[gdubs]

Robert Gordon wrote a whole book on this (“The Rise and Fall of American Growth”), and I think he’d answer your list by asking if any of those items were as transformative as going from not having electricity, to having electricity; not having indoor plumbing, to having indoor plumbing; not having a clothes washer, to having a clothes washer...

It used to take our family an hour or two to go to the video store, pick out a movie, return home — but we typically had fun doing it.

My dad got some weird pleasure out of owning the thermostat and telling us not to touch it.

Arguably people are better off if they can’t check out their investments all the time, and tax prep seems to suck just as much now as it did back then.

But honestly, yes — our digital tools are generally way faster and more advanced than they were a decade ago. I can do in an hour in Swift what would take me all day in Flash. But I’m also 10X more competent now, so it’s hard to directly compare. And I sure do spend a lot of time making sure I have the right dependencies installed any time I want to try running one of the shiny, new, JavaScript frameworks.

The real question, for me, is how distracted are we? If there have been productivity gains from technological advances, are those improvements undercut by our collective inability to focus on work for meaningful amounts of time?