Steve Horwitz has an excellent post on how improvements in travel inform his optimism. While I’ve always enjoyed spending time with my family and visiting relatives, there is more of nightmare than of nostalgia in my memories of seemingly endless hours in the cramped backseat of Dad's Dodge Aries. We just took a road trip from Memphis to Great Barrington, MA and then to New York City in a spacious Honda Pilot that is “ultra-low emissions” certified with our GPS leading the way, a selection of CDs, and iPods in case we needed (or wanted) to listen to something without distracting everyone else. Our soon-to-be-one-year-old son enjoyed the Sesame Street and Baby Einstein DVDs he was able to watch on the portable DVD player his grandparents got him for his birthday (in their wisdom, they gave it to him before we took our enormous trip). 21st Century Technology made it a far more pleasant trip than it otherwise would have been. Perhaps the best evidence I can offer for how much better travel is than it was 20 years ago, though, is the fact that I wrote part of this post in New York and part of it in Atlanta. If I’d bought the in-flight wifi connection, I could have posted it from cruising altitude. It’s hard to be pessimistic when you can blog from 35,000 feet.

Changes in standards of living are notoriously hard to measure, but someday, I think we’ll be able to develop crude proxies by watching The Simpsons. Someday, I want to write a paper trying to measure trends on late twentieth and early twenty-first century American standards of living by tracking “The Simpsons” over its entire run and seeing how their assumptions about average standards of living have changed. I’ve shown the episode “”King-Size Homer” in a presentation I’ve given to high school writing camp students, and the last time I watched it I was surprised at its assumptions about Everyman’s access to technology.*

*-“Homer Economicus Responds to Incentives,” and yes, the title is an homage to the brilliance of my co-author and co-blogger Josh Hall.