The Invisible Trillion

No Going Back

Why the Argument You’re Having Isn’t the Argument You Think You’re Having

Here is a question worth sitting with for a minute before you read the rest of this chapter.

If someone offered you a time machine and said you could live in any year you wanted, with the average standard of living of that year, how far back would you go?

Not as a king. Not as a movie star. As an ordinary person — a kid with ordinary parents in an ordinary house.

Most people, when they actually think about this, don’t go back very far. And the reasons why are the whole point of this chapter.

Three Houses

Let me show you three houses. They’re all real — reconstructed from census records, household inventories, utility data, and a fair amount of historical research. They belong to families of roughly similar social standing: not rich, not poor, doing okay. The kind of family whose kids went to school and whose parents had steady work.

House One — Massachusetts, 1725

The house is about 700 square feet. That’s smaller than a lot of two-car garages today. Seven people live in it: two parents, four children, and a grandmother.

There is one room that matters, and it has a fireplace in it. The fireplace is not decoration. It is the stove, the heater, the light source, and — in winter — the only place in the house where you can feel your fingers. In January, three feet from the fire, it is maybe 60°F. Ten feet away, it is 40°F. In the sleeping loft, where the children sleep under piles of wool blankets, it is whatever temperature it is outside, minus a little.

There is no running water. Water comes from a well, in buckets, carried by whoever is youngest and healthy. In winter, the top of the well freezes and someone has to break it. A bath happens once a week, in a wooden tub, with water heated on the fire one pot at a time. It takes about two hours to fill. The whole family uses the same water, youngest to oldest.

There is no refrigerator. Meat is salted or smoked. Milk lasts a day in summer, two in winter. Butter is made weekly. Vegetables come from a root cellar — potatoes, turnips, cabbages, onions, apples if you’re lucky. From November to April, no one in this house eats anything green. Scurvy is a real risk if the apples run out.

Light after sunset comes from tallow candles, which smell like burning fat because that’s what they are, or from the fire. Most people go to bed around 8 PM in winter because staying up is expensive and hard on the eyes. Reading at night is a luxury. The grandmother in this house is illiterate, which is not unusual.

Laundry happens once a month. It takes a full day. Water is heated in a giant kettle, clothes are scrubbed by hand on a washboard, wrung out, and hung to dry — inside in winter, which makes the house damp for days. Each person owns about three outfits. Clothes are patched, re-patched, and handed down until they disintegrate.

The children in this house have about a one-in-four chance of dying before age ten. The most common causes are diarrhea from contaminated water, respiratory infections that today would be cured by a five-dollar antibiotic, and accidents near the fire. The mother of this family has roughly a one-in-eight chance of dying in childbirth during her lifetime. Nobody thinks this is unusual, because it isn’t.

Annual energy use for this household: about 100 gigajoules total, or roughly 14 GJ per person. Almost all of it is firewood, which someone — usually the father and the older boys — has to cut, haul, split, and stack. A family this size burns about 15 cords of wood a year. That’s a woodpile the size of a small truck.

This family is not poor by the standards of 1725. They are doing fine.

House Two — Ohio, 1975

The house is about 1,500 square feet. Four people live in it: two parents, two kids. Everyone has their own bedroom except the kids, who share.

There is a furnace in the basement that burns natural gas. In winter, the whole house is 68°F, day and night. In summer, there is a window air conditioner in the parents’ bedroom that runs at night when it’s really hot. The rest of the house has fans. On the worst August afternoons, the living room hits 85°F and everybody complains, but it is not dangerous.

Water comes out of taps. Hot water comes out of other taps, from a tank in the basement. A shower takes five minutes and uses about 15 gallons. Everyone showers every day or every other day. Baths are for kids. The idea of heating water on the stove to bathe would strike this family as something from a pioneer movie.

There is a refrigerator in the kitchen, white, about five feet tall. It has a small freezer compartment at the top that grows frost and has to be defrosted once a year, a job everyone hates. The family eats fresh milk, fresh meat, frozen vegetables in winter, and — miraculously, to a 1725 person — iceberg lettuce in February, shipped from California on refrigerated trucks. Nobody finds this remarkable.

Light comes from incandescent bulbs, one or two per room, plus a fluorescent tube in the kitchen that flickers. The kids do homework at the kitchen table after dinner. Reading at night is completely normal. The whole family can be doing different things in different rooms at 9 PM — one watching TV, one reading, one doing a puzzle — and all of it requires electricity, and none of it feels like a luxury.

Laundry happens twice a week. It takes about an hour of actual human effort, spread across a day. There is a washing machine and a dryer in the basement. Each person owns maybe 20 outfits. Clothes are replaced when they wear out, not patched.

There is one television, a color Zenith, in the living room. There are three channels, plus PBS. There is one telephone, attached to the kitchen wall by a coiled cord, and the whole family shares it. Long-distance calls are expensive and rare; you call your grandmother on Sundays because the rates are lower.

The family has one car, a station wagon. The mother drives it to the grocery store. The father takes the bus to work, or drives on days when he needs to. Nobody in this family has ever been on an airplane except the father, once, for a funeral.

The children in this house have about a one-in-fifty chance of dying before age ten. The mother’s risk of dying in childbirth was about one in ten thousand. Both numbers would seem miraculous to the 1725 family.

Annual energy use for this household: about 1,200 GJ total, or roughly 300 GJ per person. That’s about twenty times the 1725 figure.

This family is not rich. They are doing fine.

House Three — North Carolina, 2026

The house is about 2,400 square feet. Three people live in it: two parents, one kid.

There is a central heating and air-conditioning system that runs, in some form, about ten months of the year. In winter, the house is 70°F. In summer, it is 72°F. The family has not experienced indoor temperatures outside the 68–74°F range in over a decade. The AC is the single largest electricity user in the house, by a wide margin, and in July it runs almost continuously.

Water comes out of taps, as in 1975, but there are more taps — three bathrooms, a kitchen, a utility sink, an outdoor spigot, a refrigerator with an ice maker. The teenager takes a 15-minute shower every morning and a shorter one after soccer practice. Nobody counts.

There are two refrigerators — one in the kitchen, one in the garage for drinks and overflow. Together they hold more food than the entire root cellar of the 1725 family stored for a winter. The family eats fresh produce from four continents, year-round, without noticing.

Light comes from LED bulbs, which use about one-tenth the electricity of the 1975 incandescents and last about 25 times longer. There are about 60 light bulbs in the house. Most of them are almost never noticed. The kid’s bedroom alone has more lumens of available light than the entire 1725 house had in a year.

There are seven screens in active use: two TVs, two laptops, three phones, a tablet, and a smart display in the kitchen. There is Wi-Fi. There is broadband internet at 500 megabits per second, which is about 50,000 times faster than the fastest home connection available in 1975, which didn’t really exist. The family streams about four hours of video per person per day, across all devices.

There are two cars, both SUVs. The family flies somewhere — Florida, usually, sometimes farther — about twice a year. Amazon delivers something to the house, on average, four times a week. The kid has never not had a phone.

Annual energy use for this household: about 950 GJ total, or roughly 315 GJ per person. That is almost exactly the same as the 1975 family.

Read that last sentence again.

This family is not rich. They are doing fine.

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