Something odd is happening to the world’s most valuable resource. Time is simultaneously speeding up and slowing down. We live in a world of instant communications and superfast internet. We also live in a world of infrastructure projects that crawl along for decades.
The other day my car wouldn’t start because I had left the key in the ignition overnight, draining the battery. I ordered a jump starter from Amazon.com and it arrived the next day. Made in China, it was presumably the product of dozens of just-in-time supply chains. I monitored its approach as it left the warehouse and sped to my house in an isolated bit of the British countryside.
On a celebratory drive, I reflected on the farce of HS2. The railway line was announced in 2009 with extravagant promises about whizzing from London to Manchester at 225 miles per hour by the mid-2020s. At the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester in 2023, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the Manchester spur was being abandoned. Nobody really expects even the Birmingham spur to be completed. As of June 2023, the country had spent £24.7 billion, and traveling from London to Manchester is not much quicker today than it was in the Victorian era; given the the number of cancelled trains, it may even be slower.
The heart of the great acceleration is the information economy. The internet gives us almost instant contact with most of the world. Stock exchanges already deal in fractions of a second, and computer scientists at Stanford University and Google have created technology that can track time to 100 billionth of a second. More mundanely, we can pay for things by waving a card or a phone rather than wasting precious moments handing over cash and waiting for change.
The time-shrinking power of the information economy has spread in ever-widening circles to the real economy. The paradigmatic example of this is, of course, Amazon with its giant warehouses, perfectly drilled workers, delivery trucks and tracking devices. New economy companies such as Uber put a premium on scaling up as rapidly as possible — regulatory barriers be damned! — in order to grab as much virgin territory as possible. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, coined the term “blitzscaling.” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg waxed lyrical about moving fast and breaking things.
By contrast, the reverse Zuckerberg principle governs infrastructure: move slowly and delay things. The New York subway system opened with 28 stations in 1904, just four and a half years after the first contract was awarded. By contrast, the 2017 Second Avenue subway, with just three stations thus far, has taken two decades to build. Engineering improvements have made it possible to apply time-crunching magic to infrastructure. China built more than 42,000 kilometers of high-speed rail between 2008 and 2022 even as the British failed to build 530 km of HS2.
The problem in the West is a combination of politics and legal rights. Politicians must wage an unforgiving war against activists who challenge their every decision and threaten to kick them out of their jobs. “Democratic debate is a cacophony of horns honking without any way to dislodge the traffic jam,” as Philip K. Howard, a senior counsel at Covington & Burling and founder of Common Good, puts it. In the United States, no serious project can even start without an environmental impact statement, but Eli Dourado, regulatory scholar, has calculated that the 136 environmental impact statements finalized in 2020 took an average time of nearly five years to write and submit.
The great deceleration can also be found in important parts of the knowledge economy, which supposedly hold the keys to a super-fast future. One study found that the average age of Nobel Prize-winners has risen steadily and the size of the teams involved has increased. A second study found that the age at which academics publish their first article in a prestigious publication has risen — from 30 in 1950 for mathematicians to 35 in 2013. A third paper demonstrates that, on average, research papers have become less innovative over the past six decades. One reason for this is the “burden of knowledge”: it takes longer to reach the frontiers of knowledge. Another is the bureaucratization of science: Quibbling peer reviewers clog up academia in much the same way as quibbling regulators clog up planning offices.
What can be done about the problem? Acceleration and deceleration are sometimes mutually dependent. Cities are hailed as the great accelerators, creating the buzz of ceaseless churn and speeding up the circulation of ideas. The world’s most speed-obsessed industries such as finance and the media are all concentrated in cities. Yet cities can also slow things down, with traffic either clogged by congestion or held to a 20-miles per hour speed limit. The more densely populated the area, the more difficult it is to get permission to build.
Speed-saturated people also take refuge in slowing things down. Workers who live in a world of split-second decisions like to wallow during their time off in long-form drama or even journalism. The media-and-entertainment industry is governed by the same time-crushing or time-extending principles as the rest of the economy. The news either comes in the form of news flashes or lengthy “explainers.” Films get longer — The Killers of the Flower Moon is three hours and 26 minutes, for example — even as TikTok video bursts proliferate.
So, the great deceleration is sometimes a price that we pay for democracy and sometimes a welcome antidote to the great acceleration. But it has undeniably gone much too far in the West. China’s ability to build so much so quickly is a source of economic and military strength. The slowness of construction means that the West relies on a decaying infrastructure that imposes costs in economic efficiency and environmental externalities (paradoxically, the time-consuming nature of environmental impact studies frequently freezes in place ageing infrastructure that has a deleterious impact on the environment).
The contrast between acceleration and deceleration is also a source of cognitive dissonance. The more we live at internet speed, the more we are frustrated with the physical world; the more we become accustomed to Amazon’s amazing 24-hour-delivery cycles, the more we are infuriated by the queues that are endemic in, say, the National Health Service. There are many reasons for the popularity of politicians who offer to make America Great Again with a wave of their magic wand. But one of them is the disconnect between the world of instant solutions offered by Amazon and the world of interminable delays imposed by democratic bargaining. The Great Acceleration not only provides a comparative advantage to authoritarian rulers who can dispense with democracy; it also provides a comparative advantage to the authoritarian mindset that can summon up images of a politics free of demosclerosis.
Doing something to shrink the gap between our two temporal worlds would be good for the West’s political and economic health. The advent of new AI tools promises to accelerate the development of new drugs to treat cancer or Alzheimer’s: David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington, says that the pace of innovation in his field has increased tenfold over the past 18 months thanks to AI tools inspired by Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind Technologies. And the response to Covid suggests that bureaucracies can be speeded up enormously, as when the venture capitalist Kate Bingham took over as chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce in May 2020.
This shaking up of sclerotic bureaucracies needs to continue even without the pressure of a health crisis. Why not bring in Amazon (or people trained by Amazon) to run giant infrastructure projects? Or take academic journals out of the hands of academic publishers and hand them over to Palantir? Or dispatch judges to Silicon Valley to watch Agile Management in practice? Or get AI to take over peer review? Elective slowness may be a virtue in a speed-obsessed world. But we can’t allow important sections of our economy to proceed at a snail’s pace even as China runs ahead with the speed of a tiger.
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