the incentive of keeping the world from falling apart.

So how does this apply to our current predicament? We have just witnessed another kind of Manhattan Project unfold before our eyes.  Most of the entire medical research world has put their everyday work on hold to work on treatments and vaccines for Covid-19.  Within days of discovering the new virus, its genome was sequenced and published online. 

Researchers were able to develop possible solutions over a couple of days and get to work testing their ideas.  The old record for the fastest vaccine ever developed of 4 years was shattered when BioNTech and Pfizer received approval for their vaccine 11 months after they started development. 

The lessons learned from this experience may lead to advances in other drugs and treatments. Perhaps we’ll learn more about manufacturing and distributing vaccines from this.  Many technologies of the past have simply been adding a small addition to an existing technology or using an existing technology for a different application.  Don’t be surprised if we learn several years from now that the seed for a new medical treatment was planted during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Aside from medical innovations, our new lifestyles have pushed forward innovation in other areas. 2020 saw a record number of new business applications.  Many of these businesses were started by people laid off because of the pandemic and were forced to get creative and take a chance on a new business to meet their needs.  Some of these businesses will probably close when jobs come back, but some will undoubtedly move progress forward.

Working from home may come to an end for some companies, but others will likely embrace the idea to some extent.  This could bring well-paying jobs to rural areas where employees can find affordable housing and, at the same time, ease the demand for housing in big cities.  It may lead to more participants in the workforce who can find a work/life balance easier by working from home.  The digital trends that were already in motion just got bolted forward by years in just a matter of months.

This experiment has forced many individuals to make hard choices, get really creative, and take risks quickly.  This episode of history won’t be fully understood to its full extent for many years, but there will undoubtedly be some significant progress made from all this sadness.