Embracing Mediocrity

Recently, I read on another blog (Dinosaurs and Robots) about NASA doing a full inflation test of their latest research vehicle, a lighter than air craft known as the Bullet 580. It is quite large; over eighty meters in length (253 feet, in fact) and designed to travel at over 128 kilometers per hour (80 mph) and should be able to carry substantial payloads.

And it was cheered.

But, as was pointed out over at Dinosaurs and Robots, why is this such a big deal, when in the 1930's we had many airships, and there were even larger craft afloat, the zeppelins. The 1930's, over seventy years ago, we were doing better than this. True, lighter than air craft were largely replaced with fixed wing aircraft in most applications, but there was truly something anti-climatic about NASA's announcement. Certainly, we can do better than this, right?

It's not that we can't, it's that we won't (or in NASA's case afford to).

Our country has been steadily back-peddling on many technologies not because they can't be done, but because they are not cheap. We have embraced mediocrity for the sake of the bottom line, discarded progress for profit. Not only are there plenty of examples that can be found in our space program (replacing the shuttle with a capsule?!?), but also elsewhere. Take the automobile, for instance. Prior to the oil spikes of a couple of years back, most Americans didn't give much consideration to mileage; usually, the only performance that was really pushed was horsepower, and most dealers only considered mileage as a measure of the car's age. During the summer of 2007, when gasoline prices hovered around $3.00 per gallon for a number of weeks, we suddenly realized the importance of mileage. We leaned on Detroit (and to a lesser degree, Japan, Korea and Germany) to produce better mileage. Of course, the scare ended and many of us breathed a sigh of relief. So did the manufacturers, though there were now hints that mileage was going to matter.

What most people don't realize is that the American automobile reached peak mileage around 1987, with most cars averaging better than 24 MPG (a 9 MPG improvement from the average of 15 MPG twelve years earlier, 1975). Then, over the next few years, MPG... dropped. It was gradual, but it sunk to a low of 22 MPG in 2000. It finally started to rise again in 2004, though slowly at first. It took a hit to our very tight wallets for us to realize that we were considering the wrong things. Mileage, as a whole, has improved.

But why was there such a huge improvement initially (1975 to 1987) and really very little since?

Because inefficient cars are cheaper to make.

And it's not just in the automobile industry that we see this. It is in everything. We embrace mediocrity not because we don't know better but because it is cheaper. Why buy a nice Swiss watch when a cheaply made Chinese watch will still tell you time? It probably won't last as long, true, but then you just go out and buy another one.

Trust me, over the lifetime of a well made Tag Heuer, you'll easily spend more for the number of cheap watches you'll go through.

And the bean counters know this. They're counting on it, in fact.

For while our collective incomes have leveled off, indeed have somewhat fallen over the past four decades, our need to meet those day to day needs have continued (and have even increased). Most of those needs have been met through the cheap; we import more items now of substandard quality than ever, because demand has not subsided while our bank accounts have. It has to balance out somewhere, after all. We spend more now on our houses and the debts we have collected pursuing the elusive American dream, we just don't have the reserves for anything else. We demand our local governments do more but not hit us with taxes, assuming that they too can cut corners elsewhere.

Yet we are the wealthiest nation on the planet, right? What gives?

It might be that tremendous gulf between the rich and the poor. Our wealthiest aren't just wealthy, they are insanely so. We don't want to say too much to upset them because they control our jobs, right? Plutocracy, anybody?

Or perhaps it's just a case of collective laziness. We no longer aim high, we aim low-ish. Easier to hit your mark that way.

Besides, when we are fat and happy, the ruling class can continue to fool us and cajole us and sleep easily knowing that the bread and circus they provide will keep us busy and out of their hair. If we don't notice their shenanigans, they can continue to shove mediocrity down our collective throats.