We were promised the future.
And for a while, it was arriving. Then, somewhere in the 1970s, we stopped building it.
In the 1960s the world moved forward. We put people on the Moon. We built rockets, reactors, supersonic flight — real things, at the edge of the possible, and the progress was shared.
And then something broke. You can argue about the cause — the end of Bretton Woods in 1971, the oil shocks, globalisation, the end of cheap energy — but you cannot argue about the shape. For twenty-five years, what workers produced and what workers were paid rose together, almost perfectly. In the 1970s the two lines separated, and they never came back together.
Indexed to 100 in 1948. Source: Economic Policy Institute productivity–pay tracker. The shaded area is the gap that never closed.
The lines used to move together.
From 1948 to 1973, output per hour and the pay of a typical worker both roughly doubled. Build more, earn more. That was the deal, and it held for a generation.
Since then productivity has more than tripled. Pay has barely moved. The shaded area is the part of what we built that stopped reaching the people who built it.
The same decade shows the same fracture almost everywhere you look: nuclear plants stopped getting finished, aircraft stopped getting faster, infrastructure cost per kilometre began climbing and never stopped. Whatever happened in the 1970s, it did not happen to one industry.
It wasn’t just wages. The same decade broke almost everything.
Nuclear reactors started — U.S.
41 reactors started in 1973. The last U.S. order was placed in 1978. Then, for forty years, essentially none.
Fastest passenger aircraft — mph
Concorde flew at 1,350 mph in 1976. It was retired in 2003, and we went back to the speed of a 1958 Boeing 707. Travel got slower.
U.S. interstate cost per mile — $M, 2016 dollars
Building the same mile of road got roughly five times more expensive — without getting five times better.
Total factor productivity, U.S. — and the trend we lost
Real data, 70 years of it. Productivity grew 1.09% a year from 1954 to 1973, then 0.48% for the fifty years since — less than half. Had the old pace held, we would be 36% richer in productive capacity than we are. The shaded wedge is 28 years of progress that never happened.
Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration (reactor construction starts); manufacturer cruise-speed specifications; Brooks & Liscow, Infrastructure Costs (2023); and Penn World Table via FRED series RTFPNAUSA632NRUG (total factor productivity, 1954–2023) — downloaded and computed directly, not quoted. Break dates are the conventional ones and are debated — the shapes are not.
Then, quietly, it financialized. Ambition migrated from the launchpad to the spreadsheet, and a growing share of the entire economy went to simply moving money around. You can watch the moment it took over:
Source: Philippon (2008). The economy tilted from building things to pricing them.
Money replaces honour and adventure as the objective of the best young men… The object of the young and the ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash. No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to serve their country — parents and students alike seek the qualifications which command the highest salaries. — Sir John Glubb, The Fate of Empires
And so, one percent at a time, we stopped building things.
We refuse this. Antbuilder is a revolt — against a world that stopped building, and against the corruption hollowing out our institutions. The answer isn't nostalgia. It's to build again.