grew at a rate greater than five per cent a year, and the percentage of Americans living in poverty dropped by nearly half by the end of the decade. grew twenty-four per cent between 19, when Jack Kennedy, campaigning for President, pointed out that Russia’s growth rate was “three times as fast,” a gap he tried to narrow while in office. In the United States, the per-capita G.N.P. And we liked it so much that it became the raison d’être of our political life. After four thousand years of economic stasis, we were suddenly in a world where the average standard of living doubled in a matter of decades, and then doubled again and again and again and again. Suddenly, people could easily venture beyond their villages, or build dwellings large enough to afford some privacy, or stay up all night if they wanted to read. To call that energy revolution liberating hardly suffices.
At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel.” A barrel of oil costs about seventy dollars at this week’s market price. Nate Hagens, the director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future, ran the numbers: “One barrel of oil has the same amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years of work. That’s because a barrel of oil contains 5.8 million British thermal units’ worth of energy. Then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we started to harness the combustion of coal, gas, and oil, and everything changed. But no progressive, violent change.” At best, he calculated, the average standard of living had no more than doubled in the previous four millennia, essentially because, when that epoch began, we already knew about fire, banking, the sail, the plow, mathematics we learned little new that would have accelerated economic growth and throughout that stretch the planet mostly ran on the muscles of people and animals, supplemented by the power of wind and water.
John Maynard Keynes once observed that dating from “say, to two thousand years before Christ-down to the beginning of the 18th century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth.
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