First World Problems

Posted: January 3rd, 2014 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

Virginia Postrel writes:

Counting your blessings is always a good idea, but calling the Christmas delivery breakdown a “first world problem” points to what’s wrong with that criticism. We want first world reliability, and if the public just shrugged when things went wrong we wouldn’t get it.

Third world conditions are defined not merely by economic misery but by unreliable services. “At the age of fourteen I had experienced a miracle,” writes Suketu Mehta in “Maximum City,” his critically acclaimed 2009 book on Mumbai. “I turned on a tap, and clean water came gushing out. This was in the kitchen of my father’s studio apartment in Jackson Heights [New York]. It had never happened to me before. In Bombay, the tap, when it worked, was always the first step of a process” taking at least 24 hours to produce drinkable water. Mehta’s family lived an affluent life but with third world problems.

By contrast, in a developed country, barring a major natural disaster, you can count on uninterrupted electricity, hot and cold running water, sewage disposal, garbage pickup, heat (and in hot climates, air conditioning), telephone service, Internet access and television. The roads and bridges will be in decent repair; the elevators will work; the ATMs will have cash; and you’ll be able to find a decent public toilet when you need one.

These things aren’t necessarily free, but they’re cheap enough for pretty much everyone to enjoy them. Most significantly, they’re ubiquitous and reliable….

It took years of sustained efforts by online retailers and delivery services to make overnight orders realistic. It also took dissatisfaction: insanely demanding companies working to please insanely demanding customers — or, in some cases, to offer customers services they hadn’t even thought to ask for — as each improvement revealed new sources of discontent.

“Form follows failure,” is what Henry Petroski, the civil engineering professor and prolific popular writer, calls the process. Every step forward begins with a complaint about what already exists. “This principle governs all invention, innovation, and ingenuity; it is what drives all inventors, innovators, and engineers,” he writes. “And there follows a corollary: Since nothing is perfect, and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not static, everything is subject to change over time.”

Rising expectations aren’t a sign of immature “entitlement.” They’re a sign of progress — and the wellspring of future advances. The same ridiculous discontent that says Starbucks ought to offer vegan pumpkin lattes created Starbucks in the first place.

Well said.