Wonderful graph on technology adoption from the NYT
This graphic appeared in an op-ed in the New York Times on February 10, 2008 titled, You Are What You Spend.
To understand why consumption is a better guideline of economic prosperity than income, it helps to consider how our lives have changed. Nearly all American families now have refrigerators, stoves, color TVs, telephones and radios. Air-conditioners, cars, VCRs or DVD players, microwave ovens, washing machines, clothes dryers and cellphones have reached more than 80 percent of households.
As the second chart, on the spread of consumption, shows, this wasn’t always so. The conveniences we take for granted today usually began as niche products only a few wealthy families could afford. In time, ownership spread through the levels of income distribution as rising wages and falling prices made them affordable in the currency that matters most — the amount of time one had to put in at work to gain the necessary purchasing power.
At the average wage, a VCR fell from 365 hours in 1972 to a mere two hours today. A cellphone dropped from 456 hours in 1984 to four hours. A personal computer, jazzed up with thousands of times the computing power of the 1984 I.B.M., declined from 435 hours to 25 hours. Even cars are taking a smaller toll on our bank accounts: in the past decade, the work-time price of a mid-size Ford sedan declined by 6 percent.
It is really striking to me how quickly technologies like cell phones are adopted. Within a few short years of their first availability, nearly everyone has one. Why shouldn’t this be so? After all, they are useful, or an economist would say they have high utility. They’re relatively inexpensive, and available nearly everywhere. Lastly: they are heavily marketed.
What does this have to do with water?
I think there are important lessons here for the water business. According to Wikipedia, mobile phones could reach “4.6 billion by the end of 2009.” Time for some quick math here: with a global populationabout 6.8 billion people, that means that 2.2 billion don’t have access to a cell phone.
Recent numbers from UNICEF and the World Health Organization indicate that 2.6 billion don’t have “improved sanitation”. I’ve never liked the “sanitation” euphemism, because it obscures a brutal and disgusting fact: in many places, people don’t have a place to poop where it doesn’t re-contaminate their food or water. This leaves them vulnerable to cholera, dysentery, and other diseases that are virtually unknown in the west. We know that toilets and latrines save lives and provide dignity, but the average global citizen is more likely to have a mobile phone than a clean, safe place to shit. Where have we gone wrong?