Geek Heresy by Toyama Kentaro

Author:Toyama, Kentaro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-6103-9529-8
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

Evolving Mass Values

India’s changes recapitulate elements of developed-world history. Like India today, the United States was buoyed by an entrepreneurial spirit. A battle against America’s rent-seeking political corruption was fought effectively in the nineteenth century.10 Consumer culture, now burgeoning in India, was all but invented in the United States circa 1920. And Indian pride in their Mars orbiter echoes American sentiment toward Apollo 11, the world’s first moon landing.

Despite huge differences in culture and history, there is no denying the commonalities among societies that experience socioeconomic growth. I grew up partly in Japan and partly in America. Despite the differences between the two countries, the repeating patterns of modernization were evident: Infrastructure tends to improve, technology to proliferate, government to become more efficient, parents to have fewer children, industrial employment to overtake agriculture, and gender disparities to shrink.11

When I landed in India, I felt a sense of déjà vu. There was something of the mid-twentieth-century Japan that my parents and grandparents had spoken of. City streets bustled with an energetic commotion. Individual aspirations – like Narasimha’s – were woven tightly into the country’s development. Ads for financial services urged people to “Invest in your family, invest in India!” There was a sense of national mission.

To believe in progress doesn’t mean that any country has arrived at the final destination, or even that there is agreement about a single destination. For example, any claim that contemporary Western society is the apex of human civilization is unwarranted – America, to take one case, could surely do better than a 15 percent rate of poverty, a government captured by moneyed interests, a stubborn resistance to addressing climate change, and reality TV. But just because progress is hard or variously defined shouldn’t mean we should scrap all hope of it.

Consider the change in women’s status in so many countries in just the past half-century. In 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that women should not work outside of the home; by 2012, less than one-third of Americans thought so.12 In the 1970s, women’s median full-time earnings were 60 percent of men’s; by 2011, they had risen to 77 percent.13 In 1970, women held 11 of 535 seats in Congress – just 2 percent; in 2014 women took 100 seats for the first time, nearly 20 percent.14 We still have a long way to go, but advances have been steady, self-sustaining, and large-scale.

To even the casual observer, it should be clear that these kinds of transformations didn’t happen through packaged interventions. Some argue that household appliances and contraceptive technologies revolutionized the role of women in society. But these inventions, as with Amazon’s effect on the book industry, were accelerators and amplifiers, not primary causes.15 The pill was approved for use in America in 1960, but US women’s movements go back to at least the mid-1800s. Women’s suffrage was achieved in 1920. The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. And all through these milestones was the constant fight for equality, fought on the frontlines by women

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