{"id":23535,"date":"2014-01-03T15:53:20","date_gmt":"2014-01-03T20:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23535"},"modified":"2014-01-03T15:53:20","modified_gmt":"2014-01-03T20:53:20","slug":"virginia-postrel-on-first-world-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/01\/03\/virginia-postrel-on-first-world-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Virginia Postrel on “first world problems”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve heard the term many, many times (and used it more than a few times as well), but as Virginia Postrel<\/a> points out, it didn’t just happen by chance that there are “first world problems” we can mock-sympathize over:<\/p>\n

Third world conditions are defined not merely by economic misery but by unreliable services. \u201cAt the age of fourteen I had experienced a miracle,\u201d writes Suketu Mehta in Maximum City<\/em>, his critically acclaimed 2009 book on Mumbai. \u201cI turned on a tap, and clean water came gushing out. This was in the kitchen of my father\u2019s 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\u201d taking at least 24 hours to produce drinkable water. Mehta\u2019s family lived an affluent life but with third world problems.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll be able to find a decent public toilet when you need one.<\/p>\n

These things aren\u2019t necessarily free, but they\u2019re cheap enough for pretty much everyone to enjoy them. Most significantly, they\u2019re ubiquitous and reliable. Even when natural disasters strike, we can expect heroic efforts to get things back to normal. Under normal circumstances, we can depend on these services to be there consistently and to work as promised. We can make plans accordingly. That\u2019s a first world privilege.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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\u2019t even thought to ask for — as each improvement revealed new sources of discontent.<\/p>\n

\u201cForm follows failure,\u201d 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. \u201cThis principle governs all invention, innovation, and ingenuity; it is what drives all inventors, innovators, and engineers,\u201d he writes. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rising expectations aren\u2019t a sign of immature \u201centitlement.\u201d They\u2019re 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. Two centuries of refusing to be satisfied produced the long series of innovations that turned hunger from a near-universal human condition into a \u201cthird world problem.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve heard the term many, many times (and used it more than a few times as well), but as Virginia Postrel points out, it didn’t just happen by chance that there are “first world problems” we can mock-sympathize over: Third world conditions are defined not merely by economic misery but by unreliable services. \u201cAt the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,25,15],"tags":[484,174,236,159],"class_list":["post-23535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-technology","tag-competition","tag-innovation","tag-progress","tag-shopping"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-67B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23536,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23535\/revisions\/23536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}